The following is a declaration from Left Voice in the United States, the MTS in Mexico, the LTS in Venezuela, and the OSR in Costa Rica — all part of the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International (FT-CI) — in the face of a new stage of military intervention in Haiti. It is a call for international solidarity with the Haitian people.
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The forces of U.S. imperialism, the United Nations, and ally countries like France are preparing a new colonial military intervention in Haiti called the “Multinational Security Support Mission.” These are the very powers that have brought Haiti to unprecedented levels of political crisis and social chaos, as a result of recurring foreign military occupations, imperialist plunder, and support for local power groups and business elites.
Preparations for this “Multinational Mission” have been ongoing for more than a year. In the last several months, however, the crisis in Haiti has escalated dramatically; as a result, the United States, the countries that make up the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and other allies called an emergency meeting in Jamaica on March 11. At the request of the United States, former de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry was forced to resign after having previously been put in power by the United States following an internationally-organized operation that assassinated Jovenel Moïse on June 7, 2021. The meeting also resolved to form a “presidential transition council” to accelerate the deployment of the planned “Mission.”
The past month has been marked by widespread anti-government protests that have paralyzed Port-au-Prince, Les Cayes, Jérémie, and other cities, demanding Ariel Henry’s resignation; violent clashes between the National Police and protesters have left numerous people injured, and state repression is escalating. The political crisis in Haiti accelerated after Henry announced that he would hold elections in August of 2025, despite the fact that he should have stepped down in February of this year. This, on top of the joint actions of rival armed gangs in Port-au-Prince attacking government buildings and police stations to force Henry to resign, has escalated the violence of what is a dire situation in Haiti.
The illegitimate government of Ariel Henry that was imposed by imperialist forces with the support of the Core Group — an organization created by the UN that effectively oversees all economic and political decisions in Haiti, which is led by the United States and made up of France, the Spanish State, Brazil, Germany, and Canada — has deepened the multi-layered crisis facing Haiti. Poverty is widespread, with nearly half of the population facing acute levels of food insecurity and 1.8 million people of Haiti’s population of 11 million people facing emergency hunger conditions. Sixty percent of the population lives in poverty. Nearly 5 million people cannot access basic goods; meanwhile, inflation remains above 33 percent, and fuel prices have increased as a result of austerity policies implemented at the suggestion of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The military intervention and political interference of imperialist powers, the UN, and the Organization of American States (OAS), are responsible for this humanitarian crisis — devastating levels of hunger, a rapidly deteriorating state and regime, and social chaos that has been marked for years by armed gangs fighting for control of the country. We are faced with the consequences of thirty years of military interventions orchestrated by the United States (just in recent history), which have deepened colonial oppression in Haiti, quelling revolts and resistance from below. These interventions include the 13 years of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) from 2004 to 2017, during which UN “peacekeeping” troops committed atrocious violations of human rights, sexual exploitation, at least 2,000 reported cases of sexual assault against women and minors, as well as the killing of 30,000 Haitians as a result of the introduction of cholera into the country’s most important river in 2010.
Gangs Acting on Behalf of the Political and Economic Elite Against the People
Haiti’s gangs — a legacy of the dictatorship of François Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude, who oversaw the emergence of the paramilitary “tonton macoute” — won ground with the help of Haiti’s economic and political elite. In recent years, they have increasingly acted autonomously, through kidnappings and arms smuggling, with the support of different sectors of Haiti’s elite that depend on them as paramilitary security forces of social containment. These gangs act with the implicit consent of the police, carrying out murders, rapes, and lynchings in order to quell social unrest and rebellion.
Haiti’s elite are the ones who have maintained historic links with organized crime, oftentimes with the complicity of imperialist forces; indeed a great part of the military arsenal that the gangs depend on comes in large part from the United States. Some of these influential figures have positions in the “transitional council” and have well-known ties to the gangs.
