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UPDATE: Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned after weeks of mounting chaos in the Caribbean nation. Mr. Henry said in a video address on March 11 that his government would leave power after the establishment of a transitional council. "Haiti needs peace. Haiti needs stability," he said.
In a city accustomed to street clashes and violence, the latest scenes of roving gang members and outright combat at the national airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, have still managed to shock.
In an apparent effort to thwart negotiations that could lead to the dispatch of peacemakers to Haiti, armed gangs in Port-au-Prince overran two prisons on March 1, releasing thousands of inmates, including hundreds of gang members. Gangs also launched an attack on the airport that forced the suspension of service there.
Instead of returning to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s embattled prime minister, Ariel Henry, in-bound from negotiations in Kenya, was forced to land in Puerto Rico, where he remains. His finance minister and acting prime minister declared a state of emergency.
Jean Denis Saint-Félix, S.J., the Jesuit superior in Haiti, says bluntly, “The situation here in Haiti is deteriorating very quickly. The violence has reached a point of no return.”
“What we are living here, less than two hours from Florida, is worse than what is happening in Ukraine or in Gaza,” Father Saint-Félix says, responding to America by email. He reports that many more Haitians will likely be on their way to the United States any way they can to escape the escalating violence.
“Nobody wants to stay in this hell,” he says. “People are seeking ways to enter, no matter how, the United States,” even “knowing the danger and risks they go through.”
“People are angry, hungry and tired of being governed by a bunch of incompetent and shameless people who leave their own to die daily at the hands of the gangs with whom they entertain dubious relationships,” Father Saint-Félix says, referring to various alignments of Haitian political leaders with some of the gang leaders.
“The poor continue to starve. But this is not news…. We in Haiti have been let down by the international community…. The people think they are forgotten.”
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of the Archdiocese of Miami has been talking with clinical precision about the various humanitarian, natural and civic threats assailing Haiti when he is briefly overcome by it all, his voice breaking. “It’s hard to talk about Haiti without crying,” he says.
He remembers warmly a Haiti before the ascendance of the drug and human trafficking cartels and the arrival of military-grade weapons from the United States, a Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake when the people came together to help each other through the calamity. Haitians “are a noble people that are being visited with terrible pain,” Archbishop Wenski says, recounting a gauntlet of human-made and natural catastrophes that have befallen the people of Haiti over the last two decades.
“Every time you think that it’s going to hit rock bottom,” Archbishop Wenski says, “it gets worse. It’s like descending into the different, lower rings of hell.”
The latest eruption of violence seems calculated not only to prevent the return of the prime minister but also to put a stop to the diplomatic mission he was leading, meant to pull together a force capable of taking on the gangs and restoring order. Mr. Henry had flown to Kenya on Feb. 29 to formalize an agreement that would deliver a Kenyan police mission to Haiti—one that the United States has pledged to finance.
But “what is needed is not policemen,” says Archbishop Wenski. “What is needed are soldiers because [the gangs] are very well armed. This is why [President] Biden doesn’t want to send anybody down there. Biden knows that if he sends in U.S. troops now, there’ll be a lot of U.S. troops that will come back in body bags.”
Last year, more than 8,400 people were reported killed, injured or kidnapped in Haiti, more than double the number reported in 2022. “This violent situation…is not characteristic of the Haitian people,” Archbishop Wenski says. “It is really something foreign to Haiti.”
He blames the relentless disorder on the gangs and their patrons among international drug cartels, “para-states” that have sown disorder throughout the Caribbean and in Latin American states like Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela. Haiti, he points out, makes a handy transhipment point for drugs on their way to the U.S. market.
Haiti has not had a functioning national assembly for more than a year, and its deeply unpopular prime minister is unelected, appointed to the office by President Jovenel Moïse just before his assassination in July 2021. Mr. Henry has reneged on various promises to restore democratic order. Elections should have been conducted in February, Archbishop Wenski says.
The disgraced Haitian army—in the past a force that effectively terrorized the Haitian people—was disbanded in 1995, although some recent efforts have been made to remobilize the armed services to contain the gang violence. Many of the gangs began as militant wings of political factions in Haiti. They have emerged as the most powerful forces in Haitian society.
With arms trickling in from the United States, some of these gangs are now better equipped than Haitian security forces. According to the United Nations, the gangs control as much as 80 percent of Port-au-Prince.
