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HAITI’S POLITICAL IMPASSE  
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Greg Beckett
June 27, 2025
NACLA [[link removed]]

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_ Haiti’s current form of “checkpoint governance” represents a
structural transformation in how politics works in the country. What
defines Haiti now is an impasse—a condition of blockage and
immobility that traps millions in place. _

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In Port-au-Prince today, roadblocks and barricades carve up nearly
every neighborhood. Residents who haven’t already fled
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each morning wondering what dangers they’ll face simply trying to
move through their own city. They swallow their rage at the armed
groups holding the country hostage
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carefully navigating the gang-controlled chokepoints that now define
urban life.

The insecurity stems not just from the gangs, but from the state’s
near-total disappearance as well. Haiti has had no elected national
government for years. Since April 2024, a Transitional Presidential
Council (CPT)—created by international actors to manage the crisis
and shepherd new elections—has held nominal power and been mired in
scandals
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Yet for many residents, the gangs and the CPT are _marasa_—twins,
two faces of the same failed system.

For decades, Haiti has been described as a country at a crossroads.
But crossroads suggest choice, possibility, movement forward. What
defines Haiti now is something different: an impasse—a condition of
blockage and immobility that traps millions in place. This impasse is
both concrete and metaphorical, connecting the physical roadblocks
fragmenting Port-au-Prince with the political deadlock preventing any
resolution to the ongoing crisis. The impasse represents more than
political breakdown
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a transformation in how politics works. Controlling who moves where
has become the main source of political power in Haiti today.

The “Gangsterization” of the Haitian State 

The current stranglehold didn’t emerge overnight. Its roots stretch
back to the post-2010 earthquake reconstruction, when donors, the
state, and local actors all made politics about infrastructure,
promising to build houses, roads, hospitals, and schools. These were
all urgently needed after the earthquake, but the reconstruction
period was defined more by its failures than its successes, including
the introduction of cholera
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Haiti by UN soldiers or the displacement of residents
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their neighborhoods.

This infrastructure politics often served as more of a cover for
resource extraction and outright graft rather than genuine
development. By 2018, growing awareness of corruption in
reconstruction projects—particularly the theft of billions
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for development and reconstruction—sparked massive protests against
the government of then President Jovenel Moïse.

These protests evolved into a movement against what civil society
groups have called the “gangsterization” of the state—the
increasing collusion between officials and armed gangs. As protests
continued through 2019, demonstrators adopted tactics known as _peyi
lòk_ (country lockdown), using strikes, marches, and road blockages
to shut down the capital. The protests were some of the largest
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the country’s history, though they did little to weaken the
international and elite support of Moïse’s government.

President Moïse’s assassination in July 2021 created a
constitutional vacuum that accelerated a transformation of the Haitian
state. With no clear succession process and most elected officials’
terms expired, political authority became increasingly detached from
formal government institutions. The international community’s
backing of Ariel Henry as acting prime minister—despite his
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of electoral mandate or constitutional legitimacy—further gutted
Haiti’s already fragile state institutions.

This period also saw the consolidation of gang power. In the summer of
2020, former police officer Jimmy Chérizier
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known as “Barbecue,” announced the formation of the G9 Family and
Allies—a federation of nine powerful gangs. This marked a shift from
neighborhood-based groups to coordinated entities with national
political ambitions. Gang federations signaled a new phase where armed
groups could effectively challenge both state and international
authority.

By March 2024, the transformation of Haitian political power was
complete. Gangs prevented Prime Minister Henry’s return from Kenya
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where he’d gone to arrange an international policing mission
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Armed gangs demonstrated their ability to dictate terms to what
remained of the government. They showed no interest in taking over the
state but made clear they could decide whether any government would
govern.

Life Under “Chokepoint Governance”

In Martissant, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince where I’ve conducted
research for two decades, immobility has become the defining feature
of daily life. Once a relatively accessible neighborhood connecting
southern regions to the capital, Martissant has become one of the most
contested zones in the metropolitan area. Armed gangs have established
numerous checkpoints along Route Nationale 2, the main road traversing
the neighborhood, effectively controlling movement
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the capital and southern Haiti.  

Roadblocks—_barikad_ in Haitian Creole—have a long history as
tools of protest. But current deployments represent something
fundamentally different: semi-permanent features that mark boundaries
and create zones of control. Major gangs target what logistics experts
call “chokepoints
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locations in the city’s circulation system where movement can be
controlled with minimal resources.

