Thursday, December 31, 2020

2020: A Reporter’s Notebook of the Year That Never Was

 


For me, this past year began in January over the blue-green waters of the Caribbean, as my plane headed home from Panama to Puerto Rico. After a rumbling earthquake nearly thew me out of bed in San Juan a few days earlier, I had passed a few days in the beautiful Casco Viejo in Panama City, and before that in Georgetown, Guyana, where I had given a talk at a workshop for local journalists. I had never been to Guyana before but had always wanted to visit and its spicy mélange of Afro, Indian and indigenous cultures, its beautiful architecture and great spicy food was just to my taste. “Perhaps I’ll come back here later this year,” I thought. 

The world was all before where to choose, to paraphrase Milton. I had a series of lectures I was going to given in the United Kingdom for some badly-needed income, had planned a long reporting trip through Venezuela driving from Caracas to Maracaibo, was scheduled to house-sit for some friends in France’s divine Loire Valley and then was planning on moving to Lisbon by the end of the year, a return to Europe I had long hope to make real. 

 

It didn’t quite happen that way, and little did I know, when my plane landed in San Juan that would be the last time I would set foot off the island this year. As a cruel virus cascaded over the world, killing over 340,000 people in my native United States alone, we found ourselves confined to our apartments and houses for long periods of time, separate from our loved ones, apart but hopefully not completely alone, for the balance of the year. As a person whose professional life has been devoted to trying to illuminate for people the common humanity we all share, it was a hard slog, confined as I was to the streets of Viejo San Juan (where the neighborhood even lost Mimi, its most beloved street cat), at first utterly empty and since summer far-too-crowded with travelers, for the duration of the year, a year that somehow vanished into the ether, along with the lives of so many beautiful people.  

 

Coronavirus was not the only struggle the world faced in 2020. The appalling murder of George Floyd reenergized the Black Lives Matter movement in a profound way and spurred what I hope will be a more honest discussion about race and accountability, not just in the United States but beyond. Citizens in countries as disparate as Belarus, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela faced down the awful machinery of state repression as France continued to be stalked by jihadist terrorism and Haiti’s political and economic actors for the most part continued to flail at one another with little concern for their vulnerable people. Here in Puerto Rico, the political duopoly of the two main political parties was broken, but the corrupt system through which they rule seems to remain largely intact. 

 

But there were bright spots. Firstly, the red-hat wearing cult of the 45th president was vanquished in November, and my home state of Pennsylvania, which shamed me by voting for him in 2016, delivered the coup de grâce. Now all that’s left is to kick his political culture into the ditch where it belongs and cover it with dirt. A man and his criminal low travelers who caused so much misery for so many people will soon be gone from the White House. Secondly, a series of vaccines against the pandemic arrived, raising hope that life might return to some level of normalcy as 2021 progresses. 

 

And somehow, amid all the unreality of this year, I managed to start work on two new books, began a PhD and to publish the articles that I like to below.  

 

For me, 2020 will in many ways remain, in the words of the caraqueña band Desorden Público, el año que nunca fue (the year that never was), a strange pause in life between what came before and after. But I hope that, as the sun sets on this most difficult twelve months, it will rise on something brighter, gentler and more humane in 2021, and that I can see you all again very soon.


Y una a una las noches

entre nuestras ciudades separadas

se agregan a la noche que nos une

 

(And one by one the nights

between our separated cities

are joined to the night that unites us)


Love to you all from Puerto Rico,


M

 


Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads for Newlines Magazine (21 December 2020)


New Voices of Rebellion Rise in Cuba for Newlines Magazine (22 November 2020)


Mexico slams brakes on clean energy momentum for Energy Monitor (22 October 2020)

Colombia’s financial services industry flourishes despite domestic headwinds for Foreign Direct Investment (15 October 2020) 

Le rôle de la communauté internationale dans le royaume de l'impunité d'Haïti for Le Nouvelliste (24 September 2020)

Haiti’s long road to energy self-sufficiency for Energy Monitor (18 September 2020)


