Michael Gallagher

In the continuing swirl and roil of violence in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince, Michael Gallagher, an American citizen and head of security for the Haitian tobacco firm Comme Il Faut, was stabbed to death in the company’s offices last week, after business hours on Wednesday, August 19. The police quickly took thirteen people into custody for questioning, and a suspect has been arrested. According to reports in the Miami Herald, the suspect, a Comme Il Faut employee who worked with Gallagher, is believed to have been stealing from the company to the tune of $69,000. At the time of the murder, Gallagher, who had lived in Haiti for 20 years, was on the trail of the money and was preparing to expose the employee. Another person on Gallagher’s team is thought to have worked with the suspect, according to a source close to Gallagher. Gallagher was also believed to have kept a large sum of his own money at the company’s offices. 

Up in the mountains

Three days after Gallagher’s murder, gang members swept through Kenscoff, a pastoral municipality up on the mountainside behind Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 47 people, among them at least five children, and kidnapping 50 more, according to Guardian reports. The larger gangs worked in tandem to commit the massacre and kidnapping, according to police and Kenscoff officials, also burning down at least 25 homes in the area. It’s thought that their goal may be to attract attention, manpower and weaponry away from downtown Port-au-Prince in order to descend on and capture a vulnerable capital, which in any case is already a welter of gang fiefdoms controlling about 70% of the city. So far no one has been arrested in connection with the Kenscoff massacre.

The discrepancy between the speed with which a suspect was arrested in the killing of Mike Gallagher, an American, and the lack of arrests in the killing of nearly 50 Haitians, has been duly noted by Haitians in comments on social media. Of course, during the rise of the gangs in Haiti over the past five years (and more) very few to none of the perpetrators of the killings and kidnappings of more than 10,000 Haitians have been arrested, much less charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. Most are still out on the street, continuing their mad depredations. The plan behind all this, if plan there is, seems to be to make of Haiti the reverse of the Swiss medal, without the snow and the banks and the veneer of law and right, but still a place where any deal can go down with no eyes watching — to turn it, in other words, into a gang-run kleptocracy available for all sorts of criminality, especially drug transshipment, a kleptocracy which effectively it already is. 

Meanwhile, gang violence has forced more than 1.5 million Haitians from their homes and into shelters or the streets. On top of this, the U.S. has begin its unthinkable program of sending back Haitians who’ve been living in the U.S for the past ten to 15 years into Haiti and this unpredictable, unstable, and violent situation on the ground. So far, the deportation flights have been depositing their human cargo in the northern city of Cape Haitian, which is less volatile than Port-au-Prince at the moment. But when the gangs realize that new meat and back accounts are flowing into the north, they will soon make their way up there to terrorize the hapless new arrivals, Trump’s deportees. 

Elections, Haiti’s first in 16 years, are scheduled to be held on December 13. It’s hard to envision free and fair elections with actual voters stepping out to vote, given the circumstances in Haiti. We’ll see who ends up with the more peaceful, freer, and fairer elections this year, Haiti or the U.S.  

In any case, Richard Miguel, an old Haitian friend of mine who has known Mike Gallagher for many years, wanted to say something about the kind of role Mike played in people’s lives in Haiti; 

I find it disturbing, in the wake of my dear friend Mike Gallagher’s violent and unjustifiable murder, that Haitians on social media are focusing right now on his race. Some are commenting that all Americans should die.Some say that the fact that Americans are deporting Haitians from the U.S. means that Americans should be eliminated from Haitian soil, and some point out that after all, Americans are responsible for the state of Haiti today. True or not true, none of that matters to me .
What does matter is that Mike worked very hard here in Haiti and gave all he could to improve conditions for many people, including his employees at Comme Il Faut.
He often told his guards there that they should take advantage of the free English courses available at Comme Il Faut so that they could get a better job in the future. He paid for Spanish lessons for me for a year at more than 300 per month. But it wasn’t what he gave me that was important. I saw the true man; I saw how he was affected when his wife’s niece died of ovarian cancer and he tried to save her but couldn’t. He paid for her funeral. 
Mike paid for my daughter’s school in the Dominican Republic for the past three years.

