Haiti

The modern republic's trajectory was shaped above all by the American occupation of 1915 to 1934. That intervention created the institutions the country still lives with: a centralised state anchored in Port-au-Prince, a national police force built from a marine-trained gendarmerie, and an economy opened to foreign ownership of land. It also produced the nationalist reaction, the noiriste claim that Haiti's African inheritance rather than its French one should define the nation, that carried François Duvalier to power in 1957 and legitimated one of the most predatory dictatorships of the Cold War.

The last half-century has been a long argument about whether the Haitian state can be made to serve the people who live in it. The overthrow of the Duvaliers in 1986 produced a constitution of unusual ambition, with decentralisation, a prime minister responsible to parliament, and a permanent electoral council. It has never been allowed to work for long. Two presidents have been overthrown by the army or by armed men, one has been assassinated, and since 2021 no elected president, parliament or mayor has held office. An international police mission authorised in 2023 and reconstituted as the Gang Suppression Force in 2025 is the latest of a long line of foreign deployments.

Haiti matters out of proportion to its size: 11.8 million people, an economy in which remittances and smuggled fuel matter more than the exports that once made the colony rich, and a state whose fiscal foundations were laid by a foreign debt and whose institutions were built by an occupation. Its present disorder is routinely described as though it had no history. The history is the explanation, though not the whole of it.

At a glance

How did the republic begin?

The independence declaration of 1 January 1804 was signed at Gonaïves by the generals of an army that had just defeated Napoleon's expedition. It said nothing about the form of government. Dessalines was made governor-general for life, then emperor in September 1804, and a constitution promulgated in May 1805 gave the state its name, banned foreign ownership of land in perpetuity, declared all citizens legally black, and made the emperor the source of law. The army was the only institution the country possessed: perhaps 20,000 men in demi-brigades, commanded by generals who had risen under Toussaint Louverture and who had changed sides twice in three years.

The new state inherited a ruined economy and a population that had no intention of returning to plantation work. Sugar exports had collapsed; the mills and curing houses of the northern plain had been burned in 1791 and again in the war of 1802–03. Dessalines and his successors tried to hold the plantation system together by decree, binding labourers to estates for a term of years; the labourers resisted, moved into the hills, and squatted on uncultivated ground. This contest — between a state that needed export revenue and a peasantry that wanted subsistence — is the oldest conflict in Haitian politics, and the peasantry largely won it.

Dessalines was assassinated at Pont-Rouge on 17 October 1806 by officers who had helped him win the war. The country then split. Henri Christophe, a former mason and hotel keeper who had commanded the northern division, established the State of Haiti at Cap-Haïtien, and in 1811 had himself crowned King Henri I, with a nobility, a court and a palace at Sans-Souci. Alexandre Pétion, a mulatto officer who had fought in the French army, kept the south as a republic from Port-au-Prince. Christophe drove the northern peasantry hard, built roads and forts, and produced the revenue the republic could not; Pétion broke up the estates and handed small plots to soldiers and cultivators, which bought him popularity and bankrupted his treasury.

The two Haitis were reunited in 1820, when Christophe, paralysed by a stroke and abandoned by his guard, shot himself in October and Jean-Pierre Boyer marched north from Port-au-Prince. Boyer had succeeded Pétion two years earlier, inheriting the presidency for life that Pétion had taken in 1816, and would rule for another twenty-three years. The colour question that had divided the two regimes did not disappear with reunification. A small mulatto elite held most of the offices and most of the export trade; the black majority supplied the soldiers, the labour and the voters. Every subsequent political crisis until the twentieth century was fought through that division, and every faction claimed to speak for the nation as a whole.

The republic of those decades was not a failed copy of a European state. It was a state built to do two things: keep the army paid and keep foreign powers out. Everything else — schools, courts, roads, a civil service — was optional.

What did the French indemnity cost?

In 1825, twenty-one years after independence, France agreed to recognise the republic on terms. In July a squadron of fourteen ships under Baron de Mackau arrived at Port-au-Prince with Charles X's ordinance of 17 April: Haiti would pay 150 million francs in five annual instalments to compensate former colonists for property lost in the revolution, grant French goods a 50 per cent reduction in customs duties, and receive in return "the full independence of their Government". The first instalment fell due on 31 December 1825. It was six times the government's annual revenue. Sugar was already in decline; by 1840 Haiti had ceased to export it altogether, and coffee, grown by peasants and taxed at the point of export, had taken its place.

