Monique Cresca is a journalist and former United Nations official based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
One morning this spring, as the orange sun streamed through the window of my home in the mountains east of Port-au-Prince, I was awakened by the sound of machine gun fire. I reached over and pulled out my phone. It was only 6:30 a.m., but it was already full of text messages from friends and neighbors. Images of armed, masked, hooded men walking nonchalantly down the town's main street flashed across my screen.
My greatest fear had come true: the gangs that had been terrorizing Haiti had taken over my neighborhood.
I reworked the escape plan I had in mind in case the gangs attacked our street, or worse, our house. I went out to the yard and told Calixto, my longtime gardener, not to lounge on the balcony, lest he get hit by a stray bullet. I explained the escape plan if the gangs entered our street, which we could tell by the sound of gunfire or signals from our neighbors. I whispered the name of the place we were going to escape to, as if the sound could reach them from down the hill. I saw the fear in his eyes, and I think he saw the fear in mine. There was no police to call for help. The Haitian state, hollowed out at its core, exists in name only.
A few weeks ago, on February 29, gang leaders formed a coalition they sarcastically named “Vive Enseng,” Haitian for “living together.” They also announced a chilling plan to overthrow the government and attack the hills overlooking the capital (where I live). In video messages, some of the gang leaders apologized for their violence. But even as they apologized, they raped, burned and terrorized people's homes. More than 4,000 people have been killed in gang-related violence so far this year.
Gangs subsequently raided prisons, freeing nearly 4,600 inmates, attacked police stations and government buildings, and laid siege to the airport to prevent Prime Minister Ariel Henry from returning to Haiti. On March 6, Prime Minister Henry was aboard a private jet bound for the Dominican Republic and was preparing to re-enter Haiti by helicopter when he received word that the US State Department had asked him to resign.
Henry's involvement with various armed groups and total inability to govern led the country to this disaster, but with him gone we were faced with a terrible power vacuum and near-total control of the capital, Port-au-Prince, by violent gangs.
Their presence was felt everywhere. ATMs were empty because banks were closed. Food was scarce in grocery stores because gangs had blockaded the port and blocked the roads. We watched videos on our phones as gangs, even recruiting children, attacked Port-au-Prince, shooting, looting and burning schools and universities, including a century-old teachers' college, a national arts school and a center for children with disabilities, as well as pharmacies, courts, government offices and entire neighborhoods. We shared our outrage on WhatsApp, and family and friends abroad called with sympathy and solidarity. But there was nothing they could do.
About 580,000 Haitians have been forced from their homes, many of them living in makeshift camps in parks and other squares, schools and government facilities with minimal food, water and sanitation. Cholera cases are on the rise. Thousands continue to take the sea or travel across Latin America in hopes of reaching the United States.
Along with the shock, fear and humiliation I felt the day the gangs came to my neighborhood, I also felt anger that things had come to this. Haiti had failed me and its 11.5 million people. Various estimates over the past few years have estimated that 80 to 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, the capital city of nearly 4 million people, is controlled by gangs, much of it through the drug trade. This was our new reality. I rushed back to my bedroom, brushed my hair, got dressed and prepared an emergency kit in case I had to flee.
I wasn't alone. The whole neighborhood was in resistance mode. Within a day of the gangs' arrival, groups of citizens had begun nighttime patrols and erected barricades using rocks, tree branches, tires, metal and broken glass.
It's always been that way. When I moved to this neighborhood around 1996, we didn't have electricity, so my neighbors and I pooled our money to install the pylons and transformers needed to provide power. In 2022, we worked together to pave a dirt road. My house gets its water from a rainwater tank, and four years ago, after we lost three months of national electricity, we installed a solar grid. As Haitians, we provide for ourselves.
Our self-sufficiency dates back generations: Haitian leaders such as François Duvalier in the mid-20th century and more recently Michel Martelly and Jovenel Moïse provided Haitians with few social services like health care, education, or protection from sexual violence or armed gangs, and they also invested very little in infrastructure.
Luckily for my neighborhood, the gangs eventually retreated. The next day, I could see evidence of their occupation: a homeless man's body in a gutter on a narrow sidewalk, and several bodies in an overturned pickup truck. I don't know why the gangs left, but they often rampage through neighborhoods, destroying lives and homes, and disappearing as quickly as they appeared.
The collapse of the Haitian state was a long time coming. In 2010, U.S. officials, the United Nations Commander in Haiti, and other international organizations interfered in Haiti's presidential elections. They alleged systematic fraud and, without evidence, eliminated one of the two top candidates, allowing the third-place candidate, pop star Martelly, known as “Sweet Mickey,” to advance to the second round and win.