Puerto Rico’s Colonial Model Doesn’t Serve Its People for Foreign Policy (31 July 2020)


Dominican Republic: George Floyd protests spark reckoning with race as elections loom for The Guardian (15 June 2020)


Donde las vidas de los negros importaban primero en las Américas for El Nuevo Día (17 June 2020)


 'Our heritage is abandoned': burning of Haitian church fuels anger at politicians for The Guardian (17 April 2020)


Puerto Rico earthquakes are just the latest in a string of shocks for US island for The Guardian (12 January 2020)  


Interviews

Michael Deibert speaking on impact of Tropical Storm Isaias in Puerto Rico on BBC World Service (31 July 2020)

 

L’église de Milot qui vient de prendre feu est un monument unique in Ayibo Post (13 April 2020)

 

Can Solar Energy Solve Puerto Rico's Energy Crisis? on The Takeaway (13 January 2020) 

 

Magnitude 6.4 Earthquake Rocks Puerto Rico on The Takeaway (7 January 2020)



Books in 2020: A Personal Selection


 Arrernte rain ceremony, Alice Springs, Central Australia, c. 1895-1901.

 

During this very strange year, these are some of the books the made the biggest impression on me. 

 

Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac

A panoply of Bourbon-era France set in a Paris boardinghouse, this book introduces a cast of characters ranging from the devoted father Goriot to the aspirational law student Eugène de Rastignac to the cynic and fugitive convict Vautrin. Balzac casts a sceptical eye on the French capital and its moneyed inhabitants alluding to “the horror under the gold and the jewels” and that “at the bottom of every great fortune without apparent source, there’s always some crime, a crime overlooked because it’s been carried out respectably.”

The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest

This sprawling book, by perhaps the greatest historian writing in English on Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian Communism, is the story of how, through a thousand small compromises and miscalculations, the political class of a society allowed themselves to preside over the building of a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave below. Using the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext to begin mass purges and executions, Stalin was, as Conquest writes, “a monster who, while adhering to abstratct and fundemntally utopian ideas, in practice had no criterion but success – and that meant violence, and physical and spiritual extermination.” He was also a master at tricking his opponents into underestimating him, as “they could - and did - frequently delude themselves into thinking that he had submitted to the will of the politburo majority, and would henceforth be possible to work with.” Given the totalitarian flirtation the United States - through the skin of its teeth - is hopefully about to exit, it is good to remember Conquest’s observation that “Stalin required not only submission, but also complicity” in relation to all those who serve an authoritarian and are then smeared with a stain that will never wash off. Also, at a time when the hammer and sickle - a symbol that ought to be every bit as repellent in modern usage as the swastika - is thrown around by the Western pseudo-radical left as a kind of unlettered shorthand, this book is a good reminder for the grim human toll the disgraced fanaticism behind it exacted on the vulnerable. 

Assad or We Burn the Country by Sam Dagher

This book by a veteran Lebanese-American journalist paints a convincing portrait of Syria’s ruling family as little more than a remorseless criminal enterprise pillaging the Syrian state and picking its bones clean. The supposedly initial reformist instincts of Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma al-Assad were nothing more than “the beautiful and shiny wrapping paper around what remained a regime of lies and terror on the inside.” A regime that exported terror abroad - almost certainly playing a role in the murders in Lebanon of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, journalist Gebran Tueni and academic Samir Kassir, allowing the rump of Saddam Hussein’s Baʽath party sanctuary in Syria after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and allowing fighters of what was the Al-Qaeda in Iraq to flow freely through the country - at home Assad Inc. became increasingly subservient to the empire-building designs of the mullahs in Iran after the 2006 Lebanon Israel War. Though the recollections of the book’s main source – former Brigadier General of the Syrian Republican Guard and Assad confidante Manaf Tlass, who defected from the regime in July 2012 – are clearly self-serving, they still give a fascinating window into the inner working of the corrupt, ruthless and deluded system that currently squats over Syria