Boyer accepted, and the consequences ran through the next 122 years. To make the first payment the treasury borrowed 30 million francs from the Paris house of Ternaux Gandolphe, which raised the money by selling bonds at a discount; the state received about 24 million and paid interest on the full sum. In 1826 the remaining 6 million was shipped to France in bags of coin. Haiti defaulted almost immediately. In 1838 France agreed to reduce the outstanding balance, after the first instalments had been paid, to 60 million francs — 90 million in all — payable over thirty years, and the schedule was completed in 1883. That is the date usually given for the end of the indemnity. It is not the end of the debt.

The loans taken to service the indemnity were refinanced repeatedly, and each refinancing cost more than the last. Two large loans from the Crédit Industriel et Commercial in 1874 and 1875 carried commissions and fees of around 40 per cent of the capital. In 1880–81 the same bank obtained the currency-issuance concession and set up the Banque Nationale d'Haïti, which held the government's deposits and charged for every transaction; its Paris shareholders earned returns that in some years exceeded the entire Haitian public works budget. By the late nineteenth century something like 80 per cent of government revenue went to foreign creditors, Germany and the United States among them. The New York Times's 2022 investigation, which put the total transferred at about 112 million francs — roughly $560 million in 2022 money — calculated that the compounding cost to Haiti's development ran from $21 billion to $115 billion.

Recognition brought trade rather than safety. Haiti was not invited to the Congress of Panama in 1826, where the new American republics met without it, and the United States did not recognise it until 1862. The figure of $21 billion is often repeated as though Haiti had paid it. It was the sum Aristide's government demanded from France in 2003 as restitution, and the demand became entangled with the crisis that ended his presidency a year later. In April 2025, on the bicentenary of the ordinance, Emmanuel Macron announced a joint commission to examine the debt; Thomas Piketty put the French obligation at about €30 billion. No payment has followed.

What the indemnity did can be overstated and should not be. Haiti's nineteenth-century poverty had domestic causes too: a narrow tax base, a peasantry that would not produce for export, repeated civil war, and a state that spent much of its revenue on soldiers. But the indemnity determined the shape of the state. It forced Haiti into permanent borrowing, gave foreign banks a claim on the customs houses, and made fiscal sovereignty the central political question of the century. When a Haitian government could not pay, foreign creditors asked their governments to collect; when their governments collected, they acquired a stake in who governed Haiti. The road from the 1825 ordinance to the marines landing at Port-au-Prince in 1915 runs through the customs receipts.

Why did the state fail between 1843 and 1915?

Boyer's fall in 1843 began with a revolt in the south against his attempt to extend his term and his use of the rural code to force labour back onto the land. He abdicated and went into exile in Jamaica. The revolution then produced a series of transient presidents — Charles Rivière-Hérard, who declared himself president for life and lasted fourteen months; Philippe Guerrier; Jean-Louis Pierrot; Jean-Baptiste Riché — until March 1847, when the army and the Senate settled on Faustin Soulouque, a former slave and general who had fought in the revolution. Two years later he had himself proclaimed Emperor Faustin I, with a nobility, a court and an invasion of the Dominican Republic that failed.

Soulouque's empire lasted a decade and was overthrown in 1859 by General Fabre Geffrard, who negotiated a concordat with the Vatican in 1860 and obtained recognition from the United States in 1862, when the secession of the southern states removed the block that had kept Washington from recognising a black republic for fifty-eight years. Geffrard was overthrown in 1867; Sylvain Salnave, his successor, dissolved the assembly, was driven out, caught by Dominican border guards and shot in January 1870. The pattern was set: a president who tried to extend his term, a revolt, a march on the capital, a new president, and a foreign merchant house financing the whole cycle at interest.

