For over a year, Viv Ansanm, an armed neighborhood coalition which has formed itself into a political party, has been calling for peace. A whole year of begging for an end to the killings, proposing various agreements, reaching out to communities. And yet, peace hasn’t come.
Why? Who is blocking what seems so simple and humane: a cease-fire, allowing children to return to school, letting markets breathe?
The answer is cruel but clear: peace threatens powerful interests. Here’s who opposes peace… and why.
1. The “Self-Defense Forces” — Armed Brigades Used as Tools
They are often called “brigades” by the oligarchy, its media, the state, and repeated by the diaspora: a polite term for local armed gangs defending the status quo but presented as “protection.” Who are they?
For the most part, they are idle youth, the unemployed, the excluded — men for whom weapons have become a source of income from the powerful and a means of social advancement. They now live off their dependence on whoever pays them to “defend” a neighborhood: food, a roof over their heads, a nest egg, then weapons and ammunition. They are armed. And they are allowed to reproduce.
Who wants peace when their food depends on weapons?
These young people — victims first — become complicit in maintaining disorder when they earn their living from violence. They continually kill innocent people primarily from vilified and criminalized Viv Ansanm quarters — neighbors, shopkeepers, homeless youth — and these deaths, in turn, fuel the anger and reaction of armed group leaders rooted in these same neighborhoods.
The targeted repression of “criminal zones” produces civilian victims; these victims trigger reprisals, which then justify militarization and the maintenance of a parallel security economy. The circle closes.
2. The Haitian National Police Transformed into a Private Guard
The Haitian National Police (PNH), instead of being a public security tool, has partially transformed itself into a security company for the powerful. Police officers assigned to protect homes and businesses receive remuneration that is sometimes indecently high compared to an average policeman’s wage. They often get side gigs with the rich and powerful. Supplements and bonuses compensate for insufficient pay.
If peace returned and the security of working-class neighborhoods became a priority again, this additional income would disappear. So, for some officers, peace becomes a loss of income. It is understandable that, here too, peace is not neutral: it disrupts informal economies and the petty arrangements that hold certain actors in check.
The bourgeoisie’s hijacking of the PNH is not new. In 2011, when reporting extensively on the secret U.S. State Department cables it received from Wikileaks, Haïti Liberté revealed how Haitian businessmen turned the PNH into their own “private army.”
3. Oligarchs and Bosses Profiting from Chaos
Powerful economic groups, certain businessmen, and free trade zone owners have every interest in an environment where the state is weak, the workforce is precarious, and costs are low. Chaos disciplines the workforce, keeps wages pitiful, and imposes conditions favorable to raking in money.
For them, full stability, fiscal accountability, rising wages, and state strength directly threaten their profits. Peace would mean redistribution, taxes, control — and therefore loss of income. They don’t want it. They resist, sometimes directly, sometimes through private security funding or political influence peddling. Sometimes they form their own armed group.
4. Parachuted NGOs and Certain Multinational Forces Paid for Inaction
Many aid budgets boom when there are emergencies and crises. Programs, consultants, and assistance contracts — sometimes paying millions — thrive in an environment of permanent emergency. Needless to say, the permanence of the crisis equals the permanence of contracts.
There is an “aid” economy that needs the crisis to persist to justify budgets, missions, and statuses. Similarly, some international forces or missions are funded and maintained in a symbolic or crisis management role without addressing the root causes.
Why give up this bureaucratic El Dorado in favor of a peace that would make their raison d’être obsolete?
5. Foreign Chancelleries and Interests That Benefit from Controlled Chaos
Finally, there are diplomatic and strategic interests — embassies, agencies, and external actors — for whom controlled chaos allows them to exert influence, maintain geopolitical leverage, and impose conditions. A perfectly sovereign, efficient, and autonomous Haiti is more difficult to control; a fragmented country, in constant demand for “assistance” and “stabilization,” is more malleable.
