Haiti's de facto president, facing ‘situation of war,' seeks more help from Canada

Globe and Mail

5 days ago

Fritz Alphonse Jean, de facto president of Haiti, is calling from a well-appointed office in the Villa d'Accueil, temporary home of the Haitian government. It is an island of calm in what Mr. Jean calls the country's 'situation of war.'
The machinery of state has been forced to largely relocate from the National Palace, a grand neoclassical building in Port-au-Prince that typically houses the country's leaders, because of regular gunfights between heavily armed gangs and the habitually underpowered police.
Gangs control an estimated 85 per cent of the capital and have thrown Haiti into its worst crisis since the 2010 earthquake, with more than 5,000 people killed in fighting since violence escalated last spring and about 10 per cent of its population internally displaced – including the government itself.
The struggle for power in Haiti has filled Port-au-Prince with dead bodies, displaced people and questions about who can bring peace to a troubled nation
Mr. Jean speaks with remarkable calm and optimism for someone three months into leading the most troubled nation in the Western Hemisphere. As the temporary president of Haiti's transitional presidential council – a body established in April, 2024, with a mandate to prepare the country for elections in 2026 – he sees himself as a wartime chief executive in a conflict the state is slowly starting to win.
'For the past eight months, there have been systematic offensives by the police against gangs, some with more success than others,' he says. 'We have reached the point where the confrontations are happening in a way that's more offensive and with more success.'
Whatever progress the government has made, however, it remains in desperate need of international help. Canada pledged $100-million in 2023 to help train and arm the national police, a commitment Mr. Jean would like his North American ally to double down on.
'Canada has always been an important partner of Haiti,' he says. 'There is an urgent need to reinforce police with armaments and training.'
An economist by trade, he looks forward to working with another former central banker-turned-politician, Mark Carney, on issues around which Haiti and Canada have historically collaborated, such as the control of money laundering.
'I am certain that Mr. Carney is sensitive to the smooth functioning of the financial sector,' Mr. Jean says.
But security is far and away the most important issue facing Haiti's threadbare and unelected government. Its efforts to rid the country of gangs have reached a new level of desperation: The New York Times reported last week that Haiti has hired the notorious U.S. mercenary Erik Prince, whose company Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.
The interim president neither confirmed nor denied the report in an interview with The Globe and Mail last week, but suggested that bringing in outside military contractors was well within his mandate.
'We are in an extremely serious situation in Haiti with forces of order that are not well enough equipped,' Mr. Jean said. 'It's normal that the government should take steps to bring an end to the violence in Haiti.'
The loose network of powerful gangs – whom the U.S. government designated as terrorists in early May – continue to outman and outgun the country's 'forces of order.' A country of nearly 12 million is policed by just about 10,000 officers, along with several hundred Kenyans deployed through a UN-sponsored security mission that has failed to capture significant territory or gang leaders.
When he was sworn in as president of the council in March, Mr. Jean promised a 'war budget' that would train over 3,000 new police officers and soldiers this year, although the government already spends nearly 10 per cent of its roughly $2.5-billion budget on the national police.
Opinion: The plan to contain Haiti's gangs won't be enough
Maintaining an arms race with gangs funded by international drug cartels – who use Haiti as a transshipment point for cocaine and other narcotics – is an uphill battle, Mr. Jean says. Although he has walked the corridors of power in Haiti for decades – first as governor of the central bank between 1998 and 2001, later during a brief stint as prime minister in 2016 – becoming head of the transitional council has been a wake-up call.
'I didn't understand the scope of the influence of transnational crime in the functioning of our economy and country,' he says.
Structural problems facing Haiti – such as a corrupt government that had stopped providing useful services and rent-seeking oligarchs who drained any vitality from the economy – helped give rise to the gangs, and the same problems will remain even if the armed groups are defeated in time for elections in February, 2026.
Even as Mr. Jean promises to focus on security above all else, he is also training his eyes on 'rebuilding the state' in the long run.
More than 80 per cent of Haitians with a university degree live outside the country, after waves of emigration that started during the brutal reign of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier in the 1960s – a 'frightening number,' Mr. Jean says. 'We can't build a country like that.'
Mr. Jean is planning a visit to Montreal soon, during which he will invite members of the city's vibrant Haitian diaspora to return to help rebuild the country.
Of the country's remaining population, more than half is under the age of 25, a form of 'wealth' Mr. Jean acknowledges is 'unexploited' because of generations of underinvestment in education.
This self-described wartime president seems eager to turn the page on an era of bloody conflict and concentrate on making a 'new Haiti' instead, one in which corrupt actors no longer 'take the state hostage.' The country, in his telling, has come to the 'end of the tunnel.'
'Everyone in Port-au-Prince feels that level of insecurity, but now there is a glimmer of hope,' Mr. Jean says. 'We could dissolve completely, and it's a possibility, countries have disappeared from the Earth. But I don't think we're going to disappear.'