After 1908 the system stopped producing even short-lived stability. General Antoine Simon took power in December 1908 and aligned himself with American interests; General Cincinnatus Leconte overthrew him in 1911. From 1911 to 1915 six presidents held office, each killed or driven into exile: Leconte, Tancrède Auguste, Michel Oreste, Oreste Zamor, Davilmar Théodore and Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The instrument of these revolutions was the caco, a peasant fighter from the northern mountains and the Dominican border, enlisted by competing politicians with promises of pay and plunder. The money came from the merchant houses, and by 1910 the most aggressive of them were German. Some 200 German nationals controlled perhaps 80 per cent of Haiti's international commerce, owned the utilities and the railway, and financed successive revolts.

The United States had been watching this since the 1880s, when it began competing for a naval station at Môle-Saint-Nicolas. In 1910–11 the State Department backed a consortium led by the National City Bank of New York to take over the currency concession and create the Banque Nationale de la République d'Haïti, which became the government's sole banker and the custodian of its treasury. In December 1914, after a coup, the bank asked for marines to take charge of the gold reserve; about $500,000 in coin was carried aboard a warship to New York. In July 1915 President Sam, facing a new revolt, had 167 political prisoners, most of them from leading families, shot in the prison at Port-au-Prince. A crowd caught him, dragged him from the French legation and killed him. The following day, 28 July, 330 marines landed at Port-au-Prince.

What did the American occupation change?

The occupation lasted nineteen years. Within six weeks the United States controlled the customs houses, the treasury and the banks; under a treaty of September 1915, an American receiver-general collected the customs, advisers ran the finances, public works and public health, and American officers commanded a new Gendarmerie d'Haïti. The National Assembly elected Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave president in August 1915; a new legislature was dissolved at gunpoint in 1917 when it refused to pass a constitution drafted under the supervision of Franklin Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Smedley Butler, commanding the gendarmerie, closed the chamber.

The constitution of 1918 removed the ban on foreign ownership of land that had been the founding article of Haitian sovereignty, and was approved by a plebiscite of 98,225 votes to 768 in a country where fewer than 5 per cent of the population voted. The marines then built roads by reviving an 1864 law that obliged peasants to work on local roads in lieu of a road tax. The corvée was enforced by armed guards who took men from their homes; Butler testified that it cut the cost of road construction from $51,000 a mile to $205. For the peasants made to dig, the difference between this and slavery was not obvious.

Resistance began almost at once and became a war. The cacos, led from 1918 by Charlemagne Péralte, a former army officer, gathered perhaps 40,000 men at their peak and attacked Port-au-Prince in October 1919. Péralte was killed by a marine patrol that had infiltrated his camp; a photograph of his body was circulated to demoralise his followers. Benoît Batraville took command and was killed in 1920. The Marine Corps reported 2,250 Haitians killed in twenty months of fighting to a Senate committee, and 3,250 to the Secretary of the Navy; Haitian historians have put the figure far higher, and Roger Gaillard estimated at least 15,000 dead across the occupation. Paul Farmer thought the higher figures unsupported by most non-Haitian historians; the lower ones are not counts either.

The occupation's civilian record was just as consequential. Louis Borno, president from 1922 to 1930, governed without a legislature alongside High Commissioner John Russell, balanced the budget, built roads, and introduced sisal as a plantation crop; American companies acquired land for banana, sisal and rubber estates, displacing peasants. Public health campaigns, road building and the gendarmerie's reach extended the state's presence into the countryside for the first time. So did forced labour, censorship, racial segregation and the persecution of Vodou. When marines fired on a peaceful protest at Les Cayes in December 1929, killing between 12 and 22 people, Hoover appointed a commission under William Cameron Forbes. It reported in 1930 that the occupation had failed to bring Haitians into positions of authority and had not understood the country's social problems, and recommended withdrawal. Sténio Vincent was elected president that year; the last marines left in August 1934. American officials kept control of the customs receipts until 1947.

The occupation left a more centralised state and a more divided society. The gendarmerie, renamed the Garde d'Haïti, was a national force reporting to Port-au-Prince, and it made and unmade governments for the next sixty years. American companies had acquired land for plantations. And the occupation produced a nationalist reaction: Jean Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'oncle (1928) and the journal Les Griots, edited by a young physician named François Duvalier, argued that Haiti's future lay in its African inheritance. That argument, noirisme, became the ideology of the Duvalier state.

What did the 1937 massacre do to the island?

