Haiti:
Against the Gangs’ Dictatorship

Mar 17, 2025

This article is translated from the March issue #325 of La Voix des Travailleurs (Workers’ Voice), the journal of the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (Organisation des Travailleurs Revolutionnaires) active in Haiti.

Armed gangs continue to lay siege to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, looting, burning, and massacring with impunity. But a breach is emerging in the very heart of this chaos. The residents of the Solino neighborhood have been driven out of their homes for nearly six months. The gangs threaten terror on them, while the authorities are inactive and complicit. But now the residents refuse to submit. They are choosing the path of resistance and struggle. They raised their heads and took to the streets twice in a week. They openly defied the gang dictatorship and police repression, and they demanded their legitimate right to return to their neighborhood.

On February 13, they took to the streets and demanded that the cops and foreign troops fulfill their alleged mission to “protect lives and property.” The corrupt and rotten Haitian police allow the bandits to impose their law. The cops even give them weapons, ammunition, and information. As for the “multinational security force,” it is nothing more than a tool of imperialist control, busy ensuring the stability of the interests of the great power countries and the local owning classes.

On February 20, the residents forcefully blocked strategic roads and erected burning barricades, paralyzing traffic. Protesters sent a clear and furious message: they want to return to their neighborhood, not the unsanitary encampments they say are like cattle pens.

Haitian police are faithful to their mission to repress the victims rather than the perpetrators. The cops responded with tear gas. This brutality only fueled protestors’ anger, instead of intimidating them. They threw stones at police vehicles and accused the cops of colluding with the gangs and leaving the population to their fate.

These events went almost unnoticed, but they could be a signal, a starting point. Criminals can only control people by keeping them in fear. When the masses unite and rise up, they can make criminals fear them.

The residents of Solino have overcome their fear. This is a moral victory. Now they realize that no one will come to rescue them and that only the mobilization of thousands of displaced people can break the gangs’ stranglehold.

They understand what the ruling classes are trying to erase from people’s minds: oppression is not opposed by submission and fear, but by organization and collective struggle.

But to achieve its desired results, this movement must spread to all the families of Solino and transform into a profound, conscious, and determined revolt. The more the mobilization grows in scope and intensity, the more it will reach displaced people from other neighborhoods and cities. These revolts could merge in a single outcry: Let’s return to our neighborhoods! That is the only way forward, not sterile negotiations with criminals, and not equally sterile and illusory anticipation of a savior. The organized revolt of the oppressed masses is the only force capable of crushing the barbarity of the gangs—and of overthrowing the system that nourishes gangs.