Returning to a Changed Port-au-Prince
I lived in Port-au-Prince from 2014 to 2015 and again from 2017 to 2021. Since 2021 I’ve been living in rural areas of Haiti and have just returned to Port-au-Prince in the past couple of weeks. Since I left, the city has changed a lot. Approximately 80 percent of Port-au-Prince is now under the control of gangs and an estimated 400,000 people have been displaced due to violence.
When I lived in Port-au-Prince previously, I used to walk or run for hours. My usual route went past the international airport, past Hugo Chavez Park and almost all the way to Carrefour Aeroport where an impressive graffiti painted on an overpass showed a warrior and proclaimed “kafou rezistans” (neighborhood of resistance). On the way back, I would stop at the park for an ice cream and a chat with the friendly ice cream vendor or grab an egg sandwich from one of the ladies selling sandwiches in the park. It would take a long time to get home because there were so many people to stop and chat with. If I was tired, I knew I could call my friend and taxi driver Rudy who would come to pick me up. I felt incredibly lucky; many foreigners in Haiti live the “compound life” seeing little of the country outside the hotels and restaurants of Petionville and their offices.
The current situation in Haiti and particularly Port-au-Prince has been building for years; it started as a protest movement back in 2018. PetroCaribe was a program launched by the Venezuelan government to sell oil in the region at a reduced rate; funds generated from this program were supposed to be invested in social programs by the Haitian government. The PetroCaribe Challenge was a movement launched by courageous people to challenge the management of these funds following the publication by two reports by the Anti-corruption and Ethics Commission of the Haitian Senate that showed high levels of irregularities in the program. In response, thousands of people demonstrated demanding to know “Kot Kob PetroKaribe?” – “where is the PetroCaribe money?”. When the Haitian government subsequently raised the price of fuel, this anger boiled over into riots.
I remember that first weekend of rage quite clearly. I was with a small group of foreigners who had gone out in the street to buy some food and see for ourselves what was going on. As public transport was paralysed hundreds of people were stranded and trying to walk home. People who were sweaty, stressed, shocked, and covered in dust kept approaching us to apologise saying “We are so sorry. Our country isn’t like this”. Since then, the Haitian government has basically disintegrated. By 2021, the president of Haiti was one of the few remaining elected officials. In August of that year, he was assassinated and since then the overall situation in the country and in Port-au-Prince in particular has degraded massively.
In 2024 it is no longer safe to walk in Port-au-Prince. I’ve ridden past Hugo Chavez Park in the back of a car on a couple of occasions. Hundreds of internally displaced people took shelter there a while ago and the park was subsequently closed. The ice cream man and the sandwich vendors are gone. Rudy was murdered in the escalating violence over two years ago; his vehicle was stolen.
The degradation in security has been slow but steady, and over the past week things have gotten worse again. The acting Prime Minister, who has been the head of government since the assassination of the president, travelled to Kenya to sign an agreement aimed at securing a deployment of Kenyan police officers to help bolster the Haitian police force. The neighbourhood around the airport was one of the last remaining safe areas in Port-au-Prince. Gangs took this opportunity to attack the airport, preventing the PM from returning and damaging several planes and the airport itself, which were hit by bullets. They also attacked the country’s two largest prisons, liberating over 3,000 prisoners. That night I was staying in a location next to the airport that used to be a guesthouse for foreigners and is now providing accommodation to several people who have been displaced, including children. We tried to distract ourselves by watching a movie but we could hear gunshots on either side and no one got much sleep that night. The next morning, I left for a safer area.
The acting PM has been unable to return and is currently somewhere in Puerto Rico. An emergency meeting of the Caribbean community (CARICOM) resulted in the promise of a seven-member presidential transition council and the PM has announced that when this council is officially formed he will resign. Gangs and other high-profile individuals have said they oppose the deal. There is little chance of this deal working even over the short term. It seems like the CARICOM leaders were simply doing what they were told to do; meanwhile Haitian leaders have rarely if ever shown that they are really interested in meeting the needs of their own people. The international fixation on “free and fair” elections is misplaced. Haiti officially became a democracy in 1986; however largely because of external factors their experience with democracy has been terrible. Haitians have never experienced free and fair elections. In the words of another foreigner who has worked in Haiti for a long time: “Democracy has best been understood as moving from knowing who had the guns (Duvalier) to everybody having guns.” The reality is that all people here want is peace and security.
The media regularly refers to Haiti as “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere”. This is not true. Haiti is not poor because of a lack of money. It is a very wealthy country with a lot of poverty and the poverty and instability are because key people and even neighboring countries want it to remain that way. Haiti is a beautiful country with rolling green mountains, gorgeous coastline, and beautiful beaches. Most of it does not look like the images shared in the media. It is very notable that there is a deep contrast between the situation in Port-au-Prince and that in rural areas of Haiti. While the security situation in Port-au-Prince has degraded deeply, life in rural Haiti continues largely at its slow and peaceful pace. Unfortunately, in rural areas there are few to no job or educational opportunities which forces young people to leave their homes for the city.