Yon Tanpèt Pafè

In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.

I. Skip This Section

… unless you haven’t read my earlier posts about Haiti; this is only to establish my bona fides. Lacking credentials, I have to get by on ability, experience, and (occasional) accomplishments.

tl;dr: 20 visits and ~6 months cumulative time in country from 2011–19. Lots of associated reading, mostly about the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Less facility with kreyòl ayisyen than I should have mastered by now. One fictional work in progress (nearing completion) by way of emotionally processing it all; others possible. Brief instances of actual life-saving activity involving water filter distribution and a fiber-optic cable run to a maternity clinic. Due to unrest, had to leave work sites in … other than the originally planned manner, which is to say more or less got exfiltrated, on my first (March ’11) and last (September ’19) visits. This included encountering burning barricades in ’19 in Jacmel and vicinity, to say nothing of the atmosphere in Port-au-Prince.

See Dilèm Aksyon Kolektif nan Matisan and Pwosesis Ayiti A for earlier commentary on what might be called post-Petrocaribe Haiti.

II. Prekosyon

Attempting a logical order:

1. My working assumption here is that everyone reading this has some awareness of recent events, enough to provide context to what I will be discussing. If you don’t, you may want to spend some time grazing (Midwesterners don’t surf) through a few recent news articles, bearing in mind that on-the-scene reporting has become largely infeasible due to the risk of violence. Reporters in (say) Miami, dedicated and talented as they are, quoting onshore academics and Haitian expatriates, however well-educated and concerned they might be, aren’t in the thick of things, and given that they could be abducted or killed within hours of arriving in Port-au-Prince, I don’t blame them.
2. In particular, be aware of structural media biases in the availability and quality of information about Haiti’s situation. In Afghanalysis, I noted their applicability to the fall of Kabul in August of ’21, and in this situation, “temporal,” “bad news,” “narrative,” and “expediency” biases are especially pernicious. To quote myself, “[media reports] may attempt to connect ambiguous events into a coherent whole in a situation which is deeply chaotic and full of minimally- or entirely non-related factors.”
3. The general picture is of course one of state failure, although I believe that the PNH (Police Nationale d’Haïti) has acquitted itself better than most observers in the Global North seem to think. Quantifying the effects is desirable:

• • What is the violent death rate per 10⁵ life-years?
  • … in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area vs the rest of the country?
  • How do these figures compare with the … more difficult areas of large cities in the US? Bringing this home, how do they compare to, say, the Englewood or Austin neighborhoods in Chicago?
  • How much have fuel and food imports decreased over the past six years since the unraveling of the Petrocaribe agreement? (I earlier attempted to analyze the fuel situation in Ayiti Pa Nimewo Yo.)
  • What has happened to baseline daily per capita food consumption, formerly ≈1850 kcal?
  • … in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area vs the rest of the country?

(I don’t know how to get the numbering to format correctly; the items below are supposed to be #s 4-8.)

1. Getting back to that “attempt to connect ambiguous events into a coherent whole,” and to propound something like a general heuristic here, do not imagine that all the things you don’t like are somehow connected. As Claire Berlinski has commented, we are in an era characterized by a decline of American competence, which I note may be nearly the definition of the first half (at least) of a Strauss-Howe “Crisis Era.”
2. The situation on the ground in Haiti is a continuum from pure banditry at one end … to a surprising degree of interest on the part of the larger gangs in obtaining a Westphalian/Weberian monopoly on violence in a defined territory (up to and including the entire country) to restore order and provide public services at the other. Plus whatever remains of functionality in the PNH and other legitimated organizations.
3. This is not much like what goes on with gang violence in the US, which is heavily tilted toward the pure-banditry end, in a national atmosphere of dysregulated attention and a pandemic of mental illness underway since at least the early 2010s. There have been as many traffic deaths as homicides this year in the city where I live—and they’re in the same neighborhoods, usually involve intoxicants, and are often hit-and-runs. Haiti is not the same kind of crazy.
4. See the Lewis Model for the contrast between “Linear-Active” and “Multi-Active” societies for an elucidation of the behavior behind the differences between US dysfunctionality and Haitian dysfunctionality. (Tangentially, I note that anyone who has spent time on the Haitian short-term mission circuit will be familiar with the phenomenon of adjusting to Haitian insanity while in country, followed by readjusting to American insanity upon returning home.)
5. Not so tangentially, 28% of Americans believe immigration is our most important problem, but only 3% say “foreign policy/foreign aid/focus overseas” is. That’s a massive and senseless disconnect, not only, but most urgently, in the context of the Caribbean Rim. And the gap is even higher among Republicans.