Martelli, who is under Canadian sanctions, has brought drug traffickers, kidnappers and gang leaders into his ranks. A UN report last fall found that Martelli himself founded one gang and supported others to protect his power. His government was ultimately implicated in the largest corruption scandal in Haiti's history: the theft and misappropriation of about $2 billion from the Venezuelan government's PetroCaribe loan program.
Martelli's handpicked successor, Moïse, won the next election in 2016 with a record low voter turnout. Haitians had lost faith in the system and no longer seemed to believe their vote mattered.
Moïse also used gang violence as a means of governance. When thousands of young people took to the streets of Port-au-Prince in 2018, 2019, and 2020 to demand social justice and an end to corruption and impunity, Moïse’s gangs responded with violence. When Moïse was shot dead in his bedroom in 2021, accompanied by his wife, the newly appointed Prime Minister Henry appointed a justice minister and an interior minister who would later be sanctioned by Canada for their gang ties. Lawlessness was out of control. None of the new government leaders were interested in providing electricity, clean water, working roads, schools, or hospitals. Their inaction led to the collapse of the state.
For a long time, I hated my powerlessness. I was terrified when I heard friends talk about being kidnapped, of girls as young as 10 and women in their 60s (some of whom had been raped in front of their families by multiple gang members). Inevitably, I wondered if I would be next.
In 2018, I finally decided to join the movement against corruption and impunity. I tucked my gray hair under a hat and wore two pairs of socks to absorb the shock of walking on the hot concrete. I listened to rural women's stories of the actions they were taking to solve their problems in the absence of state services, and I helped them devise strategies to get women into local and national political positions.
In August 2021, in consultation with political parties and civil society organizations across Haiti and abroad, we developed what became known as the Montana Accord, an agreement and roadmap for transparent, nonviolent, participatory and ethical transitional governance, signed by over 1,000 individuals and organizations. But the Henry administration showed no interest in our agreement against the criminality of his political culture. And while I and other commissioners met with officials from the United States, France, Canada, the European Union and the United Nations Office for Haiti, the international community also refused to support our efforts.
I left Haiti on April 1. The international airport had been closed for weeks, and all commercial flights were canceled. Guarded by burly, armed security guards in a dirt square in Port-au-Prince, I grabbed a big African-made carryall and hurried to board a sturdy, Soviet-era United Nations helicopter that had landed seconds earlier in a cloud of dust and deafening noise. I couldn't bring myself to look at the other 18 men, women, and children, who were driving us both to despair. Twenty minutes later, after circling north over deep plains and desert-like mountains, we landed in Cap-Haitien on Haiti's north coast, just in time for me to catch a Sunrise Airlines flight to Miami.
It was unfair that I could leave the country while most Haitians could not. Nearly half of my countrymen do not even have enough to eat.
Of course, I missed my life in Port-au-Prince. The joy of tending to the bougainvillea, lilies, irises, orchids and medicinal plants in my garden. The mangoes and avocados I ate every day. I missed the Port-au-Prince I knew back then, the city where I grew up and where I could walk the streets freely, hand in hand with my sister.
But I never missed walking past dead bodies covered in white sheets in the streets, hearing the constant gunfire, or seeing the anguish on people's faces in the supermarket.
Nearly two months after Henry's humiliating fall, nearly three years since Moïse's assassination, and days before a deadly hurricane season is set to begin in earnest, Haiti is experimenting with a new governance model: a nine-member Presidential Council that includes representatives of the Montana Movement. Unfortunately, most of the groups represented on the Council are old powers with ties to gangs and oligarchs. But this is where we are now. On May 28, the Council elected as interim Prime Minister Garry Conille, a medical doctor and veteran UN official who served as Prime Minister in 2011.
Meanwhile, the United States and the United Nations are assembling a Kenyan-led police force to help restore security and are due to arrive in Haiti soon, but the transitional government has not been involved in decision-making, and Haitians still know little about what the police will do, how they will function, and who will be held accountable if things go wrong.
I believe in Haitians. I believe in our ability to organize. I believe in our ability to transform. In 1804, we escaped French colonial rule and were the first independent black republic. Today, across Haiti, peasants, city dwellers and many other peoples are coming together to help each other survive, thrive and build.
All of us, at all levels, must take responsibility for the political transition. We must demand a presidential council, a prime minister and his government, a multinational security force, and strong checks and balances to monitor the elections. We must work together to build a government that works for all of us. In Haitian Creole, the word “combit” means “common labor,” and that is what we need.
We returned to Port-au-Prince on June 2nd.
