By Matthew Smith
Matthew J. Smith is a writer and professor of Caribbean History at University College London. He has written extensively on Haitian history and politics.
To see violence solely from numbers is always a delusive exercise. Numbers don’t bleed. They recover faster. Crime and violence truly live in hurt. The gang members in Haiti’s capital who are today destroying and taking lives know that pain is more powerful than the Israeli made Galil automatic rifles they clutch under their perspirant shirt-covered faces. It is universal gang code that you inflict as much hurt as possible to hide your own fear. Life is short for a gunman. He accepts this because he has seen so many of his bonzanmi go to the ground. Gunmen assume those who pass twenty-five are lucky overtimers who should not weep for their losses because they have seen more of this bountiful and wretched world than he ever will. The grave reality is what make gangs so hard to comprehend and even more difficult to dismantle.
What is unfolding on the historic streets of freedom in Haiti is part of a horrible saga, all the more devastating for its reach into the future. In Port-au-Prince’s poorer areas the gunmen and badmen amplify a grotesque blood Caribbean. There is in Haiti today the large writ of the region’s most terrifying epidemic. Gang violence pollutes Caribbean cities, recruiting young and younger shottas to keep the ranks strong. Gangs are a force; they are seldom one thing for too long. They atomize and then run through interconnected poor sectors and like Old Man’s Beard creep from the root, blanketing districts and eventually the city itself.
Any sober reflection of Caribbean newspaper headlines reveals that from Montego Bay to San Fernando and beyond that vine crosses water. The bruises from gang crime are marked everywhere. How many of us know personally the consequences of violence and murder? How many know the costs of burials, dead yards, set ups, empty spaces in the bed, and the long drought of hope that comes after violent death? How many Caribbean residents in faraway cities cover up every morning the unseeable scars of gang violence and refuse to return to the lands that made them? Haiti may have been the only one of us that came into independence by revolution, but all our islands have been fighting ourselves for survival long before our first independence standards were hoisted.
Violence sprouts in the traces and main streets and the gullies and back roads of most Caribbean cities. We know where to avoid and where to go like we know the words of the anthem. Laventille, Jungle, Rema, Haiti, Bel Air, Wisroc, Carenage, Saigon, Matthew’s Lane, Payneland, Spanish Town, Carrefour-Feuilles. These are “troubled areas” we learn and tell our children about, bequeathing fairy tales of badness that live forever in the collective mind. It is why decades later we don’t talk about old violence and people must listen closely to the city’s whispers to know its damage.
The Haitian gang catastrophe is linked to this side of the Caribbean. It is a destabilization on a national level of a longstanding regional glorification of the gun. This will not end well. But it will not stop life. Caribbean cities through their despair find forgiveness and survivors go on. Somewhere in Port-au-Prince today children brush their teeth before walking to school. They play in tight spaces, go out and return, and churches gather for hours on Sundays while pots of rice are prepared in concrete ravines. Women beat stiff coal blocks, carpenters build what nots, tailors hem pants lengths to konpa on radio, and weakened labourers enjoy two fingers of kleren while sisters comb out each other’s hair. We accustom ourselves to the worst of everything if given no other choice. That is the graver danger of Haiti’s present.
Intervention can only go so far. Sixty years of intermittent states of emergency have not eliminated high and rising murder rates in Jamaica where what was once a Kingston disease has infected deeper rural towns. The spread is on in Haiti. In the Artibonite and way up north gunshots echo in closed valleys. Provincial towns are linked to gangs and become reliable escape routes. It is all around a subterranean intra-Caribbean connection of drugs and guns. Guns are imported into Haiti. They are distributed by a larger conglomerate than the gangs, the class of exploiters who work with the gunmen to guarantee that the power devolution suits a higher purpose. Guns are expensive. They proliferate not just in the hands of the poor and criminally ambitious but up the ringing suburbs where middle-class men and their teenage sons have revolvers close to hand. The same in Port-au-Prince, the same in Port-of-Spain. In Kingston, middle class children see the bulge on belt hips under shirt jackets so often that they assume gun carry is as much a part of growing into manhood as facial hair.