In terms of the international community, there are the by now customary assortment of demented, regime apologists and hangers on - the Carmelite nun “Mother” Agnes Mariam, the French conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan, Assad and Hezbollah defender Nir Rosen and the right-wing French politician Valérie Boyer - but there are also the United Nations officials and staff sitting breezily at the Four Seasons in Damascus as civilians are gassed and murdered by the regime merely miles away. United Nations official Yacoub El Hillo actually helps coaxe desperate, besieged civilians out of hiding in Homs only to have them disappeared by the regime, blithely dismissing criticism by saying “the UN is not the protector of Syrians in Syria.” There is the often-malevolent role of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And finally there is the administration of former U.S. president Barack Obama, whose Syria policy - if it can even be called a policy - proved nothing short of disastrous. 

The failure of the U.S. to act following Assad’s chemical weapons massacre in Ghouta in August 2013, a military response to which had serious Turkish and French support but which died on the vine due to the Obama administration's feckless vacillation - remains a turning point in the war. The French especially, were also ready to support an American military punishment of Assad but Obama blinked. Many saw Obama’s indecisiveness in Syria as interpreted by Vladimir Putin as a sign that he could invade Ukraine at little political cost the following year. And in Syria itself, once the full measure of Obama’s weakness on the issue was assessed, regime atrocity followed regime atrocity and ISIS completed its takeover of Raqqa in January 2014 and took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, only six months later.

The book’s sharp analysis rather falters when confronted with the personality and highly questionable motives of Donald Trump - which it treats with far too much credulity - but overall it is a useful contribution to the literature chronicling a uniquely awful world leader. The regime did not derive “its strength from the army, government and other institutions found in normal states,” Dagher concludes. “In fact the underpinning of this regime were the family and clan, more than two million Alawaites, the Mukhabarat system, the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and Iran. Tens of thousands of soldiers and officers, a prime minister and other government officials ultimately defected, but all were peripheral to the regime. They were not part of its nerve center.”

Querelle by Jean Genet

An atmoospheric novel about a bisexual sailor, thief and serial killer in the French port city of Brest, this book provides a rich description of Brest and the carnival of the damned that inhabit Georges Querelle’s world.  Brest is “heavy yet luminous...A hard, solid city, built out of gray Breton granite... If Brest ever seems more lighthearted, it is when a feeble sun gilds the facades which are as noble as those of Venice, or when its narrow streets teem with carefree sailors – or, then, even when there is fog and rain.” Through such turns of phrase as describing a thug’s hand, festooned with rings, as “armored rather than ornamented,” Genet displays his ability to bring the denizens of the underworld to life for the reader in original and striking ways.

Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession by Barry Hill

A finely-researched and beautifully-written biography of Australian anthropologist Ted Strehlow, this 800 page book examines the dramatic story of his iconoclastic life along with some very important questions about the role of outsiders in vulnerable communities, how they interact with those communities, who has a right to knowledge and the nature of academic research.

In 2009, I spent several weeks traveling around the Northern Territory of Australia, which forms the basis of the book and much of Strehlow’s work, and it made a deep impression on me, from the intense physical beauty of the place, to the difficult circumstances which many local people lived in to the, to me, at least to me, extremely complex and hard-to-grasp cosmology of spiritual belief and language. 

Strehlow, on the other hand, was not an “outsider” to this region in the sense of many historians or anthropologists. He was born in Hermannsburg, also called Ntaria, and grew up trilingual, the son of a German Lutheran pastor and, in addition to German and English, Strehlow also became fluent in Arranda, the local indigenous language. After spending a decade in Adelaide, more than 1,500 miles to the south, he returned to Central Australia, His father had itemized hundreds of Aranda myths and recounted them by their aboriginal names and sometimes the places to watch the stories were connected. 