III. Aksyon Desizif

If I do this right, I’m about to offend everyone, including my younger self.

1. Haiti is entering the “suddenly” phase of “gradually, then suddenly.” My contrarian admiration for the PNH notwithstanding, the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission authorized by the UN in early October is just not going to get it done, not least because the countries tabbed to provide the manpower were selected more for skin color than language; only 3 of 11 are Francophone (including creole languages). Also, there doesn’t seem to be much actual, like, y’know, money to pay for the whole operation.
2. Lack of institutional functionality is bad, m’kay? Attempting to answer some of the questions posed in the earlier section, the aggregate homicide rate for Haiti in 2023 was ≈41 per 100,000. Quite high, although assuming a Pareto distribution of homicides in the US, we have many areas that are up around 30, and I can tell you that on the East Side of KC, it’s much higher than that, as bad as the Port-au-Prince metro itself, that is to say ~100. The Haitian equivalent of the East Side (and the North Side of St Louis, and certain sections of Chicago, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade) is the notorious Cité Soleil, just west of Aéroport International Toussaint Louverture, where Médecins Sans Frontières purports to have found that 40% of all deaths are violent.
3. … which means there’s an argument for calling out the National Guard in Missouri, Illinois, and undoubtedly several other states, because what I’m promoting here is an invasion: a full-scale, surprise attack, taking the form of an airborne assault on scores of targets simultaneously, deliberately timed to catch as many gang members on the streets of Port-au-Prince and at roadblocks in the countryside as possible. The smart ones would surrender; the rest would die.
4. Imposing order and reducing the violent death rate by >75%, to ~10/100k/yr, in a country of 11 million directly saves ≈17,000 lives in the first 5 years—at the 2023 homicide rate, which may of course increase considerably during 2024. The number of gang members likely to be killed outright in the first days of the invasion is a small, albeit quite noticeable, fraction of that, and extra lives saved by public health programs carried out during the occupation could easily reach the low six figures.
5. As usual, the problems with this scheme may be divided into “hardware” and “software.” The hardware problem is availability of forces, which are unlikely to be found anywhere other than in the US, and which necessarily—even if only a single brigade of Marines proved sufficient—would thereby become unavailable for anything else, in a world with plenty of other … situations, and incidentally with noticeable recruitment problems domestically.
6. The software problems are something else. Any US force would be ~75% non-Hispanic white, and every single Haitian casualty would be very visibly otherwise. Unflattering comparisons with the 1915–34 occupation, however inaccurate, would not be slow in coming. Haiti’s problems would be blamed on outsiders—except for Venezuela, an actual external culprit, which would be ignored.
7. The even larger software problem, though, would be the tectonic mindshift required to carry out decisive action. Driving Russian forces from Ukraine and eliminating their ability to return, sweeping Hamas into the dustbin of history, securing the sea lanes leading to the Suez Canal (and, perhaps, those leading to the Strait of Malacca), and neutralizing multiple large predatory groups in sub-Saharan Africa all fall into the same category. Dealing with failed-state levels of homicide in bottom-rung ZIP codes in the US may as well.

So Haiti is a barometer after all, of the level of provocation required to awaken the sleeping giant and fill it with resolve. We are not yet even at the end of the beginning of our Crisis. We will be fortunate if its scale only matches WWII and thereby takes two hundred million lives globally by the end of this decade. What may distinguish our efforts, as did those of earlier generations, is that the measures we take end in a net saving of human life.