The late 2022 blockade
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the main fuel terminal provides the clearest example. By controlling
access to this single facility that processes most of Haiti’s
imported fuel, gangs paralyzed the entire country for months. The
blockade demonstrated how vulnerable national infrastructure had
become to localized control and ushered in a form of rule that I term
“chokepoint governance”—power that works not by controlling
territory but by controlling the flow of essential goods and people.

For Port-au-Prince residents, navigating this fragmented urban space
takes more than good luck—it requires strategies for moving through
the city that account for gang territories, checkpoint schedules,
personal connections, and real-time information sharing. Many rely on
informal networks to share information about passable routes.
Others develop complex detour systems
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sometimes traveling hours through mountainous terrain
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gang-controlled areas.

The Global Architecture of Immobility

While the impasse manifests most visibly in Port-au-Prince’s blocked
streets, it’s fundamentally shaped by transnational dynamics that
extend far beyond Haiti’s borders. As the late Haitian-American
anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted, Haiti represents “the
longest experiment in neocolonial rule
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The current crisis continues this pattern through new experiments in
political control.

The United States has historically shaped Haiti’s political
landscape through military interventions, economic policies, and
backing favorable political figures. More recently, the United States
influences the situation by controlling what moves in and out of
Haiti, making it easy for weapons to flow
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while blocking people from leaving.

The flow of firearms into Haiti exemplifies this selective
permeability. Despite having no domestic weapons manufacturing, gangs
have acquired sophisticated arms, mostly from the United States.
Meanwhile, the ability for Haitians to emigrate faces increasing
restrictions. The Dominican Republic has kept its border closed to
Haitians
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September 2023 and has launched a mass deportation program
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Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The United States, too,
has continued aggressively deporting Haitians—including migrants who
had previously received parole—despite UN recommendations against
returning people to such an insecure country. The Trump administration
also recently included Haiti
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its list of countries under a travel ban.  

This asymmetrical mobility management—weapons flowing in while
people are prevented from exiting the crisis or are sent back into the
fray—intensifies the experience of mobility
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Haitians now feel. International actors, particularly the United
States, play a decisive role in determining who holds political power.
The support for Ariel Henry after Moïse’s assassination, despite
Henry’s constitutional illegitimacy and possible implication in the
assassination
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exemplifies how external recognition substitutes for internal
democratic processes.

The recent U.S. designation of certain Haitian gangs as terrorist
organizations
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complicates this dynamic. While the move is popular in Haiti, where
residents are weary of living amid gang violence, the designation may
function more as migration management than addressing the roots of the
crisis. As analyst Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research notes, the designation risks creating an effective embargo
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Haiti, since conducting any business in gang-controlled territories,
now including much of Port-au-Prince, could violate U.S.
anti-terrorism laws.

Politics as Survival

The current impasse represents more than a breakdown of
governance—it deepens blockages that have long defined Haitian
politics. In his analysis of Haiti’s history, Michel-Rolph Trouillot
identified a political system blocked in two ways
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peasant majority out of politics entirely, and second, by limiting
political competition to elite fights over state resources.

When a political system is completely blocked, traditional politics is
replaced with rivalries between individuals, parties, and interest
groups. Haiti’s deep social problems, rather than being addressed
through real political engagement, have historically been fought out
through elite competition for control of the state.

The gangsterization of the state, followed by the takeover of much of
the country by the gangs, represents a new version of this old
pattern. But where the old blockages kept political rivalry within
formal state institutions, the new impasse has pushed politics beyond
the state entirely. Politics is no longer about administration or
governance, but about what we might call “life itself”—the daily
work of just trying to survive
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In this context, ordinary Haitians engage in politics not through
voting or protest, but through the constant work of getting by,
around, and through—navigating roadblocks, finding safe routes, and
securing basic necessities. Every trip to the market, every journey to
work, every attempt to access services becomes a political act of
resistance against imposed immobility. This represents a fundamental
shift: politics as navigation rather than participation, politics as
survival rather than representation.

The question facing Haiti is whether these new forms of political
practice can ultimately break through the blockages that created them,
or whether they will simply reproduce patterns of domination in new
forms. The answer lies not with gangs or international actors, but in
the everyday practices of resistance and survival that ordinary
Haitians continue to develop as they navigate an impossible present
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different future.

_GREG BECKETT is associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Western Ontario. He studies Haitian history, culture,
society, and politics. He is the author of There Is No More Haiti:
Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince and co-editor of Trouillot
Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader._

_The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an
independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and
critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military
intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and
media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the
nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from
oppression, injustice, and economic and political subordination._

* Haiti
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* political violence
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* US intervention
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* resistance
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* neo-colonialism
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* Immigration
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