In the first months of 2026, Port-au-Prince became something for which the vocabulary of modern statecraft is poorly prepared: a capital without a state. An estimated ninety percent of the city lies under the effective control of armed coalitions, chief among them Viv Ansanm, a federation of once-rival gangs whose leadership now speaks in the idiom of political parties. The Transitional Presidential Council, installed in April 2024 to shepherd Haiti toward elections, dissolved on 7 February 2026 without having delivered a single ballot. Elections are scheduled for August 2026, but the body tasked with organizing them has already conceded that security is a prerequisite the state cannot yet supply.
This article argues that the prevailing framing of the Haitian crisis — as a security problem awaiting a military solution — is diagnostically incomplete and strategically self-defeating. The emergency in Port-au-Prince is not, at its root, a gang problem. It is a state-formation problem, expressed through violence, financed through corruption, and sustained through the active collusion of actors who appear, in the diplomatic cables, as interlocutors rather than as subjects of investigation. To understand why the present equilibrium is so stubborn, it is useful first to recall how it was constructed.
I A Brief History
Haiti is the product of a revolution without historical parallel. On 1 January 1804, after more than a decade of armed insurrection against French colonial rule, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the former colony of Saint-Domingue, restoring the indigenous Taíno name Ayiti. The new state was the first in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, the first Black-led republic in the modern world, and the only nation in recorded history to have been established by a successful slave rebellion. The victory came at enormous human and economic cost: an estimated 200,000 Haitians died during the revolutionary decade.
The cost compounded. In 1825, King Charles X of France agreed to recognize Haitian sovereignty on the condition that the new republic pay an indemnity of 150 million francs — a sum equivalent, by contemporary estimates, to approximately forty billion U.S. dollars. Successor loans would not be fully repaid until 1947. The indemnity established the pattern that would shape the next century of Haitian political economy: a state whose fiscal capacity was mortgaged to external creditors before it had the chance to build internal institutions. The United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, formally in the name of stability; in practice, the occupation centralized power in the capital and bequeathed a reorganized Haitian Army that would serve as the instrument of every subsequent coup.
The second half of the twentieth century belonged to the Duvalier family. François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier took power in 1957 and declared himself president for life in 1964, relying on the Tontons Macoutes — a paramilitary force that terrorized opponents and collected parallel state revenue. His son Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier inherited the presidency and continued the regime until a popular revolt forced him into exile in 1986. The Duvaliers left behind two durable inheritances: a political culture in which armed youth formations were routinely employed as instruments of rule, and a security apparatus that had been disbanded repeatedly but never disarmed.
The twenty-first century has been a cascade of compounding shocks. The earthquake of 12 January 2010 killed an estimated 220,000 people. A cholera outbreak introduced shortly afterward killed 10,000 more. When President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom in the early hours of 7 July 2021, the boundary between political party and paramilitary had effectively dissolved. The ensuing power vacuum did not create the gangs; it merely emancipated them from their former patrons.
II The Problem
Port-au-Prince is a port city whose arterial roads, maritime approaches, and land corridors to the Dominican border are now administered, in a literal sense, by armed groups. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reports that gangs exercise effective control over all access routes to the capital, extracting revenue through the systematic taxation of commercial traffic. This is not predation at the margins of a functioning economy. It is the principal fiscal base of a parallel administration. According to Human Rights Watch, more than sixty-six percent of Haiti’s population now lives on less than 3.65 U.S. dollars per day, and 5.7 million people face acute food insecurity.
According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, at least 5,519 people were killed and 2,608 injured in Haiti between 1 March 2025 and 15 January 2026, with more than 1.45 million internally displaced — a figure approaching the scale of the 2010 earthquake. Of those deaths, the majority — at least 3,497 — resulted from operations led by security forces rather than from gang-initiated attacks. Investigators documented 247 instances of attempted or completed summary executions attributed to police units, and concluded that drone strikes carried out by a private military contractor hired by the Haitian government ‘could be described as targeted killings.’ No judicial investigation has been opened.
III Five Measures Toward a Workable Path
A durable settlement for Port-au-Prince requires abandoning the pretense that this is principally a peacekeeping operation. Five interlocking measures, pursued in parallel, offer a more plausible route to a governed city:
Treat the arms pipeline as the center of gravity. Enforce U.S. export-control laws against the straw-purchase networks routing firearms through Florida and Texas to Haitian ports. Interdiction at the source is an order of magnitude cheaper than interdiction in a Port-au-Prince alley.
Dismantle the domestic financial networks that launder gang proceeds — bulk cash smuggling, unregulated money-transfer services, and front companies in real estate and construction materials. Expand U.N. Resolution 2653 sanctions to the political-economic principals, enforced through correspondent-banking pressure on Dominican and Panamanian institutions.
Rebuild the Haitian National Police on a vetted foundation rather than reinforce a compromised one. Establish an independent inspector-general with subpoena authority, recertify existing officers through a human-rights-vetted process, and recruit a new cadre from outside the capital’s patronage networks.
Treat elections as a consequence of security rather than as a substitute for it. Phased polling, precinct by precinct, conditional on ninety consecutive days of demonstrated state capacity to protect polling places. Slower than the August 2026 timetable, but likelier to produce a government that survives its own inauguration.
Address the economic conditions that make gang recruitment rational, as a matter of security policy rather than of development policy. A diaspora-remittance-financed public-works program — a sum that substantially exceeds Haiti’s annual foreign direct investment — paired with vocational training, can compete with the gangs for the same eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-old labor pool they currently monopolize.
Haiti is not a failed state in the technical sense; it is a state whose failure has been organized, financed, and periodically rescued by a coalition of domestic and international actors who have found the present equilibrium more tolerable than its alternatives. The cost of that tolerance is now being paid, in bodies and in displacement, by the population of Port-au-Prince. The citizens of Port-au-Prince have earned a better outcome than a further iteration of the cycle this region has witnessed four times since 1994. The question is whether their interlocutors are prepared, at last, to deliver one.