Most gangs have a structure. There is a leader whose role is to excite and order. Gangs are area commandos that usually dominate in one place. They compete for absolute rule. But they are in never-ending war. When a leader dies another emerges and the cycle continues. There appears little containment in Port-au-Prince where the poorer districts are triple the size of Kingston’s garrisons. The Haitian gangs are also more willing to converge. Over two hundred are active in Haiti today we are told, the pulse of most of them runs from Port-au-Prince’s ghettoes. But in a gunman town power like life itself rarely lasts and so these gangs can multiply and spread even more ferociously in order to stay in existence. Can foreign intervention really arrest this? The truth people see but do not always admit is that the modern Caribbean evolved in a gun culture. We sing about and sometimes laugh about guns. Their presence is everywhere and we apportion trust by who is holding the gun. Guns in the hands of uniformed security guards at their posts in gated communities make us feel better. When the guns become the lances of marauding bands of gang members we get worried. And there is good reason for this worry. When gangs proliferate and guns become offensive weapons for power and dominance then the culture deepens.
Haiti has had more interventions and aid assistance than its neighbours. It always seems overwhelming and desperately necessary to intervene to fix what cannot be done by state forces. It is almost forgotten now how many intelligence interventions Jamaica has had destroy Kingston’s gangs. From Scotland Yard to internal Jamaica Defence Force top brass taking a zero tolerance approach. What has it done? Today government ministers breathe a sigh of promise when early 2023 murder figures are lower than those of a year ago, then hold their breaths again that the summer numbers don’t extinguish that promise. In Bridgetown, people worry over gang murders but take solace that at least they are not like Trinidad or Jamaica or Haiti.
It has always been differences of degree that separate Haiti from an island like Jamaica. The guns for drugs trade, over a decade old now, between the two countries, ensures trans-Caribbean gunman links. They repeat a trade that is much older. In the nineteenth century, Jamaican businessmen profited from Haitian instability by outfitting schooners with arsenal to go to coastal Haitian towns where they found the hands of a proto military made up of peasant farmers in torn trousers whose services went to the better paying political hopeful. This was, on paper, what the US Occupation was meant to repair. Today the bare-chested gunman in Port-au-Prince wears ripped up denim jeans presenting, like his gun-carrying forebears, an alternative model of male social ascendance. Today they kill, maim, kidnap and wound without care, for their loyalty is only to the gang. This will not end soon.
The painful reality is that Haiti desperately needs a chance to come out of this cycle. Intervention at best can create political legitimacy for state function and restore the democratic project. It can pave the ground for a return to parliamentary rule and elections. But that will only be a beginning. As Kingston brutally shows, the violence and badman is a monster that carries its own oxygen supply. Disarmament is a difficult mission when the entire coastline is a port and guns can be hidden in pots, cupboards, and under the earth. It takes small units of well-paid fishermen to net caches of drugs and guns to keep the gang underworld ticking. And the financers are not in Haiti, but in places just a short flight and a day’s sail away. That is how guns first hit the streets of Kingston in the 1960s. Now Kingston like Port-au-Prince holds countless weapons from rudimentary homemade one-shot guns to the war ready AK models. Then there are the political and social actors who like their nineteenth century ancestors reap rewards in this trade, and trust that blood follows the laws of gravity and never streams up to their safe mountain compounds.
There are the murders and there are also gang-related crimes. The bone deep ones that people would rather not disclose or statistics blur. The kidnappings, sexual assaults, slashings, and robberies, all gnawing at the edges of any plan of restoration and stability. It is all so different from anything that long traumatised Haitians have had to face. Twenty years ago, in Port-au-Prince, a woman asked me why Jamaica had such a high murder rate when there was no coup, no dictator, no paramilitary force. It was perplexing to her because she had not known in her life or country’s history how gangs and guns redraft the narrative of a city. As the decade long acceleration of gang violence in Port-au-Prince has become more frightening her question is no easier to answer. Poverty drives the pressures for criminal activity but the full-scale spread that Haiti now endures defies easy explanation and the focus has to be to stop it. Intervention this time cannot be an end but a start for Haiti, Port-au-Prince, and their survivors to work their way forward. Discussions among CARICOM leaders to stand with Haiti must move beyond promises to help with the restoration of order. The long plan for an alternative in a situation of war involves much more than recovery. The whole culture of the gun that gives the gunman his ephemeral superiority must be the target. It is possible to make sense of what is happening in Port-au-Prince if we think expansively. We can view it as part of the Caribbean tragedy. The same challenges of containment, disarmament, poverty alleviation, opportunity creation, of increasing security in urban areas and establishing a lasting peace are more horrifying but they are the same. The histories that created gang violence and the failures and successes of stopping it cannot be undone but they can be confronted. The stakes for Haiti and its neighbours are too high and critical. Thinking regionally about Haiti’s gun crisis is the first step in making meaningful and inevitable intervention for the Caribbean’s most triumphant and pained island.