Only a few years before Strehlow’s father arrived, a pogrom had been launched against indigenous Australians in nearby Barrow Creek and where the remains of the Kaititya people could be uncovered in and around a locale dolorously named Skull Creek for decades. Press coverage of the violence, often instituted by marauding whites, verged on genocidal, referring to indigenous Australians as “wolves'' and “inhuman monsters'' who were “unfit to live.” In researching the history of this part of Australia, one comes across many Outback versions of Joseph Conrad’s Mister Kurtz. 

Strehlow, on the other hand, treated the indigenous culture with great respect, spending years transcribing Arranda songs and poems from older, initiated men that he feared might be lost and acquiring, in the process, hundreds of ceremonial objects known as tjurunga that the men, he insisted, had passed on to him in formal surrender ceremonies. He witnessed and recorded around 200 sacred ceremonies. 

As Hill writes 

The whole life of the region was, in a sense, conducted according to song, the secrets of which was central to the laws of the culture, so that existence was made to pivot on a stark contradiction: On the one hand a bare, elemental life; on the other one that thrived on an elaborate use of language. The whole region was animated by song that gave almost everything – fauna, flora, much of the typography - meanings. The train was a narrative, and songs, like rain, united the sky with the earth, and day with the stars of the night. The songs were important among the deeds to the land. To sing a song with the transmit proprietorial responsibilities to others. A song serves to locate men and women in totemic terms, and this in turn mapped individuals with regard to birthplace and place of conception. A man or a woman, and the clan to which they belong to, owned the song as they owned the land, rather in the spirit of copyright as it is understood today. They belong to the song and it’s country, as much as the singer’s voice belongs to his or her body.  Everything in the scheme of things was vitally, metaphysically connected. Spirit animated earth: the ground of life was valued as spirit.

 

In 1971, nearly 40 years after he began his initial research, Strehlow published his study of Aranda ceremonial poetry, Songs of Central Australia. Though mocked at the time by publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, it has since become seen as one of the great works of anthropology to emerge from the continent. 

 

Towards the end of the Strehlow’s life the question of ownership of the ceremonial objects he acquired became more complex, with younger indigenous representatives calling for the objects to be returned while Strehlow resisted, saying they had been entrusted to his care. As the book makes clear, Strehlow had strong grounds for distrust of any type of officialdom. 

 

After protracted negotiations that went beyond even Strehlow’s death in 1978, the objects are now housed at the Strehlow Research Centre Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. All in all a bracing biography about a compelling figure that raises many important questions. 


Dubliners by James Joyce

For me, one of the great short story collections of all time and somehow redolent of the fading light and low shadows of autumn, these finely-observed, tender portraits of the working class of Ireland in the early 1900s remain powerful even today.

Clasp by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

The first English-language collection of poems by the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, who had previously written exclusively in Gaelic, this is a volume that alternates between lyrical musings and a sometimes jarring attention to the corporeal world, often in highly musical languages Though many lines concentrate in issues of domesticity, just behind the veil there is a rustling of something more. “I’ve never been so far from home,writes the narrator of the poem Maeve in Chile. “No, I’ve never been so close.” 



Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads

December 21, 2020 

Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads

As Haiti veers from its constitutional path and armed gangs compete for power, its civil society persists in spite of the odds

By Michael Deibert

Newlines Magazine

(Please read original article here

At the end of November, a curious decree was published in Le Moniteur, the official journal of Haiti’s government. The edict announced the creation of a new security service, the Agence nationale d’intelligence (ANI). Answerable only to the president and immune from criminal charges without presidential approval, the ANI’s anonymous agents will be tasked with the “monitoring of individuals and groups liable to resort to violence and to undermine national security and social peace.”

A Caribbean nation of 11 million, sharing the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, Haiti has rarely known a period free of political tumult in its 217-year history. The country was forged in the fires of the world’s only successful slave revolt. Marginalized by outside nations aghast at the thought of a Black republic, bedeviled by internecine political wars and repeated outside meddling (including a 1915 to 1934 military occupation by the United States), this nation of what the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot called “the children of heroes” has not had an easy path.

Few periods, however, have been as tumultuous as the last year, as President Jovenel Moïse, in office since February 2017, has squared off against a fractious opposition that has thrown everything they have at him to drive him from power, without apparent effect.