Archbishop Wenski has little hope that the Biden administration or the American people are prepared to show greater mercy to the people of Haiti as conditions deteriorate. He describes U.S. immigration policy on Haiti as racist and incoherent, driven by a “phobia” of black people, not the actual circumstances plaguing Haiti or the rule of law.
Thousands have been returned to Haiti from the United States despite the nation’s social collapse, violating a bedrock human rights principle of non-refoulement that prohibits states from transferring asylum seekers out of their jurisdiction when they face a risk of harm. Haiti has been unsafe for years, the archbishop points out, owing to natural disasters, conflict in the streets and ineffective governance.
But that has not prevented the Biden administration from deporting 27,000 people to Haiti, creating what The Washington Post called “the largest mass expulsion of asylum seekers in modern American history.”
“That’s like sending people back to a burning house,” Archbishop Wenski says. “It doesn’t make any humanitarian sense and it doesn’t make any legal sense.”
Despite extending temporary protected status to Haitians in U.S. residence, deportations to Haiti have continued as recently as March 1, when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had to suspend a flight to Haiti because of gunfire at the airport.
Trapped indoors and unable to freely move about Port-au-Prince, Father Saint-Félix says, his Jesuit community struggles to continue its various services to the Haitian people. Other communities and representatives of relief and development agencies in Haiti report the same, with overseas staff and local teams locked down by the violence.
“We manage to do some work, but everybody is stressed out by the prospect of being kidnapped at any time,” Father Saint-Félix says. The city is completely surrounded by armed gangs, and the Jesuit community members “sometimes…can spend a whole week without being able to step outside of our houses.”
Father Saint-Félix reports that clergy and religious men and women have been targeted by kidnappers. “At this very moment, six religious brothers of the Congregation of [Brothers of] Sacred Heart are still held hostage together with one collaborator.” His community has had to deal with three instances of kidnapping.
The people of Haiti feel similarly held hostage, Father Saint-Félix says, both by the gangs and by an incompetent and corrupt government that somehow retains the support of the United States and international community.
But as hard as it is for members of Haiti’s religious communities, “average people are not even allowed to survive,” he adds.
“The kind of life that Haitian people, especially in the capital, are living is far from being human. Nothing works. The most basic human and living conditions are lacking,” Father Saint-Félix says.
“Even the hospitals have been vandalized and patients and personnel gunned down. The schools and universities are forced to close. Most kids fled from the capital; others try to leave the country by all means.”
Father Saint-Félix believes that ultimately sustainable solutions to the ongoing crisis “have to come from within.”
“However, in this moment we desperately need a backup to put some order in the country” and to “cleanse, reform and empower the Haitian police in order to liberate the country from the power of gangs of all kinds.”
Even as he issues this appeal for help, he seems determined to continue the Jesuit mission in Haiti. “We continue to stand by our people,” he said, “working and hoping with them. Until when, we don’t know.”
“Here in Miami, we’re surrounded by islands of pain: Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela,” Archbishop Wenski says. “Everyone of us has a personal connection with someone on one or more of those islands. It really hits home to us here.”
“The only thing we can do right now is pray, pray for Haiti,” he says.
As far as the moral call Haiti’s continuing calamity places before its affluent northern neighbor, Archbishop Wenksi is reminded of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, “the rich man who had everything and Lazarus who had nothing.”
“Lazarus is laid on the doorstep of the rich man’s house, suffering misery. Well, here we are in the United States of America,” Archbishop Wenski says, “and Haiti is on our doorstep.”
“Haiti is the Lazarus of our day, and the rich man in the parable goes to hell and he looks up in hell and he sees Lazarus [in heaven], and the reason he goes to hell is not anything he did—because Jesus doesn’t say he was an adulterer, he doesn’t even say he was a thief—but Dives, the rich man…goes to hell because he didn’t do anything.”
More from America:
- Racism, migration and exploitation: the bitter history of Haitian workers in the D.R.
- Living in hell: A Jesuit superior describes dire conditions in Haiti
- Is the Biden administration ready to respond to a Haitian immigration emergency?
- How can the world stop Haiti’s ‘descent into hell’? Let Haitians lead.
- The Jesuits’ complicated past in Haiti: From owning plantations to serving the Black community