The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic was fixed by treaty only in 1936, and for most of its length it was not a line but a zone where Haitian labourers crossed to cut cane, tend cattle and sell in the border markets. Between 1913 and 1931 some 30,000 to 40,000 Haitians went each year to the sugar estates of Oriente Province in Cuba, and comparable numbers moved east into the Dominican Republic. By the mid-1930s perhaps 60,000 Haitian-born people and their descendants lived in the Dominican borderlands.

On 2 October 1937, Rafael Trujillo spoke in Dajabón and told the town that Haitians were stealing cattle and provisions and that he had already begun to remedy the situation. Over the next five days the Dominican army, with civilian collaborators, killed Haitians along the border. Soldiers used machetes and clubs rather than rifles so that the dead could be presented as the work of civilians, and pursued people into the Massacre River. Estimates of the dead run from 14,000 to 40,000; most scholars settle at about 20,000. The story that soldiers made suspects pronounce perejil — parsley — and killed those who could not roll the r in Spanish is universally repeated and may be partly myth: Lauren Derby's research found the shibboleth in few first-hand accounts, and the killings appear to have been organised by military districts rather than decided one victim at a time.

The diplomatic aftermath was squalid. Sténio Vincent negotiated an agreement signed in Washington on 31 January 1938 under which the Dominican Republic paid $750,000, of which $525,000 was delivered — about $30 a victim — and accepted no responsibility, describing the killings as a response to illegal immigration. Corruption in Port-au-Prince meant that survivors received a few cents each. Trujillo used the affair to entrench antihaitianismo as national doctrine; the massacre also ended the Haitian army's brief spell as an apolitical force, after a suspected coup by young Garde officers in December 1937.

The two decades after the massacre were governed by the same narrow elite that had run the country under the occupation, with the army as arbiter. Élie Lescot, president from 1941, suppressed the press and was deposed in January 1946 after students and workers protested the jailing of Marxist journalists. The revolution of 1946 put a black civilian, Dumarsais Estimé, in the National Palace; he raised civil-service pay, expanded schools, taxed income, and proposed that Vodou be treated as a religion. The army removed him in May 1950 when he tried to extend his term, and Paul Magloire won the first direct presidential election that October.

Magloire's six years were the last of the old order. He restored the elite to office and borrowed heavily, and when he tried to stay beyond his term in 1956 a general strike forced him into exile. Three provisional presidents followed before the election of September 1957, which the army steered toward the candidate it thought it could manage: a country doctor who had run a United States-funded anti-yaws campaign and served as minister under Estimé, François Duvalier.

How did the Duvaliers hold power for twenty-nine years?

Duvalier won the election of 22 September 1957 with 679,884 votes to Louis Déjoie's 266,992, in a campaign marked by fraud and intimidation but not invented from nothing. A noiriste intellectual, he presented himself as Estimé's heir. What followed was not a conventional military dictatorship. Duvalier had watched the army remove Estimé, and he set out to make the army incapable of removing him. He purged the officer corps, rotated commanders, built a presidential guard and a militia, and after a coup attempt in July 1958 created the Volunteers for National Security — the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, known as the Tonton Macoutes — a plain-clothes force recruited from the towns and the countryside, paid in licence to extort, and answerable to him alone.

The regime's methods were terror, patronage and the deliberate cultivation of a supernatural reputation. Duvalier had himself portrayed as Baron Samedi, the lwa of death; he spoke in the nasal voice associated with possession and claimed to be an "immaterial being". Vodou was not the mechanism of his power — the Macoutes and the army were — but it gave the terror a cultural vocabulary that Haitians understood and foreign observers did not. The Catholic Church, which had supplied most of the country's schools since the 1860 concordat, was persecuted: priests were expelled, the archbishop deported, the Jesuits banished, and Duvalier excommunicated in 1961. Estimates of the dead run from 30,000 to 60,000; the prison at Fort Dimanche, where opponents were tortured and killed, became the symbol of the regime.

The forms of constitutional government were kept and emptied. A referendum in 1961 extended his term with 1,320,748 votes in favour and none against; on 14 June 1964 another referendum made him president for life with 99.9 per cent, and the ballots were printed with "yes" already marked. He changed the flag from blue and red to black and red to symbolise Africa, revised the Lord's Prayer in his own praise, and named his son successor. When he died on 21 April 1971, Jean-Claude Duvalier, aged 19, became the youngest head of state in the world. The army did not intervene, because the Macoutes and the dynasty's clients were still in place.