From Haiti’s mist-shrouded mountains to its lush rice fields to its glistening tropical beaches, warring politicians now battle in a landscape of competing armed groups. The criminality and economic anguish they stalk are far from natural occurrences like the hurricanes that occasionally batter Haiti’s shores; they have been created by powerful people both within and beyond its borders.

Moïse, an agribusinessman known locally as Nèg Bannann (The Banana Man), won the presidency by gaining 55.60% of the vote in a crowded field in a November 2016 contest marked by feeble participation. The opposition’s earlier promise to wait for voters with “machetes and stones in hand” likely did not help turnout. With the vote overseen by an interim president and political rival — former senator Jocelerme Privert — it was the second attempt at holding a presidential ballot after the first attempt was shelved due to violence and allegations of fraud.

Running as the candidate for the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK) developed by former president and carnival singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, Moïse promised an aggressive infrastructure program to help revive Haiti’s economy, still struggling from January 2010’s devastating earthquake.

Despite the construction of miles of roads and the beginnings of an effort to restructure Haiti’s faltering energy grid, the reality has turned out somewhat differently. Moïse has been dogged by allegations of corruption related to his business dealings before becoming president. A 600-page audit of the Venezuelan low-cost oil program known as PetroCaribe claimed that firms linked to Moïse took part in an embezzlement scheme. Since 2018, a civil society movement under the slogan Kot kòb PetroCaribe a? (“Where is the PetroCaribe money?”) has demanded accountability for the funds, an end to corruption, and other government abuses.

Moïse denied links to the scandal and called on the Organization of American States to investigate, while frequently assailing what he charges is the “state capture” of Haiti’s resources by corrupt business elites and their political allies. Earlier this year, a government anti-corruption task force published a report which concluded that, between March 2019 and May 2020 alone, private oil companies operating in Haiti made $94 million in undue profits at the expense of the state.

After all eight members of Haiti’s Conseil électoral provisoire (CEP) resigned last July, Moïse created a new electoral council and unilaterally named its members. Many have been tasked with organizing local and federal elections and overseeing a commission to re-write Haiti’s often-criticized 1987 constitution. The new document is slated to be approved by a plebiscite, a move that left many stunned.

The president’s actions are “totally, wholly, bluntly unlawful,” says Georges Michel, a Haitian historian and constitutional expert. “It is a move towards arbitrary rule and dictatorship.”

Reached for comment, Haiti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Claude Joseph said that the changes were needed, noting — correctly — that presidents have been left to govern by decree several times in recent years as legislative elections failed to occur on time. Joseph went on to say, “President Moïse has been absolutely clear that he will not stand for a second term. These reforms will serve no benefit to him but will pave the way for a functioning democratic government in Haiti.”

In fairness, Moïse’s aberrant actions have been equaled if not exceeded by those of his political opposition, a different breed entirely from his civil society opponents. They are a collection of men — for they are almost all men — who have developed reputations for themselves at home often at odds with how they wish to be perceived abroad.

Before the terms of most of its members expired in January, Haiti’s parliament was regularly unable to reach quorum because its members didn’t show up for work. In May 2019, rather than allow a vote on Moïse’s designate for interim prime minister, a group of opposition senators led by Antonio “Don Kato” Cheramy, a former rapper turned politician, destroyed the meeting room. After Moïse nominated a Ministry of Finance official for the same post four months later, opposition politicians, again led by Don Kato, once more vandalized the parliamentary meeting hall. One of the president’s fiercest critics, the former senator Moïse Jean-Charles, recently demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy — a favorite target of opposition ire — and vowed to “dismantle this political class to make room for a new dynamic carried by young people.” This promise might have sounded more convincing were it not coming from a 53-year-old man who has not had a job outside of politics since the mid-1990s. In late 2019, an opposition-led armed strike forced the country to a standstill for weeks, further wounding an already grievously ill economy and achieving virtually nothing.