In 2023 alone, these gangs have been responsible for the internal displacement of more than 165,000 people and at least 8,400 assassinations, injuries, and kidnappings in Port-au-Prince. The situation for women and children is dire, with unquantifiable instances of sexual assault taking place in regions where the gangs are active; Doctors Without Borders documented at least 1,005 cases of sexual assault in the first half of 2023 in Port-au-Prince. The harassment and brutality of the gangs, coupled with the abuses of the U.S. and UN military forces that purport to defend people from this violence, has deepened Haiti’s humanitarian crisis and led to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country to seek asylum elsewhere.
The supposed control of the gangs and the social crisis serve as an excuse for a new multinational military attack that will repress protests and a developing mass movement willing to fight against the government’s harsh austerity and inadequate social measures. Imperialist forces will not allow the development of a social movement from below against the social catastrophe it has created. Just days before Henry stepped down, there was a severe crackdown on protesters marching to the Canadian embassy to demand Henry’s resignation.
Imperialist interference will result in new levels of catastrophe and a new assault on workers, women, and the poor in Haiti. We must fight to put a stop to the violence against women and children in Haiti. Active international solidarity with Haiti is necessary to combat these crimes against humanity. It is necessary for women, young people, and all the oppressed in Haiti to take the struggle into their own hands, carving an independent path with their own organizations and demands.
Imperialist Interference and Intervention: A Renewed Colonial Attack
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the creation of the presidential transition council, saying that the United States welcomes the plans “to create a broad-based, inclusive, independent presidential college that would, in particular, first, take concrete steps to meet the immediate needs of the Haitian people” and that would “enable the swift deployment of the Multinational Security Support Mission.” Following an emergency meeting in Jamaica, representatives from the United States, France, Canada, CARICOM leaders, UN representatives, and Mexico, among others, determined how to avert the crisis in Haiti and moved towards deploying this new imperialist intervention.
Following an emergency meeting in Jamaica, representatives from the United States, France, Canada, CARICOM leaders, UN representatives, and Mexico, among others, determined how to avert the crisis in Haiti and moved towards deploying the Multinational Security Support Mission. In February, the UN said that five countries — Kenya, Chad, Bangladesh, Barbados, and the Bahamas — had formally pledged troops for the intervention, with Kenya being the largest known contributor with 1,500 troops. Antigua and Barbuda, Suriname, and Belize would also join in. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s opportunist president, Nayib Bukele, is using this crisis to market himself as a restorer of “order” under his punitive anti-gang policy, which would require imperialist funding.
The Brazilian government of Lula, besides having pronounced itself in favor of the intervention, requesting “the international community to urgently adopt concrete measures to support the country, in particular through the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2699 (2023), which creates the Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti (MSS),” is also considering participating in the intervention with logistical support or by training Kenyan troops that will repress the Haitian people. It should be remembered that Brazil was in command of the previous intervention, MINUSTAH, which included several military figures who became members of Bolsonaro’s far-right government just a few years later.
We are facing a more offensive imperialist security policy than in previous years, a plan that is endorsed by the UN to justify more weapons and training and further occupation. These measures are reinforced and fueled by a racist rhetoric against Haiti that is used to legitimize imperialist intervention. These are the forces that promise to “create the security conditions that are necessary to hold free and fair elections, to allow humanitarian assistance to get to people who need it, and to help put Haiti back on a path to economic opportunity and growth.” This is a new chapter in a long history of imperialist interference and oppression by the United States in Haiti, a country that was once the scene of the 1791 Revolution that concluded in the abolition of slavery. Now Canada and France — members of the Core Group that has forced presidents to power and strengthened political factions to act in its interests since 2011 — are also intervening to strengthen imperialist domination in Haiti, preventing the country from making decisions that are not mediated by these imperialist powers and repressing any resistance to the colonial order. Together with the United States, they are increasing military funding, a small price to pay for digging their claws deeper into the region.
