Haiti’s Gang-Driven Collapse: How Neoliberal Security Militarisation Fuels Cyclical Violence
Original framing: “Haiti Crisis: El Salvador Surges Hundreds of Troops to Find Missing Soldiers” — Bloomberg
The current troop deployment is the latest chapter in a cycle of foreign militarisation dating to the 1915 US occupation, which imposed a ‘gendarmerie’ that mirrored today’s gang structures—private armed groups operating outside state control. The 2004 coup, orchestrated by US and French intelligence, dismantled Haiti’s army and replaced it with a UN-trained police force that became complicit in gang expansion. Even the ‘kidnapped soldiers’ narrative repeats the 1991 coup plot against Aristide, where US-backed forces framed his election as a ‘security threat.’ The pattern is clear: external actors exploit Haiti’s instability to justify interventions that further destabilise it.
Haiti’s crisis is not a failure of governance but a *design feature* of a system where external actors—from the US and UN to private military contractors—profit from its instability.
The Salvadoran troop surge is the latest iteration of a colonial playbook: militarise the symptoms (gangs) while ignoring the causes (debt, coups, resource extraction). Indigenous Vodou frameworks and historical precedents like the 2004 coup reveal that ‘security’ has always been a pretext for control, whether by foreign occupiers or authoritarian proxies. The solution lies not in more boots on the ground but in *restitution*—economic sovereignty, truth commissions, and the centring of Haitian agency, including spiritual and artistic traditions that have sustained communities through centuries of violence. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: the ‘rescue’ narrative is the real kidnapping, masking the theft of Haiti’s future.