Another of Moïse’s many recent decrees seeks to classify protest strategies such as reducing freedom of movement on public roads as “terrorist acts,” punishable by up to 50 years in prison.

With many of their own families living safely abroad, Haiti’s political operators appear to hold fast to Satan’s maxim in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: It is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

As all of this goes on, Haiti’s security situation has disintegrated. In the space of a few days, kidnappers seized a young doctor from the Hôpital de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti, a well-known guitarist from the group Strings, and the wife of the head of the Unité de sécurité générale du palais national (USGPN), the police unit directly responsible for the president’s personal security. Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste newspaper recently ran an account of one kidnapping victim that detailed how kidnappers possessed “heavy weapons, dozens of vehicles and government license plates,” performed reconnaissance on potential targets’ social media accounts and were able to open the phones of their victims without asking for security codes. In August, Monferrier Dorval, head of the Port-au-Prince bar association and a well-known attorney, was slain returning home, one of several such assassinations in recent months.

This landscape is even more dolorous when one pauses to consider that, in just over 25 years, Haiti has been host to the Mission civile internationale en Haïti (MICIVIH), the Mission des Nations unies en Haïti (MINUAH), the U.S.-led “Operation Uphold Democracy” in 1994, and, from 2004 to 2017, the Mission des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), which eventually became the Bureau intégré des Nations unies en Haïti (BINUH), which is presiding over the current implosion.

As the political situation in Haiti has deteriorated, the role of the baz (base) — the armed groups in the country’s most impoverished quarters acting as a kind of netherworld of neighborhood protector, tax collector, muscle for political interests and freelance criminal — has grown to ever more powerful levels.

The baz are descendants of other irregular paramilitary forces in Haitian history — from the zinglin of the mid-1800s rule of Faustin Soulouque to l’armée souffrante of the renegade general Louis-Jean-Jacques Acaau to the Tontons Macoutes of dictator François Duvalier. One can almost pinpoint when the baz, as a specific political modus operandi, overwhelmed Haiti’s democratic sector and began the slow, inexorable poisoning of its political system.

After returning in October 1994 from an exile during which hundreds (perhaps thousands) of his supporters were killed by the army and paramilitaries (some of whose leaders were on the payroll of the CIA), then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first order of business was to disband the military that had overthrown him. He dissolved the military in April 1995 (which was illegal without a constitutional amendment, as the army was still enshrined in Article 263 of the Haitian constitution). With the creation of the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) the following month, many hoped for a more humane face of public security in Haiti.

The PNH faced a rough economic landscape, however. In 1995, as part of an IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment made with U.S. President Bill Clinton’s support, Haiti lowered tariffs on imported rice to 3% from 50%, quickly becoming the world’s fifth-largest importer of U.S. rice. The backbone of the Haitian economy, local rice could not compete with cheaper American imports, putting farmers out of work. Those who fled the countryside to the cities found few jobs waiting for them, as the early-1990s U.S. embargo that helped drive the military regime that had ousted Aristide also wrecked Haiti’s manufacturing base.

At a January 1996 meeting between the PNH and a gang that referred to itself as Lame Wouj (The Red Army) in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a young policewoman named Marie Christine Jeune criticized what she viewed as the president’s attempts to co-opt the nascent police force by suggesting it join forces with pro-government thugs. Two months later, a month after Aristide left office, Jeune was found slain. It was the beginning of a pattern of the killing of police officers who would not turn a blind eye to illegal armed actors that continues to this day.

That same year, Aristide founded the Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family) party. In the years leading up to and beyond Aristide’s 2001 return to office, the party nurtured a network of armed supporters in marginalized communities. The network was referred to as chimere, after a mythical fire-breathing demon. Many of the leaders of these groups in Port-au-Prince had grown up in the orbit of Aristide’s Lafanmi Selavi home for street children. When I was living in Haiti between 2001 and 2004, a number of them became my friends. They would receive a little money for no-show jobs at state industries and, in return, were expected to enthusiastically demonstrate for the president and terrorize his opponents. They were in regular contact with the PNH. Almost none of these young men would make it out of their 20s alive.

