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Mr. Prince goes to Haiti
Jonathan M. Katz
May 30, 2025
Longtime readers know that before almost anything else I was writing about Haiti. I lived, worked, fell in love with my wife in, and wrote my first book about Haiti. At dinner, in Port-au-Prince or elsewhere, I could be reliably counted on to talk for hours about Haiti’s history, people, language, politics, music, and the world’s greatest rum.
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Well, nearly twenty years after I first set foot on Haitian soil, I may have finally come to a point where I have run out of things to say:
Let’s put aside the clichéd deterministic headline. How can you even react to the substance of this scoop? Erik Prince — merchant of death, ex-boss of convicted murderers, repeatedly investigated for alleged involvement in domestic political interference and foreign coups, Trump megadonor, brother of ex-Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — is, according to the New York Times about to bring his Nisour Square roadshow to sunny Port-au-Prince.
When you dig into the story by Mark Mazzetti, Frances Robles, and David C. Adams, the picture immediately gets worse:
Haiti’s government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Mr. Prince’s team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target.
Security experts said Mr. Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said.
That’s right, drones. This shines some light on stories from earlier this year about small drones armed with explosives being deployed against gangs in Haiti’s capital. A supercut of small drone strikes was uploaded to YouTube by the Haitian National Police. That’s since been taken down, but clips of it can be seen here. In March, Haitian police reported a major raid into the Delmas 6 stronghold of Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, leader of the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies and its newer umbrella group Viv Ansanm (“Live Together,” or, if you prefer, modus vivendi). Several of Chérizier’s lieutenants were killed; Barbecue himself was initially reported dead but later resurfaced. It isn’t clear if drones or Prince’s forces were involved in that raid, though it seems some observers have questions.
Context? Where to begin? Things have long been rough in Haiti, but have been truly careening toward the abyss since 2021, when the country’s last elected president was assassinated in his home, apparently by Colombian mercenaries. (Theories abound, but who ordered the killing remains at this date unknown.) Since the U.S.-backed interim government (predictably) collapsed last year, there has effectively …
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