Haiti's Rump Government is Cooked

Barbecue Makes His Move as Henry Struggles to Re-Enter the Country

“Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.” - Edmund Burke [Reflections on the Revolution in France]

Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, described by some as the strongest amongst gangsters and by others as a revolutionary, demanding the resignation of Haiti’s “Prime Minister” Ariel Henry.

Haiti’s rump government seems to have reached its expiration date. The illegitimate Prime Minister Ariel Henry left the country on an official visit to Kenya, in an effort to finalize the intervention force he has spent over a year begging the world to send. In his absence, the most powerful gang leader, Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier has demanded that what remain of the government resign and has ordered their capture. Two prisons have been overthrown by militants, in one instance with over 3,500 inmates escaping, that alone putting back onto the streets 3.5 accused or convicted criminals for each one of the thousand police personnel pledged by Kenya. The main international airport in Port-Au-Prince has been attacked and Ariel Henry’s plane was not even allowed to land in the Dominican Republic, throwing a wrench in his plans to re-enter Haiti via helicopter. Henry, whose location was unknown for a couple of days, turned up in Puerto Rico, safely in the embrace of his American sponsors [we would learn that he had been in New Jersey for a couple of days prior]. Pressure is said to be mounting on Henry to “speed up the transition” for his previously pledged 2025 elections, but Henry is in no position to hold any sort of election and there is no one to transition power to. The state in Haiti has failed, and now a man called Barbecue is leading a full revolution. What was supposed to be an international “police action” to prop up Henry’s regime is no longer possible. It seems that the “International Community” is left with three choices: a “full-scale” military invasion, letting Cherizier transition from a gang leader to a statesman and attempt to build a state, or perhaps most likely, seeking to prevent Cherizier from uniting Haiti and attempting to rebuild the state while offering no viable alternatives. One way or another, we can assume that the “Core Group” of neo-imperialist powers will not look at their total failure as a reason to stop victimizing Haiti under the guise of helping it.

I last wrote about Haiti at the beginning of October. At that time, the United States had just managed to bribe Kenya’s President William Ruto into leading an “international force” to enter Haiti and attempt to prop up the unelected “Prime Minister” who was placed by the United States outside of the democratic process and had since been “governing” by fiat. The reality is that the “Haitain government” is no more than a gang of around 10,000 men who control around 20% of Port-Au-Prince. There is no legislature and government social services are nearly non-existent. With the jailbreaks, they no longer even have that most basic state function under their control. If you want to get caught up, you should read my previous article if you have not already:

The main thing that has happened since October, before the events of the last week, is that Kenya’s Supreme Court ruled the country’s involvement in an international intervention force to be unconstitutional absent a law being passed by the legislature, which was not forthcoming. I have to admit my surprise that what seemed to stop this venture was an African state having a strong separation of powers. However, Ruto, determined to embark on this misadventure due to generous US funding, managed to skirt the spirit of the law and the court ruling by signing a “reciprocal” agreement with Henry. It was this agreement which was being signed when Cherizier called for the arrest of the government. It needs to be noted that on top of everything wrong with this, Ariel Henry is just some guy, and has no authority to sign any agreement on behalf of the Haitian people; the situation is reminiscent to the stories of Europeans finding Indians willing to sign treaties for people who never consented to their leadership, and then using it as justification to take all of the land. As this was going on, Cherizier announced his rebellion, saying,

"We'll fight Ariel Henry until the last drop of blood, we'll fight until he resigns. I am ready to make an alliance with the devil, ready to sleep in the same bed as the devil. Our goal is to break the system…Either Haiti becomes a paradise for all of us, or a hell for all of us.

If Ariel Henry doesn’t resign, if the international community continues to support him, we’ll be heading straight for a civil war that will lead to genocide.”

It is unclear if Cherizier is threatening to do a genocide, or just warning the situation will get that bad; there also are not really racial or ethnic groups besides Haitians in Haiti in any large number, so he presumably means “mass death” not the more literal definition of genocide.

