Haiti is imploding. The immediate cause is a massive hike in gas prices, which the government has announced will nearly triple overnight. (Unlike in the United States, where people just assume the president does things like that, the Haitian state formally sets prices at the pump.) Flaming barricades are going up in all the major cities. Banks are closed; embassies are shutting down. Protesters are filling the streets. Some are ransacking stores. The police and gangs are gearing up for more violence — against and, as often, in concert with each other. The major Port-au-Prince newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, summarized it simply: “A new leap into the unknown.”

We might not know exactly where things are headed, but how we got here is clear. How far back you want to go is up to the teller. You could start with the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse last year — a crime that remains unsolved — which has left Haiti’s ever-shrinking administrative state in the hands of an unelected successor: the “acting” Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Or you could wind it back further to the PetroCaribe corruption scandal, in which Haitian officials including Moïse and his patron-predecessor Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly allegedly made off with some $2 billion in fuel loans provided by Venezuela, without ever building the infrastructure and social programs those loans were supposed to fund. (The end of those subsidies is officially what prompted the de facto government to raise prices of all fuel sources, including diesel and kerosene.)

It helps to go back further than that, to how the Moïse-Martelly clique got into power in the first place: the overturning of the 2010 election by the U.S. and its imperial allies, in the person of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They were acting out of frustration with the lack of reconstruction from the catastrophic earthquake earlier that year — a reconstruction those same-said imperial allies had pledged (but not, for the most part, delivered) billions to fund. Or you could go back six years before that, to the U.S.- and French-backed coup that overthrew the putatively redistributionist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Of course, you can’t really talk about that without covering the U.S. government’s previous support for authoritarian forces in Haiti following the end of the murderous Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986, or its on-again-off-again support for the Duvaliers during their 29 years of rule. Or rewinding all the way to the brutal 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-34 that led, indirectly, to the Duvaliers’ terror-fueled rule. Or the massively extractive 19th-century French post-slavery ransom that led to the U.S. occupation. And so on, until you get to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Genovese pirate himself.

This retreat into the longue durée might seem academic, or an exercise in casting about for anyone off the island to blame. But the major international players are admitting it themselves. Just last month, the Organization of American States issued a statement out of their headquarters on Washington’s Constitution Avenue, across the street from the National Mall, stating flat out: “The institutional crisis that Haiti is experiencing right now is a direct result of the actions taken by the country’s endogenous forces and by the international community.” (In the next paragraph, they moved past the “endogenous forces” completely: “The last 20 years of the international community’s presence in Haiti has amounted to one of the worst and clearest failures implemented and executed within the framework of any international cooperation.”)

In the year since Moïse’s assassination, Haiti’s cities — especially the capital, Port-au-Prince — have been taken over by marauding and brutal gangs, the most powerful of which had operational connections to the slain president’s administration and the Haitian National Police. Over just the last week, a 17-year-old girl was killed in the district of Cite Soleil. Then a group of Haitian journalists who came to investigate the murder was ambushed by gangs: two journalists were killed, five others escaped. Another Haitian journalist was shot in broad daylight during a protest by a police officer, whose personal sense of impunity was such that he was unfazed by the fact that the reporter filmed the whole assault as it happened. (As I understand it, the journalist survived.) Haitians are also up in arms about the murder of an employee of the cell phone utility Digicel near the U.S. Embassy in an apparently botched kidnapping attempt.

The endogenous de facto president/prime minister, the aforementioned Ariel Henry, has spent his year in non-office doing nothing but accelerate the tailspin. Like the trigger-happy police officer, he feels no need to even pretend to have accountability, since there will be no elections to replace or even constrain him in the foreseeable future. More importantly, Henry likely feels he has the complete and unwavering support of the real power in Haiti: the U.S. government. As the former U.S. Special Envoy to Haiti Daniel Foote said this week (in an interview unfortunately given to a craven nativist think tanker, gleefully reprinted by the New York Post), the Biden administration stopped pressuring Henry to hold elections to replace himself when Henry agreed to accept deportation flights from the U.S. — aimed at ending an encampment of Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, that had briefly become a media spectacle.

Indeed, it is no wonder that anyone in Haiti who can scrounge together the means to get out of the country, by whatever avenues available, is doing so. Loading up “ICE Air” flights and depositing those who’ve managed to escape back into their collapsing country only makes matters worse — a state of affairs that Foote’s interviewer’s home institution, the white-nationalist “Center for Immigration Studies,” was cheering on just a few weeks ago.

Henry finally emerged from hiding to address the “insecurity” this week, in a speech that has been widely mocked on Haitian social media. (The biggest laugh line was Henry’s insistence that he hadn’t given any previous speeches about the crisis because he has “been working” — a double howler in a country where, thanks to the unrest worsened by his mismanagement, steady work is often impossible to come by.) But Henry probably doesn’t care about Haitian reactions; the real purpose of his address was more likely to mollify the White House and the U.S.-led diplomatic “Core Group” that effectively appointed Henry to his post last year. He promised to put Haiti “into electoral mode” before “the end of the year” — a bit of meaningless bureaucratese of the kind that often serves to mollify international backers who care far more about the appearance of, rather than the actual functioning of, democratic procedures.

As others have pointed out, there is a meaningful alternative out there: an incredibly broad consortium of labor, farmers’, professional, diaspora, and religious associations that calls itself the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis. The group has drawn up a blueprint for an interim government — including a representative body that would act as a check on executive power. It also includes safeguards against self-interest, such as a provision that members of the commission cannot take leadership positions in the transitional government. As the group’s spokeswoman, Monique Clesca, has written: “Facing no perfect alternatives to a corrupt, illegitimate government that rules by decree, we believe the country’s best hope is a political transition in which inclusion provides legitimacy, leading to free elections. We can create a free, secure, democratic Haiti on our own, but we need the United States and other nations to abandon the status quo and back the work we’ve been engaged in for months.”

Those words were written nearly a year ago. The Biden administration and the “Core Group” — all the latest iterations of the imperial powers that have controlled fates in Haiti since its inception — are still ignoring them. Hundreds of years in the making as it may be, the crisis is now a year worse, and growing more dire by the hour.

Edited by Tommy Craggs

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