Jean-Claude's fifteen years were less murderous and more corrupt. He left government to his mother Simone and a clique of hardline Duvalierists, restored relations with the United States, and presided over an economy that grew for a while on aid, tourism and light assembly — the "Taiwan of the Caribbean" phase, when baseballs, bras and electronic components were assembled for export. The inequality that made the model work was extreme: 24,000 people, perhaps 1 to 2 per cent of the population, owned about 40 per cent of the country's wealth. His marriage in May 1980 to Michèle Bennett, a mulatto divorcée, in a ceremony reported to have cost $2 million, offended the noiriste wing of the regime and the slums alike. In 1982, under American pressure over African swine fever, the government slaughtered the Creole pig population — the savings account of the rural poor — and the countryside never recovered.

Discontent became a movement after Pope John Paul II visited in March 1983 and told an audience at the airport that "things must change in Haiti". Protests began at Gonaïves in October 1985, spread to Cap-Haïtien and Les Cayes, and by January 1986 had become a general uprising. The Reagan administration, which had supported the regime as an anti-communist ally, cut aid and arranged a French aircraft. On 7 February 1986 the Duvaliers flew to France. The dictatorship ended not because an opposition party won an election but because the poor of the provincial towns and the slums came into the streets and the army declined to shoot them.

What did the 1987 constitution promise?

The constitution approved by referendum on 29 March 1987 was written against the Duvalier experience and against the army. It created a prime minister responsible to parliament, a bicameral legislature, a judiciary with its own budget, a permanent electoral council, and a system of elected mayors and departmental assemblies intended to move power out of Port-au-Prince. It made the armed forces subordinate to civil authority and, in a clause that mattered later, provided that the president's term was five years and could not be extended. It remains a serious document, invoked or evaded by Haiti's political class for forty years.

The transition government of General Henri Namphy had no intention of honouring it. The election of 29 November 1987, in which turnout was high, was stopped when soldiers and armed men attacked polling stations and killed voters in Port-au-Prince and the provinces; estimates of the dead range from about 30 to more than 200. The election was cancelled. A new one, in January 1988, was boycotted by almost every candidate and drew a turnout of about 4 per cent; it made Leslie Manigat president, and the army removed him four months later. Namphy took over, then Prosper Avril, who governed from September 1988 until March 1990. In September 1988, at the church of St Jean Bosco in a poor quarter of the capital, armed men with red armbands machine-gunned a congregation during Mass, killed thirteen people and burned the building; the priest was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Salesian who had become the most popular voice of the poor.

The election of 16 December 1990 was the first in Haitian history that observers from the United Nations and the OAS judged free and fair. Turnout was high. Aristide, running for a coalition of parties under the banner of Lavalas — the avalanche — took about 67 per cent of the vote against Marc Bazin, a former World Bank economist backed by Washington, and Roger Lafontant, a former Macoute chief. The result was a genuine popular mandate, won by a liberation-theology priest who had survived at least four assassination attempts and had been expelled from his order in 1988 for mixing politics with the priesthood. On 7 February 1991 he was inaugurated, the first freely elected president in thirty years.

The constitution of 1987 and the election of 1990 together promised something the country had never had: a state whose authority came from a majority of its citizens rather than from the army and the merchant houses. Both were fragile from the start. Aristide had no party organisation capable of governing, no majority in the legislature, and no control over the army he had inherited; the officer corps had watched him take office with the memory of what had happened to Estimé. Seven months later it destroyed the experiment.

Why did democracy not consolidate?

On the night of 29 September 1991 army units mutinied, seized the radio stations, shelled the presidential residence and killed people in the poor neighbourhoods that had voted for Aristide. The death toll that night is disputed — the New York Times initially reported 26 dead, the State Department later estimated 300 to 500, and Amnesty International 1,500 — and further killings followed. Aristide was allowed to leave for Venezuela after the intervention of the French, American and Venezuelan ambassadors. General Raoul Cédras, whom Aristide had promoted to commander-in-chief in June, took power; a civilian front man, Joseph Nérette, was installed as provisional president under article 149 of the constitution.