It was around this time that Henry disappeared. The Caribbean Community organization of states, CARICOM- with US support- solidified their position that he should give up “power.” For its part, the US denies pressuring him to resign, instead issuing a more generic statement about agreements to transition power. As Ariel Henry drifts around homeless, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier clearly means business. Here is a report from the Associated Press which gives you a good feel for Barbecue’s rebellion:

And fight they have. The violence has been described as “unprecedented” and the precedent in Haiti is extreme violence. What remains of the national police are under attack at many locations and took to begging for help on social media. Two huge overcrowded prisons were overthrown, with almost all of the inmates fleeing [except for the notorious Colombian hit squad said to have killed President Jovenal Moise in 2021.] The main airport has been besieged, stopping all flights in and out of the country. No force within Haiti can possibly stop this situation outside of the victory of Cherizier, who is said to have mostly united the largest gangs in Port-Au-Prince. The government issued a curfew and state of emergency, but that means nothing in a failed state.

Modern Port-Au-Prince is probably worse now than Mogadishu in the early ‘90s, at least in terms of trying to conduct an operation within the city. The main difference is that, mercifully, the military was disbanded in 1995 due to its history of severe abuses towards the population, and though a tiny military was brought back, it has no advanced weaponry. In fact, Haiti has also been under various arms embargoes since the ‘90s, and though the country is flooded with light weapons, there are not heavy weapons to loot. It’s also the case that compared to post-collapse Mogadishu, the gangs are much better established, which has the upside that they are fighting less over territory with each other, but it would also makes them much harder to dislodge, especially for foreign troops. As I said in 2022, it was always the case that yet another intervention force was doomed to failure:

However, before there was at least some chance of protecting government buildings and saving Henry’s illegitimate regime. That is now out the window and they would have to invade hostile territory. Previously the US led a multinational force of 25,000 men and two carriers, back in ‘94, but the situation is more anarchic now and it is established it didn’t ultimately work last time. A photojournalist named Giles Clarke who was recently in Haiti describes that no one he talked to from any social class wants an international force in the country. However, many people, including former United States Special Envoy for Haiti Daniel Foote, who has been a critic of the “Core Group,” say that an intervention is now “unavoidable” though it is unclear if that means he thinks it is a good idea or just that it will happen. Foote said, “It's an absolute necessity now. We've let this slide from worse to worst, all the while abdicating our responsibility to others. But nobody can argue that Haiti isn't a failed state when the penitentiary gets emptied out.” Still you can be sure that almost no one with power will consider leaving Haiti alone. They are unlikely to even explain how this is anyone’s business. The one real consequence to the outside world is that no one in the region wants a further wave of refugees from Haiti, especially with the US is already in the midst of an immigration crisis; some small boats of Haitians recently intercepted in Florida serve as a reminder that this problem can easily reach our shores. The thing about that, however, is that an international invasion could just as easily create a larger migrant crisis than leaving it alone.

It seems Ariel Henry’s part in the story is going to be over soon. He is basically a pretender now and he is unlikely to land in Haiti leading men on a mission to retake the throne- the man is an elderly neurosurgeon, not Bonnie Prince Charlie. He isn’t a particularly evil political leader, if you can even call him that, but he took power, such as it is, completely illegally and never had the ability or perhaps the desire to actually calm Haiti enough to hold an election. The short story of what happened is that at the time of President Jovenel Moise’s assassination in 2021, Henry had been named the new Prime Minister, but not sworn in, so the acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph should have rightfully taken power. US pressure got Joseph to step aside and placed Henry. Henry was in contact with Moise’s assassins in advance of the attack, but his guilt has not been proven. Still, no one in Haiti or their expatriate community ever wanted him in that position. In the almost 3 years he has been Haiti’s Prime Minister and de facto President, Henry has alternated between a Yertle the Turtle who rules what he can see from the Presidential Palace and little else and an even more cut-rate Volodymyr Zelensky, going around the world begging for assistance. He agreed in February of 2023 to leave office by February 7th, 2024, which of course did not come close to happening. Still, he isn’t accused of doing anything more wrong than attempting to head a weak puppet government and overseeing the usual widespread abuses by what pass as Haiti’s national police. However, his idea for foreign intervention is deeply unpopular with Haitians everywhere, not the least of which because last time the international “peacekeeping” troops caused a cholera outbreak and raped Haitian girls and women on a massive scale.

