Foreign dominance crumbles in Haiti as popular forces assert control
Analysis by Steve Lalla, first published in Orinico Tribune, March 13, 2024
With the resignation of Haiti’s ‘prime minister’ Ariel Henry, the U.S. has suffered another humiliating foreign policy defeat. Though never elected, Henry was encouraged by the United States and the ‘Core Group’ of foreign powers dominating Haiti to seize power in July 2021. This, then, sparked a prolonged popular revolt that never recognized his legitimacy.
The ‘Core Group’ is a shadowy imperialist cabal composed of representatives from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union, Brazil, and the Organization of American States (OAS). The cabal has attempted to run Haiti since 2004 when the democratically elected and hugely popular president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the government he led were overthrown in a paramilitary coup with essential backing from the U.S., France and Canada. Aristide was abducted in the middle of the night by U.S. marines and flown to the Central African Republic. He was only able to return to the country in March 2011, and only as a private citizen.
Junior partner Brazil accepted the lead policing role in Haiti on behalf of imperialism following the 2004 coup. Though never in full operational control of it, Brazil was the largest contributor of soldiers to the discredited United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, known by its French-language acronym ‘MINUSTAH’. It operated in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. Its most wretched act in Haiti was when its soldiers brought a deadly cholera epidemic to the country, following the devastating earthquake of 2010 that killed tens of thousands (not ‘hundreds of thousands’ as Western media and NGOs falsely reported). The epidemic killed some 10,000 people and infected hundreds of thousands, but no foreign official ever faced justice for their reckless and criminal conduct in causing it.
The CARICOM group of countries, with U.S. backing, are now suggesting that another transitional and unelected government be put in place to replace Henry’s defeated interim government. This plan will not restore order in Haiti, nor will it secure U.S. and other imperialist investments in the country.
Haitians have been demanding free and fair elections to the presidency and legislature ever since the 2004 coup against Aristide. Mot recently, the demand for elections has been the primary demand of popular mobilizations, reinforced by an armed struggle that ultimately prevented Henry from returning to Haiti from Kenya. He was in the African country in early March trying to cobble together an international police and military intervention that could protect his crumbling governing and its imperialist masters.
Elections were promised by Henry and his foreign masters several years ago but never took place. In response, political organizations including those led by Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier, turned to armed struggle following years of unsuccessful street demonstrations. Today, Haiti finds itself in a revolutionary situation.
“We are not in a peaceful revolution,” says Cherizier. “We are making a bloody revolution in the country because this system is an apartheid system, a wicked system.” (Here is a Western news media report citing Cherizier. The report uses typical imperialist language dismissing the popular, self-defense forces in Haiti as ‘gangs’.) By all accounts, Cherizier is the dominant figure in an armed rebellion that has usurped control from the foreign-appointed government at virtually all levels. “Barbecue is now the most powerful man in Haiti,” according to Judes Jonathas, an independent consultant based in Port-au-Prince.
Cherizier leads an alliance of self defense forces called ‘G9’ (‘Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies’). He told a 2023 documentary film, “The demands of the ‘G9’ and its allies are: stability in our communities to prevent fighting among armed groups, stability for businesses to function without fear so that people in our community can live without fear and feel secure, potable water for everyone in the poor neighborhoods, and good healthcare and good schools for everybody in the poor neighborhoods.”
As cited in the pro-Western Guardian newspaper, Cherizier lists Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X as his heroes. “I like Martin Luther King, too,” the told New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson when they met last year. “But he didn’t like fighting with guns. I fight with guns.”
Cherizier’s G9 alliance is credited with seizing control of Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince in early March and thus preventing Henry from his returning to the island from his scheming in Kenya.
Henry flew to Kenya to encourage the government there to join and lead an international policing force to protect Henry’s hated, do-nothing administration. The U.S. had offered Kenya $100 million to pay for this effort, but the plan was never popular locally. On January 26, Kenya’s highest court ruled that the policing scheme was unconstitutional because Kenya is not at war with Haiti. The government now says its policing plan is ‘suspended’.
The US is now offering a $300 million total bounty for any country willing to lead an invasion of Haiti and install a U.S.-backed, unelected government by force. The plan is supported by CARICOM, a regional trade bloc that has lost much credibility in Haiti as a result of accepting a role as doormat for the imperialist powers.
The revolutionary forces of Haiti are showing no sign of permitting the formation of any ‘transitional government’ that would act as a vassal of US imperialism. “Haitian citizens and political organizations have firmly declared that they do not support the political transition that the US Department of State is preparing for Haiti,” writes Isabelle Papillon on March 13 in the trilingual print weekly Haïti Liberté. For the time being, Haiti’s revolutionary forces have defeated the unelected puppet government installed by the U.S.-led imperialist cabal.
The horror of the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine has exposed, for all the world to see, the degenerate nature of U.S. imperialism. The U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine has revealed the political as well as military weakness of the U.S. military. The resounding defeat of the regime in Haiti led by Ariel Henry follows the definitive end of efforts by the U.S., Canada and the European Union to overthrow the socialist government of Venezuela. The limits of U.S. power even in its ‘back yard’ of the Caribbean and Latin America is on full display.