While Haiti has been politically fragile since a magnitude-7.0 earthquake rocked the island nation in 2010, killing more than 100,000 people, a series of crises in the last few years have shaken the country anew. In 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by Colombian mercenaries funded by an unknown source, triggering political turmoil that was only worsened by the installation of acting president Ariel Henry, whose slashing of fuel subsidies caused widespread protest in fall 2022. Since then, the primary power brokers in the capital city of Port-au-Prince have been gangs, especially members of the infamous rivals G9 and GPep, which formed an unprecedented alliance to oust Henry in September 2023.

But G9 and GPep are only two of the 200 gangs that now control as much as 80% of the country’s capital. Not only do the gangs use American-made weapons; their very existence is rooted in the history of European and American interference in the Caribbean from the colonial period through the present. The area of Haiti was under French rule from 1697 to 1804, when Haitian liberation forces revolted, expelled the French settlers, abolished slavery, and declared the Kingdom of Haiti — which the French government soon billed for lost revenues to the tune of 150 million francs. The centuries of extortionate “reparations” to France that followed, as well as American seizure of the entire Haitian gold reserve during its own colonial ventures in 1914, left Haiti without the funds to develop key infrastructure. Two decades of American rule introduced a new precedent in governance of the country: military might, which persisted even after American withdrawal in 1934.

During the Cold War, under the US-backed rule of the dictators François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the Haitian secret police force and militia the Tonton Macoute carried out as many as 60,000 executions of dissidents, those suspected of harboring them, and countless innocents. Though the Macoute was disbanded in 1986, it was never disarmed, and its members soon reassembled into paramilitary groups with political fronts that would dominate the post-Duvalier landscape. When President Jean-Bertrand Aristide attempted to outlaw them in 1994, the insurgent groups became avowed enemies of his regime, while others aligned with him and formed armed bands operating in opposition to the Macoute gangs.