The US has said it fears the Haitian government could fall at any time. This is a strange thing to say, being as the Prime Minister is unable to enter the country, the prisoners have been released, police at every level are under siege, and even the central bank has been attacked. It seems there is only the symbolism of the Presidential Palace left, but when the head of a government cannot get back to its own seat of power, that government has fallen; he is already Haiti’s government-in-exile, and has lost support for even that. One imagines that by now Henry has gotten in contact with a realtor in Miami [I’m kidding, I assume he already owns property in Florida.] No one has any real idea for how to select any other leader and claim that leader has legitimacy. If they choose someone in country they would just be signing his death warrant. If they choose someone from out of the country it would just be a different person going around begging for an invasion. I am reminded of something El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said recently, “Take the best government in Europe, and send them to govern Afghanistan like they govern their country in Europe. They would all be dead in a week.” Except no one would be sending their best, it would just be some random hacks they select whom they consider sufficiently pliant. Still, the insanity and futility of an idea rarely stops the Western ruling class, and Biden’s White House is already bloviating about how Republicans are holding up funds for a suicide mission into Haiti. I’m not in a position to say what would be necessary to invade, occupy, and stabilize Haiti well enough to hold elections and build up a new state, but were it possible at all, one would imagine 10’s of thousands of well-trained troops and billions of dollars over the course of more than a decade, and for all of that you may still end up evacuating the embassy by helicopter. Biden insists for now there will be no US “boots on the ground” but of course that is what they always say. Regardless the Biden Administration is determined to spend $200 million dollars sending a “coalition of the willing” on a walkabout through hell for no good reason. The process of “vetting” this coalition will be quite difficult, especially as Kenya’s police have been accused of extreme violence and are supposed to somehow teach Haiti’s national police how to behave when they don’t even have a clear way to speak to each other due to the language barrier.

There are only two men who anyone thinks have a chance of leading Haiti in a different direction. The first is Barbecue, who has been accused of massacres that there seems to be clear evidence he has nothing to do with. He is under heavy US sanctions and is considered to be nothing more than a criminal. Still, he is said to be building schools and maintaining order in his area of control. He seems to have organized a sort of gang truce and unified the armed factions at least against any sort of intervention. He speaks like a revolutionary leader, talking about how they can create their own future or be lead towards hell, as if Haiti isn’t there already. You can see him for yourself, in this clip from Dan Cohen’s documentary “Another Vision” about the situation in Haiti.

I don’t doubt that a propensity for the use of violence is part of how Cherizier got where he was today [he was in fact an elite police officer before switching gangs] but he is obviously something more than a common bandit. The more sympathetic mainstream media figures say he portrays himself as a “Robin Hood” and most seem to leave impressed. His accessibility to the media and fearlessness in the background of Haiti’s extreme violence and misery makes it hard to sell the idea that he is a monster. It’s going to be the case that should Cherizier survive he will have a great deal of power in the country one way or another, because he is the one leading a revolution that has at the very least expelled Henry from the country.

The other man to watch in Haiti is Guy Phillipe. Philippe was deported to Haiti from the United States at the end of 2023, after finishing a sentence relating to drug trafficking case [he plead out to money laundering to avoid a life sentence.] Phillipe lead a coup against the elected President Aristide in 2004, which based on contemporary reporting by Max Blumenthal as well as documents newly received by The Grayzone as the result of an FOIA request, seems to have had a high degree of CIA involvement [to my great shame, I did not pick up on this when I first wrote about Haiti and simply described the US as helping Aristide flee the country.] Phillipe has been busy the past few months, somehow coming to control an armed environmental agency that has gone rogue known as BSAP. This organization is said to have somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 soldiers by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime; it is unknown how they are organized or paid. This is, of course, strange. It is the equivalent of the EPA or Forest Service busting loose. However, due to poverty and weak government Haiti has severe environmental damage, and in such situations criminal gangs tend to get involved in illegal resource extraction, which can create a very violent situation. The fact that they turned against the state and became a paramilitary, even getting into a deadly firefight with the national police, simply shows the depth of state failure. The Haitian news outlet Vant Bef is reporting that Guy Phillipe is promoting himself as a candidate for the head of a transitional council. Giles Clark, speaking on CNN, expressed the belief that there is some sort of alliance between the men. There doesn’t seem to be evidence to support this, but it is clear that no man alone can rule Haiti, and any lasting settlement would have a place for many armed factions. I get the feeling that Philippe is somehow seen as more “acceptable” as a political leader than Cherizier, despite that he is an ex-convict who was just deported back to Haiti. Perhaps it is because Phillipe is a known political figure going back 20 years, and he was elected as a Senator in 2016, the last national elections held in the country. However, he was captured and turned over to the DEA before taking office, after years “on the run” during which he somehow managed to run for Senate and get elected. He seems to still have partisans throughout the country, as is often the case with anyone who has previously lead a coup.

