Okap (Cap Haitien), Haiti.

On May 28th, the New York Times announced: “A Desperate Haiti Turns to Erik Prince, Trump Ally, in Fight Against Gangs.” The article revealed that the mercenary for hire, Prince, with a long track record of illegal interventions and egregious human rights violations in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the globe, has already been secretly working in Port-au-Prince alongside other private security contractors.

While the colonial overseers are quick to point out how corrupt their underling Haitian government is, they turn a blind eye to their own incestous billionaire cabinet. Prince has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial contributions to Trump’s campaigns and is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first Secretary of Education.

As has been widely documented, Blackwater had a long track record of aiding U.S. imperial missions. They were a close collaborator with Zionism and are invested in colonial projects in Africa. Blackwater trained Colombian soldiers for the princes of the United Arab Emirates to use as they pleased. Prince is active in the narco-democracy of Ecuador where the richest family in the country just stole the elections.

Deploying mercenaries to carry out U.S. foreign policy objectives is nothing new for both the Democratic and Republic governments of the United States of Imperialism, but the idea is gaining more traction and Haiti is a perfect testing ground. Beyond a tiny, fractured, timid solidarity movement, who cares about this “shithole country,” long misrepresented by the racist, shrewd U.S. mainstream media, as a hopeless case of Black people unable to govern themselves? Only last month, the Trump administration tested the waters promising to send Haiti’s gang leaders to Nayib Bukele’s maximum security dungeon, known by its initials, CECOT.

As imperialism prepares its next round of machinations against the inheritors of the 1804 revolution, it is vital for anti-imperialists to have a clear view of the balance of class forces in Haiti today.

Who are the two “sides” dueling for power? Viv Ansanm (VA) is a sophisticated confederation of paramilitary gangs in Port-au-Prince. The underfunded, kleptocratic Haitian National Police (PNH), backed by the U.S. ‘s MSS mission and now Erik Prince’s mercenaries are on the other side. The unarmed, besieged and traumatized masses are trapped in the middle. Understanding where their class interests lie will help clarify who “the good and bad guys” are in Haiti.

Hunger, Displacement and Trauma

Eric Prince’s recycled Blackwater is invading an already occupied Haiti.

With their origins in the Clinton-annoited Michel Martelly dictatorship from 2011-2016, paramilitary gangs have raped, looted and burned their way through the alleyways and ghettos of Port-au-Prince. “Viv Ansanm” is the name of the paramilitary alliance which today wages war on the masses’ sovereignty. According to the popular movement I have worked with since 1998, VA plays a role today similar to their marine predecessors, who wielded the latest U.S. weapons of their time to subdue the restless natives from 1915-1934.

Most recently, the gangs have committed massacres against the poor in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, headed towards the Dominican border in Mibalè (Mirebalais), up in the pristine mountains of Kenscoff and in an oppressed corner of Petionville.

The more massacres they commit, the more their spokesperson Barbecue claims to want peace. Bragging about being “the Trump of Haiti,” Barbecue’s rhetoric clashes with the material reality of his fellow countrymen.

Haitian social leaders compare their dire reality today to that of their ancestors abducted onto French slave ships and imprisoned on sugarcane, coffee and cotton plantations. In the timeless classic, Black Jacobins, CLR James wrote:  “If on no earthly spot was so much misery concentrated as on a slave ship, then on no portion of the globe did its surface in proportion to its dimensions yield so much wealth as the colony of San Domingo [Saint Domingue]. And yet it was this very prosperity which would lead to the revolution.” What would the Pan-African author and organizer say about this historic land today, as the tropical rain and unforgiving sun alternate punishing an estimated 1,300,000 Haitians who no longer have a roof over their head?

The Proxy Occupation

While Barbecue brags about his “revolution” to a non-Kreyòl speaking audience, 5.7 million Haitians, roughly half the country’s population, face acute hunger. 2 million are starving. Families who a year or two ago eked out a living in the vast complex of shantytowns that is the heart of Port-au-Prince, today are huddled together in squalid makeshift shelters in lots, alleyways or abandoned structures.

Barbecue and Viv Ansanm are both Haitian and foreign creations. Who would the bandi (criminals) be without access to massive shipments of sophisticated U.S. weaponry? What power would they have without his alliance with transnational cocaine traffickers? Barbecue’s power derives from the disempowerment and violent suppression of Haiti’s popular left. Overwhelmingly, Haitians see him as a djòlè (loud mouth), blofè (liar) and abolotcho (opportunist).