The response was an embargo that hurt the poor far more than the generals. The OAS imposed sanctions in October 1991, the United Nations followed with an oil and arms embargo, and the economy contracted by perhaps a third. Tens of thousands of Haitians took to boats; the United States Coast Guard interdicted 41,342 in 1991 and 1992 and returned nearly all of them. The Governors Island agreement of July 1993 provided for Aristide's return and the retirement of the high command; the army refused, and a mob on the docks at Port-au-Prince turned back the USS Harlan County in October, a humiliation that convinced Washington that negotiation alone would not work. In July 1994 the Security Council authorised member states to use "all necessary means", and on 19 September about 20,000 American troops landed under Operation Uphold Democracy after a last-minute delegation led by Jimmy Carter persuaded Cédras to leave.

Aristide returned in mid-October 1994 with three years of his term left. His achievements were real: the army was dissolved in April 1995, a civilian police force was created with international training, the Macoutes were disarmed, and in February 1996 he became the first elected Haitian president to hand power to an elected successor, René Préval, who had won 88 per cent of the vote in a Lavalas sweep. The achievements were also brittle. The disbanding of the army removed the only institution capable of coercing the country and replaced it with a police force of a few thousand untrained men; the economy was opened to imports on terms that destroyed domestic rice and poultry; and Aristide's decision to break with Préval in 1996 split Lavalas into rival factions.

The late 1990s were consumed by a deadlock over elections that neither side would concede. In January 1999 Préval dismissed the Chamber of Deputies and most of the Senate after their terms expired and governed by decree for two years. The legislative elections of May 2000, in which Lavalas won almost everything, were disputed because the electoral council had counted only the top four candidates in some Senate races, a technicality that probably did not change the result but which the opposition and the donors used to refuse the outcome. The opposition boycotted the presidential election of November 2000; Aristide won with more than 90 per cent on a turnout the government put at 60 per cent and Washington at 10. Some $500 million in aid was suspended.

The next four years were a slow squeeze. The opposition, grouped in the Convergence Démocratique, demanded Aristide's resignation and refused every compromise; the government used gangs and police against demonstrators; the donors kept the money. In February 2004 an armed movement built from former soldiers and death-squad leaders — Guy Philippe, Louis-Jodel Chamblain — took Gonaïves and then Cap-Haïtien and marched on the capital. On 29 February Aristide left on an American aircraft, with American diplomats aboard, and was flown to the Central African Republic. He called it a kidnapping; Washington said he had resigned, though the letter he signed does not clearly say so. A Caribbean Community statement questioned whether the resignation was voluntary, and a 2022 New York Times investigation found that French and American officials had discussed removing him, in part because of his reparations claim against France.

The 2004 crisis set the pattern that has held ever since. A president is removed by force or pressure; an interim government takes office without a mandate; a foreign force arrives; an election is held under foreign supervision; and the new government lacks the institutions to govern. MINUSTAH arrived in June 2004 with 7,000 troops under Brazilian command and stayed thirteen years. It fought gangs in Cité Soleil, trained a police force, and supervised three elections. It also left behind a cholera epidemic and a record of sexual exploitation, and it never built the institutions that would have made its departure safe. René Préval returned to the presidency in 2006 with 51 per cent of the vote, governed cautiously, and was unlucky: world food prices rose, four storms hit in 2008, and on 12 January 2010 the ground moved.

What did the 2010 earthquake expose?

The earthquake struck at 16:53 on 12 January 2010, with its epicentre near Léogâne, about 25 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, at a depth of 13 kilometres. The presidential palace, the cathedral, the National Assembly, the main prison and the headquarters of MINUSTAH collapsed; the mission's chief, Hédi Annabi, and about 85 other United Nations personnel were killed. The government's estimate of the dead rose to 220,000 and then to more than 316,000. Independent estimates are much lower: a University of Michigan study put the figure at about 160,000 within six weeks, a 2013 study at 137,000, and an unreleased USAID survey at 46,000 to 85,000. Nobody counted the bodies. What is not in doubt is the scale of the destruction: some 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings destroyed or badly damaged, 1.5 million people displaced, and a capital whose already weak institutions had lost their buildings and much of their staff.