The issue that will be on everyone’s mind is if a bandit can be accepted as a statesman. Many will say Haitians shouldn’t have to live under the rule of a man like Cherizier or Phillipe, which seems to be an irrelevant point given the lack of options. I discussed the formation of states extensively in my previous article on Haiti and don’t want to cover the same grounds, but suffice to say deciding that the protection of some particularly strong armed group is better than the alternative is functionally how any commonwealth is formed. Most men who start states or lead revolutions are originally seen as bandits by those whose power they threaten. This was the foundation of Rome, how some vikings became the Normans and created modern Europe, and indeed how revolting slaves founded Haiti. Tolstoy notes in War and Peace the absurdity that 10 years before and 1 year after Napoleon’s capture in Paris following the invasion of Russia everyone considered him a bandit, but in the time between, he came to be called an Emperor, worthy of marrying the daughter of the Emperor of Austria. The point is, outlaws have been recognized as legitimate political leaders many times in the past and it will continue to happen in the future.

The only viable system I see for Haiti in the interim is a sort of feudalism, where Barbecue is the chief among warlords, as they try to stabilize the country and create a more equitable system. John Locke wrote, “I will not deny that if we look back as far as history will direct us towards the original commonwealths, we shall generally find them under the government and administration of one man.” [The Second Treatise of Government, 105.] It isn’t viable to impose a “liberal democracy” onto the complete state collapse of Haiti, especially given that the outside powers are completely addicted to preying on their weakness and would not be willing to let Haiti elect anyone they don’t like anyhow. My concern is that the neo-imperialist powers of the “Core Group” do not want the public of the world to take any lessons they might from observing this, as their empire is one of lies based on men believing government is something different than it is. I fear the most likely scenario is that whatever leader or system does arise in Haiti is not accepted, and it becomes a sort of black hole under embargo from the world around it. That said, this is how Haiti started in the wake of a slave revolt no one wanted to accept, and they could perhaps weather it better this time without having to pay the French “reparations” for freeing themselves from literal slavery.

The US campaign to control Haiti and leave it as a pliant, poor state to exploit seems to be at a dead end. However, those who rule the US are nothing if not tenacious in their willingness to face constant humiliation in attempts to make fallacious points about how the world works, as they use lofty words to rob countries blind. I don’t see how anyone but Cherizier can lead the country, be it formally or as the force behind the throne. It may be objected “who are you to make such a determination?” No one, it is just an opinion, it is for Haitians to decide, but at the this time a free and transparent election is impossible. My only role in this is to discourage my own country from further victimizing Haiti. It must be said though, it is quite a bit different for a country to be ruled by the man who can rule it through his own power than to have foreign empire managers make a determination about who can fill such a role and impose him on a people, as the US has done so many times across the world. Indeed, that’s how Henry ended up where he was. As it stands, the planned “stabilization” mission is suicide in the face of unified gangs, and would not even be able to get established in the country, while there is no longer a government to prop up. There seems to be no way the US can put together the willpower to do a full invasion of Haiti as they have in the past. Most likely they will indeed just sanction and embargo this poor country to prevent it from any chance of building its own homegrown state. The problem is that no one wants to see the messy and often brutal process of pulling a state together in the modern era, it is much better concealed by the mists of antiquity. Thus, the process may be made impossible and then sooner or later the failure of the process which the US sabotaged anyway will be used to justify an invasion. It has happened many times before.

Assuming he isn’t stupid enough to force his way back into the country, it is perhaps only Ariel Henry who gets a happy ending here. If Will Smith’s 1997 hit song is any indication, Miami is a lovely city, and I expect Henry to show up there and join the masses of Latin American exiles at any time. He can either return to Haiti and risk being captured or killed by any of the multitude of armed factions, knowing full well he has no chance of genuinely helping Haiti, or give up the struggle and try to enjoy the last years of his life. I know what I would choose:

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