Haiti is in the hands of the rebellion; in the hands of the armed paramilitary groups that seek the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry and are preventing his return to the nation.
Clashes between the armed groups and the state authorities spread throughout the capital in strategic places such as the presidential palace and different prisons, leading to the release of more prisonsers.
The health service and medical care are in a state of collapse as a result of the ongoing conflict.
Other areas controlled by the rebels are some of the country’s port areas and companies like the Caribbean Port Services. Fires in institutional areas such as commissaries and government buildings are now routine as well.
Among all the tension the United States has deployed troops to reinforce the security of the United States Embassy in Haiti and evacuate non-essential personnel. While the European Union also withdrew all diplomatic personnel from the Caribbean island as well. Canada withdrew all diplomatic personnel and closed the embassy to the public and will remain inoperative as long as the state of emergency continues or until the security situation in Haiti is normalized.
German diplomats were evacuated by air on a mission to the Dominican Republic. However, diplomats from France, Spain and Mexico have not evacuated their staff from embassies.
The various armed groups, who refer to themselves now as “Viv Ansanm,” which translates to “Live Together,” are predominantly former military and police. They are heavily armed and their main goal is to rid the country of Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The root of the crisis dates back to the 2004 US coup d’état, making it a crisis of imperialism. The US, France, and Canada backed a coup against the country’s first democratically elected, socialist, president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The US Marines kidnapped him from his home and flew him, his family and staff to the Central African Republic. The US demanded he not return to the hemisphere.
The US and France organized a multinational military occupation culminating in the US ambassador picking the new interim president of Haiti. The country went from having thousands of elected officials to none today. The occupation created a political body called the Core Group which is an unelected group of Western officials, who control all the political and economic actions in Haiti, even choosing Ariel Henry as the Prime Minister after the assassination of Jovenel Moise.
The US banned Lavalas, the social democratic popular party, from participating in the political process. After the 2010 earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people, the US demanded elections, to give the political system the image of inclusion. Wikileaks revealed that Hillary Clinton flew to Haiti and changed the election results, ensuring the neo-Duvalerist (the predecessors of the US backed dictatorship), would gain power with only 20% of the vote.
In actuality, then, the US imposed the total destruction of the Haitian state and political infrastructure, creating a corrupt, bourgeois catastrophe. The paramilitaries were funded by oligarches and they universally despire Henry’s attempt to impose outside intervention on the country.