In November, Barbecue’s soldiers fired at random Spirit and JetBlue passenger planes transporting Haitians from New York and Florida back home. Remittances are a neocolony’s lifeline. They account for $3.8 billion dollars in Haiti, roughly one fifth of Haiti’s GDP. Through his new “big beautiful bill,” Trump and his cabinet of vampires will now tax this lifeline at 3.5 percent.

According to Haitian researches and community defenders, “The gangs also destroyed the Superior Court of Accounts and Administrative Disputes (Cour Supérieure des Comptes et du Contentieux Administratif, CSCCA) offices where government spending receipts are archived, including the dossiers concerning the PetroCaribe arrangement with Venezuela.”

East Flatbush community organizer, Dahoud Andre of KOMOKODA (Coalition to End Dictatorship in Haiti), stated on Democracy Now:

“Barbecue is an assassin, a criminal [and] someone who is responsible for all of these massacres. And despite the denunciations of the people of Lasalin (La Saline), of all of these poor neighborhoods in Belè (Bel Air), they themselves say that it is Jimmy Cherizier. This is RNDDH. This is Fondasyon Je Klere. This is the CARDH and the people in the streets and any radio station in the country that you turn on. And people who are massacred are speaking directly about who they saw come with guns, with gasoline and fire to burn down their homes.”

The Haitian people continue to ask Barbecue and his Western supporters:

+ If you are a revolutionary, why are all of your victims defenseless families?

+ Colonialism never sent guns to Makandal, Dessalines or Charlmagne Peralte. Why have they been sending them to you and your fellow corrupt police officers and gang members in the most forgotten ghettos in the hemisphere and in this century?

+ Why don’t you direct your well-stocked cache of weapons against Haiti’s ruling oligarchs and Core Group diplomats and intelligence agencies hidden away in the picturesque hills of Petionville?

+ If blan (foreigners) want to know how the gangs have ruined our lives, why don’t they ask us?

+ Is anyone naive enough to think the empire would allow revolutionaries to possess massive amounts of the most sophisticated Western guns?

+ Why does the empire sanction Nicaragua, starve Cuba, asphyxiate Venezuela and wage coups in Bolivia and throughout the hemisphere, but nourish Haiti’s gangs with an endless supply of guns and drugs?

These are all questions we have formulated and posed from within Haiti’s censored and repressed, but stubborn, popular movement. According to ardent VA defender, Kim Ives, “Barbecue and VA buy the guns with money they receive from Haitians in the diaspora.” I have never heard one Haitian believe this to be true.

The Foreign Occupation

Like the Palestinians, the Haitian people know foreign occupation and apartheid in their own land. MIT professor Michel DeGraff explains:  “Why do I, a Haitian, wear a Keffiyeh? Because Haiti was Palestine before Palestine was (Occupied) Palestine…”

From 1915-1934, thousands of U.S. marines invaded, “helping make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” Langston Hughes captured the dynamic that existed between occupiers and occupied:

“In 1915 the American Marines came to Haiti to collect American loans. Haiti was a land of people without shoes – black people, whose feet walked the dusty roads to market in the early morning, or trod softly on the bare floors of hotels, serving foreign guests. Barefooted ones tending the rice and cane fields under the hot sun, climbing mountain slopes, picking coffee beans, wading through surf to fishing boats in the blue sea. All of the work that kept Haiti alive, paid the interest on American loans, and enriched foreign traders, was done by people without shoes.”

In 1937, the product of the U.S. 1916-1924 occupation of the Dominican Republic, Rafael “Trumpillo” Trujillo slaughtered over 20,000 Haitians on the border with the Dominican Republic. In 1994, Bill Clinton ordered an invasion of Haiti, transporting back a kidnapped president under orders that he scale back the radical programs he had designed to empower Haiti’s silenced majority. From 2004-2017, the Core Group and  the United Nations’ MINUSTAH occupied Haiti, opening fire on many protestors who wanted their abducted president back in the National Palace.

Haiti is a marathon runner.

Haiti is a colonial laboratory.

Haiti is the Palestine of the Caribbean.

What other nation has endured so many colonial experiments?

The plot thickens.

