TORONTO — It has been more than five months since Ariel Henry, Haiti’s embattled prime minister, made a plea to the international community: Deploy a “specialized armed force” from abroad to restore order to a country reeling from a constellation of crises.
The catch: The United States does not want to lead it.
That has left Haiti still waiting for an answer. When President Biden meets Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa this week on his long-awaited first visit to Canada in office, the leaders will discuss a way forward in Haiti, to which both their countries have close and long-standing ties.
The Biden administration, mindful of failed U.S. military interventions in the past, has prevailed upon Canada to take a “leadership role” in an international force. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters in January that Canada itself had “expressed interest” in such a role, but U.S. optimism has waned as months have passed without any commitment from Ottawa.
“We believe the security and humanitarian situation in Haiti is worsening and the situation on the ground will not improve without armed assistance from international partners,” a National Security Council spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to the agency’s rules, told The Washington Post.
Since the beginning of the year, 531 people have been killed, 300 wounded and 277 kidnapped in gang-related violence in Haiti, U.N. officials reported Tuesday. The pace of the mayhem has been increasing: In the first half of March alone, at least 208 people were killed, 164 wounded and 101 kidnapped, according to officials.
Most of the violence has been in Port-au-Prince, the capital, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said. Most of the victims between March 1 and 15 were killed or injured by snipers who were reportedly shooting randomly at people in their homes or on the streets.
Canadian officials have said any outside intervention must be backed by a political consensus in Haiti. They have noted that previous interventions haven’t led to their desired outcomes. They have also cast doubt on whether the Canadian armed forces have the capacity for the type of mission the United States has proposed.
Officials also bristle at the notion that they have not already assumed a leadership role. They point out that they’ve beefed up their diplomatic presence in Haiti, deployed several missions to assess needs, provided armored vehicles and other support to the police, and imposed sanctions on 17 Haitians, including alleged gang leaders and their alleged backers among the political and business elite.
The United States, meanwhile, has cheered — but not matched — Canada’s sanctions. Brian Nichols, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, lauded Canada after Ottawa imposed sanctions on several former Haitian prime ministers and former president Michel Martelly in November. Washington has not yet targeted those officials with sanctions.
“For me, the best way to restore some stability for Haiti is to first sanction the elites to tell them that they can no longer finance the gangs,” Trudeau said at a town hall last week in Montreal. “And … we must ensure that the Haitian National Police have the power to do their jobs.”
He said other countries, including the United States, need to do “much more.”
Gilles Rivard, a former Canadian ambassador to Haiti, has advised the Foreign Ministry on U.N.-led peacekeeping missions. He called the reason the United States has not matched Canada’s sanctions a “big question,” given that the close security allies are likely to be sharing intelligence about the individuals in question.
“If we could coordinate on that, it would be very helpful,” he said.
Dunois Erick Cantave, a member of the Montana Accord, a powerful coalition of civil society groups and political figures, said Haitians initially welcomed the sanctions, but have lost faith that they can bring about change because they are “partial and selective.”
Washington has imposed visa restrictions on more than 40 alleged gang leaders and supporters since October and levied sanctions on four people. A senior State Department official, asked last month if the department planned to add sanctions on more people, said the decision process was lengthy and required the proper “legal authorities” and “corroborating evidence.”
The United States has imposed its sanctions under an executive order that targets “foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade.” That wording, analysts said, might explain in part why Washington has not targeted the same people as Ottawa.
“If [the Haitians] have U.S. status, that’s likely the reason that the U.S. hasn’t done it,” said John E. Smith, a former director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Meanwhile, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it has “not received any disclosure from third parties on frozen assets for Haiti,” raising questions about Canada’s enforcement capabilities.
Analysts say U.S. allies are hesitant to risk lives in a logistically complicated mission that would require a significant amount of time and resources and have complications. Trudeau leads a minority government dependent on the support of other parties to advance his agenda. He has been on the defensive for weeks over questions about what his government knew about and how it responded to alleged Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections.
“You won’t go there for three months or six months,” Rivard said. “You will go there for at least a couple of years.”
Trudeau, at a meeting with Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in January, said he was “very aware that things could get worse in Haiti.”
Since then, the terms of Haiti’s last 10 senators have expired. With the presidency vacant since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse and in the absence of elections, the national government now has no democratically elected officials. In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, gang violence has pushed deeper into more neighborhoods.
“Kidnappings are rampant,” Helen La Lime, the special representative of the U.N. secretary general for Haiti, told a meeting of the Organization of American States last week. “The sexual violence that is taking place in Haiti is at levels never seen before — and rarely seen in any society.”
The Haitian police, struggling with high rates of attrition, have been outnumbered and outgunned by the gangs.
The United States, and Florida in particular, is the main source of firearms for Haiti, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported this month. They are often procured through straw men in states with lax gun laws and then trafficked illegally to the country.
In Haiti, Henry’s request for a foreign force has been divisive. Some fear such a force would buttress Henry, a deeply unpopular appointee whose critics view his claim to power as illegitimate. He said last week that he would mobilize the army to aid the police in wresting control back from the gangs, another controversial move.
As security conditions deteriorate, some Haitians are taking a dim view of the international response. When Canada deployed two navy ships to patrol Haitian waters last month, Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s largest newspaper, published a front-page cartoon showing a bandit holding a gun in one hand and a man upside-down in the other — shaking him down, literally. He shrugs off the ships.
They’re a joke, he says in Creole. “They’re not going to get close.”
Georges Michel, a Haitian historian who helped write the nation’s 1987 constitution, said some measures taken by the international community have been well-intentioned but have come too late. As the country’s interlocking crises worsen, he and other Haitians see a foreign security force as the only way that they can breathe.
“When Canada sent a plane and a boat to fight against the insecurity, the population laughed,” he said. “We don’t have problems with the birds or the fish.”
Mérancourt reported from Port-au-Prince. Karen DeYoung, Jeanne Whalen and Yasmeen Abutaleb in Washington contributed to this report.