For certain external interests, maintaining “well-ordered disorder” serves geopolitical and economic aims.
To summarize: who doesn’t want peace?
1. Armed brigades and other “enforcers”: because it provides them with a livelihood and local power.
2. Some police officers: because it provides them with additional income and opportunities.
3. Oligarchs and business owners: because disorder protects their profits, that is, threatens their income.
4. NGOs and missions paid for crisis management — the aid economy: because the crisis finances their bureaucratic existence.
5. Certain foreign powers and chancelleries: because chaos gives them influence, a pretext for intervention, and room to maneuver confused and desperate forces on the ground.
In other words, peace threatens multiple revenue streams. From the perspective of the system’s guardians, peace is therefore both dangerous and costly.
And a crucial reminder: not just the brigades and police officers, but all five symbiotically linked anti-peace sectors, are responsible for killing primarily innocent civilians living in the demonized Viv Ansanm areas — these murders arouse anger and a desire for revenge. Viv Ansanm armed group leaders might be either enraged or feel obliged to retaliate to satisfy their neighborhood and/or show strength to discourage such killings. Thus, violence becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, a vicious circle: repression begets civilian casualties begets popular anger begets armed reaction begets increased militarization.
It must be understood that saying “we want peace” is noble, but it’s not enough. We must also denounce the interests that block it. We must expose how violence is monetized, how it is bought and reproduced. We must remember that the first to be injured by this logic are the poorest — families, children, workers.
There are a few non-violent ways to break or hinder this pattern without seizing state power.
1. Pull Back the Curtain: Journalists and activists can investigate and publish who finances which “brigades,” how they pay, how much they pay, from where and how they supply the “brigades” with guns, ammunition, bullet-proof vests, vehicles, and other materiel. The communications and contracts, whether formal or informal, between the “brigades” and their patrons, whether private or governmental, would also be important to disclose.
2. Targeted Campaigns: Once the oligarchs, government officials, and/or intermediaries who finance and foment “brigade” and police violence are exposed, they can be boycotted, picketed, pilloried on social media, and other actions to make them stop their funding.
3. Lobbying: Some NGOs, which might be deeply engaged in assisting and facilitating the interventionist designs of Washington, Ottawa, or Paris and their Haitian puppets, may have some naive or good-willed people who do not understand their work’s deleterious effects. They should be identified, approached, and educated to understand and stop it, where possible, which will be rarely.
Unfortunately, the only sure way to break this cycle of violence is for progressive, popular, enlightened forces to take state power. If that happens, the new state might implement the following:
1. Demobilization and employment programs: Transform the “brigades” into useful, productive citizens by providing them with training, internships, and employment, all of which could be financed by taxing (or expropriating) the very same bourgeoisie which today use their ill-gotten profits to sow violence.
2. Reform the PNH: Reconstruct the force from top to bottom, reevaluating salaries, rearranging command structures, putting in place strict civilian control, and ending moonlighting for the bourgeoisie, among other measures.
3. Control NGOs: Haiti must stop being the “Republic of NGOs,” which today come and go as they please and do as they want. NGOs, especially foreign ones, must be vetted, regulated, and monitored by the state so that they do not become corrupt enterprises and, worse, destabilization agents. Any assistance they provide must be overseen on the criteria that they are promoting real peace and development, not permanent crisis management.
The peace proposed by Viv Ansanm is neither naive nor passive: it is pragmatic and urgent. But peace requires more than a mere cease-fire between armed groups. It requires attacking the interests that profit from the chaos. As long as these networks — economic, political, security, and diplomatic — are not dealt with, peace will remain a word, not a reality.
It is time to ask the real question: who benefits from the continuation of violence? We must respond with transparency, justice, and redistribution, indeed with refounding Haitian society.
Haiti deserves peace. But peace demands that it be paid for, not with death and fear, but with the restitution of stolen land and labor, social justice, and democratic reconstruction.
source: Haiti Liberte