A Desperate Haiti Turns to Erik Prince, Trump Ally, in Fight Against Gangs

New York Times

2 days ago

Erik Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of President Trump, is working with Haiti's government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.
Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, signed a contract to take on the criminal groups that have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory, according to senior Haitian and American government officials and several other security experts familiar with Mr. Prince's work in Haiti.
Haiti's government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Mr. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target.
Security experts said Mr. Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said.
The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs.
American officials said they were aware of Mr. Prince's work with Haiti's government. But the full terms of the Haitian government's arrangement with Mr. Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen people who follow Haiti closely. All but one spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive security matters publicly.
The State Department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti's National Police, said it is not paying Mr. Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Mr. Prince owns other private military entities.
The involvement of civilian contractors like Mr. Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and checkered history in the private security industry, marks a pivotal moment in Haiti. Its crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021, and the government now appears willing to take desperate measures to secure control.
Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters.
Gangs have captured so much territory in recent months that U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.
The situation is dire enough that officials and civilians alike say they are eager for any overseas help, particularly after a $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money.
With Haiti's undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.
Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince.
After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.
Before presidential elections in Ecuador this year, Mr. Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs.
Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Mr. Prince.
A person close to Mr. Prince said he hopes to expand the scope of his work in Haiti to include help with customs, transport, revenue collection and other government services that need to be restored for the country to stabilize. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti's finances are in shambles.
The Haitian prime minister's office and a presidential council, which was formed to run the country until presidential elections can be held, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Mr. Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education during Mr. Trump's first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal 'adviser' to Mr. Trump's first transition to office, a description he denied.
Days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organized a meeting between Mr. Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir V. Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny.
The House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed.
Mr. Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the U.S. military in places like Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.)
In 2011, Mr. Prince helped recruit and train an army of Colombian mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates to use in conflicts around the Middle East. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, The New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States.
A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in Libya, which he denied.
'My name has become click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,' Mr. Prince said in a 2021 interview with The Times. 'And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it's pretty damn sickening.'
Haiti's experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When U.S. forces returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation.
In recent years, military contractors in Haiti have had a more tainted record. Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse.
Rod Joseph, a Haitian American U.S. Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Mr. Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year.
Mr. Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Mr. Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the U.S. government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government.
He said Mr. Prince told him that he planned to send private soldiers from El Salvador to Haiti along with three helicopters to engage in attacks against the gangs.
Mr. Joseph said he was uncomfortable with the idea of contractors working directly with the Haitian government, without any American oversight.
'We should be very worried, because if he's from the U.S. government, at least he can have the semblance of having to answer to Congress,' he said. 'If it's him, his contract, he doesn't owe anybody an explanation.'
'It's just another payday,' he added.
Mr. Prince texted him a few days ago, Mr. Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Mr. Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Mr. Joseph to lead them.
U.S. military contractors doing defense work overseas are required to obtain a license from the State Department, but those licenses are not public record.
Mr. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has traveled overseas in search of new business, said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of 'The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.'
Mr. Prince is viewed skeptically by other members of the private military industry, Mr. McFate said, because of his showy nature and the negative publicity he generates for a security industry that prides itself on a 'sense of professionalism.'
'It's always worth noting where Prince is going, because it's sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,' Mr. McFate said.
But experts stress that Haitians are desperate for solutions — regardless of where they come from.
'The doors are open. All possibilities must be on the table,' Haiti's Minister of Economy and Finance, Alfred Métellus, told Le Nouvelliste, a Haitian newspaper, last month. 'We are looking for all Haitians, all foreigners who have expertise in this field and who want to support us, want to support the police and the army to unblock the situation.'
Mr. Joseph said he worried that outsourcing the work of fighting gangs to private military contractors would not do anything to improve the skills of the Haitian police and military.
'When you do it this way, it's trouble,' he said. 'Every time you parachute knowledge in and parachute out, the locals will always be in need of that knowledge. If you don't have knowledge of security, you will just have a bunch of dead people.'