Foreign security contractors hunting for notoriety and big government contracts are not the only U.S. force threatening to ramp up their occupation efforts. After meeting with Kenya’s National Security Minister and the nominal “head” of the “Multinational Security Support mission” in Washington, Secretary of State and Cold Warrior Marco Rubio suggested the Organization of American States (OAS) could play a renewed role in Haiti. The OAS itself has recognized that it and other instruments of foreign occupation are responsible for the destruction of Haiti. In the summer of 2022, the OAS’s General Secretariat did what imperialists and their lackeys never do, told the truth. They wrote: “The institutional crisis that Haiti is experiencing right now is a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community.”

Regardless of what combination of Western entities supply the lethal muscle, it is clear that the U.S. is now amplifying their efforts to take out another one of their Frankenstein creations.

Similar to Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and Manuel Noriega, the Haitian gangs plaguing the capital city and the Latibonit department were made in the USA. These four actors were all at one point useful to empire. They functioned as Western-backed attack dogs, but were always on a short imperial leash. As soon as they were no longer useful pawns for the U.S. foreign policy establishment, they were discarded by the U.S.,   then vilified by the CIA-influenced media apparatus. Their new usefulness was as “boogey-men” that could justify U.S. invasions and occupations.

In Drone Warfare, the Masses Always Lose 

A key voice for peace and dignity in Haiti is Rudy Sannon, who broadcasts and lives daily under death threats from Viv Ansanm. Sannon denounced a PNH drone attack on Gran Ravin and Vilaj de Dye on June 9th. This drone attack is one of the ones Erik Prince has been bragging about supervising and employing. According to VA’s greatest critic, many innocents were murdered and maimed, though he could not yet offer a number.

This speaks to the complexity of this war and why many leftists in the English-speaking world have failed to understand it.

Gran Ravin and Vilaj de Dye are the strongholds of two famous and ruthless warlords, “Ti Lapli” aka Renel Destina and “Izo,” Johnson Andre. This French documentary interviews Ti Lapli in his pool house erected on the ruins of the former vibrant neighborhood. Izo and his murderous, cocaine-dealing lieutenants speak for themselves in this video. Both are on State Department sanction lists, and more importantly reviled by the masses for kidnapping, raping and murdering. Like all of the VA warlords, both possess heavy supplies of sophisticated U.S. weaponry, far superior to that of the Haitian state. Now that their Frankenstein has successfully turned a capital of the Western Hemisphere into a hellscape, U.S. intelligence and diplomatic offices can dispose of them. A similar scenario is now developing in Palestine where Netanyahu is paying Palestinian bandits to fight Hamas.

It is not clear if Erik Prince and the corrupt Haitian states’ drones hit Ti Lapli, Izo or their most powerful lieutenants, but they did inflict heavy damages on the inhabitants of the neighborhoods, lost to gangs years ago. There are unconfirmed reports that Izo was hit by a PNH drone. Whether this is true or not, it proves the warlords are not invincible. The masses could care less who flew the drone. They want justice. In their day to day lives, the paramilitaries are the face of their homelessness and hopelessness.

The location of this government attack is symbolic. This is where then-PNH police officer Barbecue participated in the 2017 Gran Ravin massacre, according to the mass leadership and their communities. Numerous human rights organizations corroborate popular memory, some of which are more left-oriented and some of which are NGOs that receive foreign funds. To discredit all of the voices critical of the gangs reflects a white savior pipe dream.

The War on Haiti is also an Informational War 

Unsurprisingly, Viv Ansanm and their spokespeople label anyone who has challenged their destruction and seizure of 90 percent of Port-au-Prince as “CIA and NED agents,” including Sanon. Just as VA has a lethal monopoly over force and Port-au-Prince, they seek to monopolize the right to be the sole representatives of the people in the press and on social media.

How many community organizers have denounced VA? How many have been exiled, kidnapped and murdered for it?

ImajINAN, named after a vodou lwa (god), is a space where diverse displaced organic intellectuals analyze life and how Haitian families have had to reorganize their society, families and “communities” under criminal gang rule. Any question we foreigners have about paramilitary rule, the Haitian people have long been answering.

The murdering of innocents has been the raison d’être of the gangs and offers a taste of what is to come. This is the stage, again historically unprecedented, in the continuum of Full Spectrum Dominance. The Uses of Haiti are myriad and constantly evolving. The two sides compete with one another in dishonesty and savagery.

Where do the masses line up? 