Aristide was overthrown in February 2004 after months of massive street protests and an armed rebellion against his rule (a rebellion that began with the Lame Kanibal, a formerly loyal gang in the northern city of Gonaïves). After that, the young gunmen engaged in a brutal war of attrition against police, then under the command of Léon Charles (who would later be named as Haiti’s ambassador to the Organization of American States and was recently re-appointed by Moïse as head of the PNH), that became known as Operation Baghdad. Hundreds would die before some level of stability returned when an unelected interim government was replaced by René Préval, in his second turn at the helm of Haiti’s ship of state. Préval, between his inauguration in May 2006 and Haiti’s apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake, proved that he was Haiti’s wiliest and most able politician.

The only president in Haiti’s history who twice turned power over to a democratically elected successor, Préval – an agronomist by training – represented a figure in whom many sides of Haiti’s stratified nation, from the rich in their villas above Port-au-Prince to those in the slums, felt they had a representative. He managed to bring a measure of tranquility to the divided country, saying that Haiti was like a bottle that must rest on its broad base to be secure. If it rested on its narrow mouth (the presidency and the country’s elite), it would topple over and shatter.

When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, destroying much of the capital city and killing more than 300,000 people, Préval appeared at times paralyzed when faced with the massive task of rebuilding. After a fraught election during which the international community pressured him, and as with his 2006 win, street protests erupted when it looked like the leading candidate might be deprived of victory, Préval (who would die in March 2017) turned the presidency over to Michel Martelly in May 2011. Many among Martelly’s entourage, including some advisers, had either direct or family links to the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1971 until his overthrow in 1986.

Many foreign commentators on Haiti couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that a right-wing populist who had previously performed in drag and a diaper and had once released an album called “100% Kaka” could win a contest for the presidency. But the Haitian sociologist and former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Guy Alexandre, saw things much more clearly. He wrote that Martelly’s popularity was “explained by the frustration of the population and its rejection of Préval, who has not been able to manage the country after the earthquake… [Martelly] is backed by former Duvalierists and the youth of the popular classes for whom he represents a break with the traditional political system.”

A little over a year after his election, Martelly would form the PHTK, whose name — roughly translated as “Bald Headed Haitian Party” — referred to Martelly’s gleaming pate. Corruption and patronage flourished, and the PHTK would enthusiastically embrace the baz model, as had many other political parties as it metastasized throughout Haiti’s body politic.

In recent months, despite the revival of the Haitian army in 2017, two specific armed groups have risen to prominence as the government and its opponents prosecute their struggle for power.

Last year, while the government negotiated with the PNH over the police department’s desire to form a union, a gang calling itself Fantôme 509 (the country code for Haiti) and claiming to be dissident police began appearing at demonstrations. Though certainly dominated by current and former officers, there is some evidence that Fantôme 509 also struck an alliance with a gang operating out of the Village de Dieu slum. Appearing masked and frequently shooting in the air and at vehicles, Fantôme 509 is viewed widely as a wing of the opposition, and the rank-and-file PNH perceives the group’s members as outlaws.

On the opposite side is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a former officer in the PNH’s Unité Départementale pour le Maintien de l’Ordre (UDMO) who went rogue following a November 2017 PNH raid against a gang in the hillside slum of Grand Ravine during which at least two police officers and 10 civilians died. Part of a larger neighborhood called Martissant, Grand Ravine is a known opposition stronghold. About to be arrested amid an investigation of the civilian deaths, Chérizier instead retreated to his home base in the lower Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. He was subsequently linked to a 2018 massacre in the capital’s slum of La Saline that a United Nations report said left at least 26 people dead (a report by the Haitian human rights group Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains, RNDDH, put the death toll at 71) and during which the U.N. alleged involvement by two then-government officials.

