The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Haiti:
The Poor Fight Misery and Gangs

Feb 3, 2025

The following is excerpted from Combat Ouvrier (Workers’ Combat), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers’ group active on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, issue 1342, January 18, 2025.

Gangs maintain their grip on the capital. Getting around in and out of Port-au-Prince is a perilous exercise, as you have to get past posts manned by gangsters, and national roads, ports and the airport have become virtually inaccessible….

In 2024, more than 5,600 people were killed by gang attacks: 1,000 more than in 2023, according to U.N. figures. These figures are certainly far below reality, as they do not take into account all those people who drown while trying to cross to neighboring islands to escape this oppression.

The number of internally displaced people fleeing the occupation of their neighborhoods now exceeds two million. They have built new refugee camps that are already saturated, with hundreds of thousands of people surviving there in abject conditions, deprived of everything.

The bandits impose their law through terror, ransacking and burning everything in their path. They now have branches everywhere. Their financial resources allow them to do so, but they are also recruiting because of the great poverty that is gaining ground and attracting new fighters to their ranks.

They have been repulsed three times in the neighborhoods they have attacked. The police were helped by the population in some cases. The government and its police were more reactive in protecting the administrations. After all, it was to the heights of the capital that public administrations moved when the administrative center district fell to gangs last year.

The population of working-class neighborhoods, victims of gang and police clashes, has been economically devastated. Port-au-Prince’s industrial park is almost deserted, with a few companies operating sporadically. Bosses call in workers to work for a few days to fill orders, then send them away until the next order comes in. In the neighborhoods, merchants, artisans, electricians, plumbers, bricklayers and others are out of business, construction sites are halted, and thousands of workers are unemployed.

The grip of gangs and this barbarism is neither inevitable nor accidental. It’s the result of a system in which the bourgeoisie rules, exploits the workers and pays its stooges to run the state in order to make ever greater profits.

For working people, for the poor, there is no solution from those in power. The perspective is the same as in the aftermath of the earthquake: the survivors must first rely on themselves, organizing to face and overcome. It is from this state of mind, from the awakening of class consciousness, that the working class and the poor will be able to build their revolutionary party. It’s the only way out. Then this party’s armed workers’ militia will stand up to the gangs and the scum of corrupt politicians and silence them.