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
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
Aug 4, 2025
This article is translated from the July 21 issue #1394 of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in Guadeloupe and Martinique, two islands that are French overseas departments in the Caribbean.
Gangs linked to trafficking of drugs and weapons continue to extend beyond Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. They looted the communities around the capital and then seized communities further away. They also have made Haiti a trafficking hub. Police seized more than a ton of cocaine on July 13 on Tortuga Island, off Haiti’s coast.
The population has fled. More than 27,500 people were displaced in a week because of gang attacks, according to the International Organization for Migration. Some displaced people found refuge with host families. The majority ended up in shelter camps which now hold more than 218,000 people. The western department of Port-au-Prince now has more than 85 such camps where there were none last December. For the first time, the number of camps outside Port-au-Prince exceeds those in the capital.
Adding to these displacements are mass deportations of Haitians, mostly from the neighboring Dominican Republic: more than 108,000 people so far, according to the United Nations.
As for government efforts to fight the gangs, the plan of deploying a police brigade to monitor supposedly protected zones has had few results.
Another police unit uses exploding drones against the gangs. A community near the capital was struck by suicide drone attacks during the weekend of July 13. Police claimed to target gang positions there with three days of salvos. Police did not disclose the number of gang members hit. But the damage to homes and small marketplaces was considerable.
Poor people are the main victims, caught between gang bullets and the sporadic police response. Stopping the criminals is a matter of life or death for the masses. But in the absence of a political organization defending their interests, the masses find themselves alone facing the gangs and their accomplices, such as big businessmen and drug traffickers.
The only alternative lies in a self-directed struggle by poor and working people—in organizing around a workers’ party that could lead a collective armed mobilization to put the gangs out of commission.