Deepening a multinational military intervention in Haiti is inseparable from the geopolitical interests and tensions in the Middle East that are the backdrop of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, nor is it separate from the continuing war in Ukraine and the United States’ imperialist competition with China in Latin America. New imperialist intervention in Haiti in the name of “security” and “humanitarian aid” — alongside the intervention of the IMF and the World Bank — represents a continuation of the Biden administration of Trump-era policies in the region.
France and the United States are primarily responsible for the deep misery affecting Haiti. The imperialist powers made the the first Black republic in the world pay for its independence by crushing the country under an odious, illegitimate, and illegal foreign debt. We fight for the unilateral and unconditional cancellation of the foreign debt and the withdrawal of French and U.S. troops from the Caribbean.
The Haitian people have the right to self-determination in the face of interference by the Core Group, the imperialist countries, and international financial organizations.
Women, Girls, and Migrants amid Racism, Violence, and Misery
Genocide, economic brutality, and gang violence are an inconvenience for U.S. imperialism as the Haitian humanitarian crisis spills across its borders. Haitian migration to the United States has increased in large numbers over the last 14 years, accelerating between 2016 and 2018. The hardening of Biden’s anti-immigrant policy — which has been a continuation of Trump’s — are the epicenter of bipartisan politics heading into the U.S. presidential election. In line with imperialism, Mexico and other Latin American countries are strengthening their borders and laws in an attempt to curb migration.
In the Dominican Republic, racism toward Haitians has been spreading amid classist and nationalist discourse from the ruling elite. The Dominican government has stated on several occasions that it will not under any circumstances take in Haitians displaced by violence. Meanwhile, at the U.S.-Mexico border, immigration authorities encountered Haitians about 53,900 times in 2022 and more than 76,100 times in 2023. About 141,000 people of Haitian origin have requested refuge in Mexico.
In line with the security alliances and anti-immigrant policies between Mexico and the Biden administration, the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has maintained a policy of harassment and dissolution of caravans by agents of the National Migration Institute, the National Guard, the police, and the army. Migrants also face violence from organized crime.
Down with the border wall, stop the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border! Down with the Trump-era anti-immigrant laws that Biden has continued, and the racist and criminalizing discourse against migrants crossing the border!
Stop Imperialist Military Intervention
The deep social, economic, and political crisis that Haiti is going through is not going to be solved with military interventions led by U.S. imperialism, nor from the international organizations at its service like the UN or the OAS. On the contrary, interventions have done nothing more than plunge the Haitian people deeper into misery and chaos and further subjugation by imperialism.
In all the countries of the continent, the working class and popular sectors must raise their voices against imperialist military intervention in Haiti and any military intervention in the framework of the UN and the OAS. If this new intervention takes place, it will only whet the imperialist appetite in the region. For its part, the multi-ethnic U.S. working class can and should support the Haitian people by organizing in the heart of imperialism to repudiate any kind of imperialist interference, just as they are beginning to do in the face of the genocide in Gaza.
At the same time, together with the workers and peoples of Latin America, the U.S. working class should repudiate the Biden administration’s criminal policy towards Haitian migrants who are persecuted and repressed by immigration agents, as well as the racism of which they are victims in Latin America.
Only the working class and the oppressed of Haiti can provide a way out of the catastrophic crisis created by the ruling classes and their corrupt governments that are supported by imperialism. These sectors must take their own destiny into their own hands and reject any kind of military intervention, as well as any occupation force disguised as “peace” or “security” missions.
In the heat of their struggle, the Haitian people must strengthen their own mass organizations by setting up organizations of self-determination, trusting only in their own forces, in the perspective of a government of the workers and the oppressed — the only kind that will be able to give a true and definitive solution to the crisis.
We call on all the organizations that claim to be anti-imperialist and democratic, those that claim to be of the workers’ and socialist left, human rights, social movements, workers, youth, and women who have been championing their demands in the continent, to join forces and categorically reject any kind of military intervention in Haiti.
For the right to self-determination of the Haitian people!
No to imperialist military intervention!
Out with colonial imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean!
Down with the IMF and the World Bank!
For a socialist Haiti within the framework of a Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America and the Caribbean!