The relief effort was the largest in the organisation's history and one of the least effective. Governments and charities pledged about $13 billion; most of it went to foreign contractors and NGOs rather than to Haitian firms or the state, and a year later only a fraction of the rubble had been cleared. Port-au-Prince filled with camps, and the camps became the base from which nongovernmental organisations, not the government, delivered health care, schooling and water. Haitians called the result the "Republic of NGOs": a state that could not tax, hire or build was being asked to coordinate an aid economy larger than its own budget.

Nine months later, in October 2010, cholera appeared in the Artibonite valley, a disease that had not been recorded in Haiti for a century. The strain was South Asian, and epidemiological and genomic work traced it to the base of a Nepalese contingent of MINUSTAH at Mirebalais, whose sewage drained into a tributary of the Artibonite. The United Nations denied responsibility for a year, then accepted it in 2016, when Ban Ki-moon apologised and promised $400 million; by early 2017 about 2 per cent of that had been raised. The epidemic infected some 820,000 people and killed around 9,700 by the end of the decade. Cholera did more than the earthquake to destroy confidence in the international presence, because it was caused by the people who had come to help and then covered up the cause.

The political consequence was a disputed election and a wasted presidency. The first round in November 2010 was marred by fraud; after an OAS recomputation, Michel Martelly, a compas musician, won the runoff in March 2011, built housing and introduced free primary schooling, and was accused of corruption. Parliament was dissolved in 2015 and never properly replaced.

Hurricane Matthew struck the Tiburon Peninsula on 4 October 2016 as a category 4 storm, killing 546 people, displacing 175,000 and causing perhaps $2.8 billion in damage — more than a fifth of GDP — in a region that had barely recovered from the earthquake. The presidential election had already been annulled after the October 2015 first round, and the interim president, Jocelerme Privert, governed for a year while the calendar was rewritten. The election of 20 November 2016 gave Jovenel Moïse, Martelly's chosen successor, 55.6 per cent in the first round on a turnout of about 21 per cent. He was inaugurated on 7 February 2017, on the site of the demolished National Palace, with a mandate that a fifth of the electorate had supplied.

How did the state collapse?

Moïse's presidency began with a corruption scandal and never escaped it. A Senate commission reported in November 2017 that nearly $2 billion from Venezuela's PetroCaribe oil programme had gone missing between 2008 and 2016, under Préval and Martelly, and that companies connected to the president's circle had received contracts. When the government tried to raise fuel prices by up to 51 per cent in July 2018 to satisfy the IMF, the country erupted; the protests that began then did not really stop for three years. They were led by a shifting coalition of opposition parties, student groups and, increasingly, armed men from the slums, and they were met with live ammunition. In 2019 the country was shut down for weeks at a time by roadblocks — the period Haitians call peyi lòk, the locked country.

The political crisis turned on a constitutional technicality with lethal consequences. Moïse argued that his five-year term ran to February 2022 because he had taken office a year late; the opposition argued that the term belonged to the office, not the man, and had begun in February 2016, so that it ended in February 2021. He had been governing by decree since January 2020, when the legislature expired, and in 2021 he proposed a referendum to rewrite the constitution and allow consecutive presidential terms. In February 2021 the opposition named a Supreme Court judge as provisional president; the government arrested 23 people and claimed to have foiled a coup. On 7 July 2021 a group of 28 men, most of them former Colombian soldiers recruited through a Florida security company, entered the president's residence in Pétion-Ville and shot him twelve times. His wife Martine was wounded and flown to Miami.

The murder has been investigated more thoroughly in the United States than in Haiti. American prosecutors have convicted or charged a handful of the mercenaries and financiers; Haitian investigations have indicted a former Supreme Court judge, a former senator, a former government official and, in 2024, the former first lady and the former acting prime minister, Claude Joseph. The motives remain contested — a kidnapping plot that turned into an assassination, a drug-trafficking cover-up, a struggle among oligarchs — and no court has established who ordered it. What is certain is that the state lost the one institution capable of arbitrating the succession, and that the men who replaced Moïse had no constitutional standing at all.

Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon and former UN envoy whom Moïse had appointed two days before his death but never sworn in, became acting prime minister on 20 July with the backing of the "Core Group" of ambassadors — the United States, France, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Germany and the European Union. He promised elections within eighteen months and held none. A month later a second earthquake, of magnitude 7.2, struck the southern peninsula, killing 2,248 people and injuring 12,763; the aid that followed was diverted or blocked by the same armed groups that were now taxing the roads. By 2022 gangs controlled the approaches to Port-au-Prince, the Varreux fuel terminal was blockaded for two months, and Henry asked the United Nations for an armed intervention.

Who rules Haiti now?

The answer since 2021 has been: nobody with a mandate. The Security Council authorised a Multinational Security Support Mission on 2 October 2023, with Kenya as lead nation, but the force was slow to assemble, chronically underfunded, and never much larger than 1,000 people. In February and March 2024 the gang federations combined in an offensive that overran police stations, freed about 4,000 prisoners from the two main prisons, and shut the airport. Henry, travelling to Nairobi to finalise the Kenyan deployment, could not come home. On 11 March he announced he would resign once a transitional council was formed, and on 25 April a nine-member Transitional Presidential Council was sworn in at the National Palace, with gunfire audible outside.

The council was a compromise among parties, civil society and the private sector, with seven voting members, two observers and a rotating chair. It removed the prime minister it had appointed, Garry Conille, in November 2024 and replaced him with the businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé; three of its members were referred for corruption investigation. It dissolved on 7 February 2026 without an election, transferring what remained of executive power to Fils-Aimé, who governs through a council of ministers under a "National Pact for Stability and the Organization of Elections". The first Kenyan police contingent had landed in June 2024; the last left in April 2026. In October 2025 the Security Council replaced the mission with the Gang Suppression Force, authorised at 5,500 personnel; by mid-2026 it was at perhaps a fifth of its strength, with Chadian, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Jamaican, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan contingents arriving in batches.

The security picture is mixed. The UN Panel of Experts reported in September 2026 that operations since December 2025 had halted the gangs' expansion in the capital, but that the gains were fragile, the roads out of Port-au-Prince remained under gang control, and Viv Ansanm had fractured into open war, killing 613 people in Cité Soleil and the Cul-de-Sac plain between March and July. Between October 2025 and April 2026, 3,165 people were killed and 1,551 injured. Displacement reached 1.5 million, about 12 per cent of the population.

Elections have been the test of every transition since 1987, and they have failed again. The electoral council set a first round for 13 December 2026, then postponed it indefinitely on 7 October, citing gang violence and the impossibility of preparing in the occupied parts of the country. Whether a vote held under those conditions could produce a government anyone accepts is the question that has destroyed every previous transition.

The economy has been reorganised around the crisis. Apparel assembly, the one formal sector that survived the 2010s, has shed contracts as factories were shot up or cut off from the port. Remittances, perhaps $4 billion a year from a diaspora of one and a half to two million, keep more households alive than any other flow. Charcoal, contraband fuel, extortion and kidnapping make up a criminal economy worth tens of millions a year in extortion alone; agriculture, which employs about 40 per cent of the workforce, is subsistence farming on eroded hillsides.

The country has been here before, and recovered: the occupation, the Duvalier years and the 2004 collapse were each followed by reconstructions of a sort. What is different is that the state's coercive capacity, its fiscal base and its electoral legitimacy have decayed at once, and that no foreign power is now willing to supply what the state lacks on the scale of 1994 or 2010. The republic declared in 1804 is not in danger of disappearing; the question is whether it can again become a state its citizens have reason to obey.

Common myths about Haiti

Timeline of Haiti

What the map shows next

At 1957 on the map the map shows a country of about three and a half million people, still overwhelmingly rural, with coffee as its principal export and Port-au-Prince a city of perhaps 200,000. It is the year of Duvalier's election: the last moment at which the old order of the army, the merchant houses and the peasantry could have produced a different outcome.

At 1986 on the map the same territory holds perhaps six million people, a capital swollen by migration and a manufacturing sector that had begun to replace coffee in the export accounts. The fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier that February is the point at which the country's politics became a contest between a mobilised majority and an army that no longer wished to rule.

At 2010 on the map the map is drawn a few months after the earthquake, with a million and a half people in camps and the international presence at its height. At 2021 on the map it shows the country at the moment of Moïse's assassination, with the gangs already in control of the roads and no elected institution left below the presidency. Between those two frames is the whole distance between a state that was being rebuilt and one that has ceased to function.