Chérizier held a press conference last June, dressed in a suit and carrying a machine gun, during which he announced the formation of the G9 an fanmi e alye, an alliance of armed groups around the city. A month later, G9-allied gunmen held a public demonstration in Port-au-Prince during which police did not intervene. Though Chérizier specifically stated that he was not “pro-government or pro-opposition,” many see the G9 as the government’s bludgeon to clear out potentially troublesome elements from opposition neighborhoods before as-yet-unscheduled elections are held. Speaking on Radio Métropole last month, Moïse said, “I have no connection with these bandits, I do not distribute money or weapons to them to maintain order in their neighborhood.”

On December 10, Cherizier and the two officials — Ministry of Interior functionary Fednel Monchery & former West Department delegate Joseph Pierre Richard Duplan — were sanctioned by the U.S. State Department for their alleged roles in the La Saline killings.

Many veteran observers feel the dynamic in Haiti with the armed groups has begun to shift in recent years, with the politicians no longer holding all the cards.

“Many of the gang leaders are very aware that they’re being used, and they want to start doing things for themselves, especially when it comes to the next elections,” says Louis-Henri Mars, the executive director of Lakou Lapè (“peaceful community” in Creole), a group that promotes non-violence and dialogue. Mars is the grandson of Haitian author Jean Price-Mars, one of the founders of the négritude movement of Black consciousness and has been involved working with the most marginalized communities in the capital for decades. “You’re not going to become mayor if the crew don’t say yes, you’re not going to become deputy.”

Earlier this month, the eminent Haitian jurist & homme politique Gérard Gourgue died at 95. Under the Duvalier dictatorship, he bravely created the Ligue haïtienne des droits humains, and was repeatedly beaten and harassed by the tyrannical security forces. He was briefly a member of the military-civilian junta after Duvalier’s fall in 1986, and his likely victory in 1987 presidential elections prompted the killing of voters in what became known as the Ruelle Vaillant massacre. Still opposed to tyranny into his 70s, Gourgue was a member of a wide-ranging opposition when Aristide began his drift toward dictatorship. He was briefly proclaimed “provisional president” in 2001, leading the school he ran to be attacked by Aristide partisans as students cowered inside.

Gourgue was one of the last of the all-but-vanished generation of democratic activists that I met during my first trips to Haiti in the 1990s, notable for their intellectual brilliance. There was the economist, author, and political militant Gérard Pierre-Charles. There was the former head of the Parti unifié des communistes haïtiens René Théodore. There was the ex-priest turned human rights champion Jean-Claude Bajeux, who had lost most of his family to Duvalierist terror. All have since gone to join to the ancestors

It is not easy to find these bright lights in Haiti’s political firmament anymore, but if one knows where to look, one can still find them in the country at large.

The impoverished Cité Soleil is often characterized as a place of violence, but it is a community where fishermen mend nets by the glittering Caribbean and delicately-dressed schoolchildren skip down dusty streets as residents struggle diligently to better their lives. In such communities, one finds groups like the Sant Kominote Altènatif Ak Lapè and the Konbit Solèy Leve, which have tasked themselves to provide residents with a world-class library, which is already half-built. Further afield, one finds groups like the Asosyasyon Orijinè Granplenn in the northern community of Gros-Morne, which advocates for the interests of Haiti’s long-suffering peasants. In Haiti, even those with the most impetus to give up soldier on, often against extraordinary odds, chèche lavi (looking for life).

In an open letter in Le Nouvelliste published a few months ago, an eminence who even predated Gérard Gourgue’s generation, the 103-year-old author Odette Roy Fombrun, confessed to her compatriots, “I am sad to leave my country in tatters.”

She then went on to implore them to:

Rise to the level of true citizens by agreeing to make personal sacrifices in favor of the country, of political and economic stability, of the return to the constitutional path, and the strengthening of institutions. It is imperative to stop this descent into hell with the humility of each of us to recognize that, alone, not in small, dispersed groups, we can do nothing. …Wisdom and love of country require us to work together.

As they stand, daggers drawn, one hopes that Haiti’s political actors hear her plea.