A single mother, Maude, from Dèlma 31 was forced to evacuate her home and neighborhood where she grew up. She and nine other family members made their way through the paramilitary labyrinth first to Okap and then by flight to Okay. It was only because they have family in Waterbury, Connecticut that they could afford the arduous journey. How many Haitian families live in the U.S. in constant debt to keep their families back home aline. Maude addressed her own individual and national tragedy: “What we are going through is horrible. I can’t express the pain we have endured. But the big, bad U.S. coming in and murdering all these heavily-armed children, young men and innocent civilians is not the solution. I cannot forget what these criminal gangsters have done to us but there has to be a better way.”

Many Haitians disagree and want revenge on Barbecue and VA. Overwhelmingly, the Haitian population fears and repudiates VA. This footage from the burned-down neighborhood of Fort Nasyonal, a neighborhood where I slept on cement roofs after the earthquake, is the reality of an estimated 1.3 million Haitians who have nowhere to live. MOLEGHAF encourages discipline to all of their comrades who help guide daily life in the kan (camps).

While many neighborhoods have been depopulated by the paramilitaries, others partially function under occupation. Sex workers, cooks and domestic workers are often forced to serve the warlords and their militias. Other malere, the destitute majority, have no choice but to search for scraps of food or anything of worth left in the burnt-out, abandoned communities.

What will an increased U.S. occupation of Haiti look like? 

What good could possibly come from another paramilitary outfit like Prince’s introducing more deadly weapons into this dystopian quagmire?

On May 24th, Kejal Vyas wrote in the Wall Street Journal that at least 300 civilians have already been murdered by drones. RNDDH (Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network) head, Pierre Esperance, claimed to the Journal that “his organization hadn’t logged any civilian deaths so far and that he supports the use of drones against the warlords: What should we do? Wait for the gangs to come to us and kill us?” Such a cavalier attitude about “collateral damage” against civilians and conscripted child soldiers mirrors the examples of sadism that both the gangs and the state have accepted.  Drone warfare will occasionally score a big hit on a warlord and give the imperialists the headlines and soundbites to keep going. Everyday Whatsapp, Facebook and YouTube spread rumors that Barbecue was hit. The hundreds murdered by the drones and warfare will occasionally receive one sentence of attention, like this one from the Times four days later: “Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people.” The quote is from the same Pierre Esperance, who appears to have changed his tune upon learning the human cost of the strikes.

Barbecue has promised his death squads can respond in kind, buying drones in a corrupt society where dollars talk and the masses are refugees in their own land. The AI War from the Skies has already started, and more foreign soldiers and weapons of mass violence are making their way to Haiti.

The U.S. government is sending the foreign guns for hire to murder the native guns for hire. Their number one targets are the number one recipients of their guns à là Escobar, El Chapo and Ben Laden.

The empire insults the intelligence of the thinking. Haiti is the living embodiment of what Full Spectrum U.S. Dominance looks like. No country has been more impacted by nefarious direct and indirect foreign interference, and once again, it appears, it is just getting started.

CNN, Fox, NYT and the rest of the clichè spreaders: Haiti is not the poorest country in the hemisphere, it is the most oppressed. The hemisphere’s vultures and jackals have feasted upon no other carcass in such a thorough way.

When the invaders eventually murder Barbecue, Lamò San Jou, Jeff Kanara or any other VA warlord, will an alienated segment of the U.S. “left” reinvent history, idealizing them and holding them up as martyrs? Do Haitians see their hangmen as their heroes? Why do some journalists wage war on behalf of the warlords? Why do some streamers try to make a buck off a genocidal war?

The honest Haiti watchers, and most importantly, Haiti’s displaced, repressed and exiled leadership agree this is among Haiti’s toughest historical challenges since the 1804 revolution. They do not frame their struggle as deciding between a native or foreign occupier. They see Barbecue, Viv Ansanm, Erik Prince, Marco Rubio, the Kenyan and Salvadoran mercenaries as being part of the same “pwojè lanmò” (death plan). Like the enslaved plantation workforce of centuries past and the massacred Lavalas masses of the 1990’s, the Haitians masses have again been silenced. How can we translate them, listen to them and stand with them? In the words of the late People’s Lawyer Mario Joseph: “We cannot see right now how liberation will happen, but we know that something will emerge from the Haitian people, as it always has.”

The post Erik Prince vs Barbecue: Haiti is Trapped Between Two Occupations  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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