These people that killed Mike don’t care that they killed a good man who was only trying to do his job as he thought right.
The details of his death remind me of that of Jovenel Moise [the Haitian president assassinated in 2021]. Like Jovenel who was murdered at his official residence less than a year before the end of his term, Mike was killed only few months prior to his retirement from employment.
Mike loved his job and repeatedly told me how well Comme il Faut treated him. Even though  things were rough, with gangs all around the place, Mike didn’t want to abandon the company. He was responsible and even decided it would be best to live ON SITE at the compound in order to better protect the building and its staff.

Mike will be missed terribly and this will affect the well being of at least thirty people who aren’t his immediate family but who depended on Mike for support. He provided generously and without any personal vanity for friends in need, for a wide circle of Haitian acquaintances and their kids, people who don’t have the resources to provide for themselves in the current Haitian economy. 

May the criminals who stabbed him to death get their karma refund and may Mike’s soul rest in eternal peace. A wonderful human being was eliminated.
He wasn’t just an American in Haiti. He was a caring and ethical person.

I hope, if there is some trace of justice left in Haiti, that those responsible will be held accountable.

If not GOD will deal with them eventually.

Mike saved his hard earned money for many, many years in order to have a decent retirement.
Unfortunately that won’t be happening now.
Take care, Mike. I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.
Farewell my brother, my friend. You are a light that will shine on forever.

The secret sauce of the city’s political success? A mix of big money, high society, and socially progressive ideas.

Within a week of each other this past August, two California politicians, both women, took to the television screen for important speeches, one at the Democratic National Convention, one at the Republican. They presented a startling contrast.

Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, in a conservative plum pantsuit, spoke elegantly and probingly for 18 minutes about the problems the country faces. To be sure, her speech was historic—made as it was by a half Black, half South Asian woman running near the top of a national ticket—but its delivery wasn’t especially passionate; it was, in fact, a little flat.

Senator Kamala Harris speaks on the third night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for the vice presidency. [Win McNamee//Getty Images]

In a pre-recorded speech, Kimberly Guilfoyle addresses the 2020 Republican National Convention. [Chip Somodevilla//Getty Images]

Days later Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, adviser to President Trump, and romantic partner of Donald Trump Jr., stood at the podium at the RNC in a skintight Kardashian-style red dress and ranted for six minutes about the evils of the Democratic Party, the grandeur of Trump, Joe Biden’s extreme leftism, and the death of California, her home state, from drug abuse, violent protests, and blackouts. Her speech was many things, including flamboyant and extreme, but it was not boring. (A few weeks later, she was alleged, in a report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, to have committed baroque sexual abuses against staff at Fox that led to her dismissal there. She has denied the allegations.)

What Harris and Guilfoyle had in common, however, was that they were forged in the same crucible, one that has shaped much of American politics in the past half century: San Francisco’s Democratic political machine.

Senator Kamala Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom visit the scene of fire-ravaged property in an unincorporated area of Fresno, California in September 2020. [FREDERIC J. BROWN//Getty Images]

The machine—which operates around a fulcrum of big money, high society, and socially progressive ideas—has molded such Democratic politicians as governors Pat Brown and Jerry Brown (father and son); Willie Brown (former San Francisco mayor, machine boss, and no relation); Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein; former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer; San Francisco mayors Ed Lee and London Breed; and San Francisco mayor, lieutenant governor, and now governor Gavin Newsom (to whom Guilfoyle was married until 2006, before she eventually hitched her wagon to the cause of archconservative Republicanism).

Ronald Reagan outside at his ranch in 1965. [Bill Ray//Getty Images]

Harris and Guilfoyle know each other: Both worked in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, a political launching pad, in the early 2000s. “San Francisco is this little town,” says Miriam Pawel, author of The Browns of California and other books about California politics. “It is so different from everywhere else in [the state], and they all know each other. So many of California’s politicians come out of this—right out of the machine.”

But until now there has never been a Democrat from California on a national ticket, so the San Francisco Democratic Party machine, though enormously influential nationally, has never been represented in such an august position. Every Californian to run for president or vice president has been a Republican, and there have been precious few. Only one native Californian, Richard Nixon, has won the presidency. (Ronald Reagan, another Republican president with serious California cred, having been governor, was born in Illinois.) Nixon is also the only Californian, born or bred, to have won the vice presidency, but his political career was jump-started in Washington and New York—not in-state.

Power Point

We don’t pay much attention to political machines anymore. I do, because I happen to come from a family whose patriarch, my grandfather David T. Wilentz, was the boss of a powerful northern New Jersey Democratic machine, back when they were called “organizations” or “clubs.” Call them what you will, party machines are usually groups of behind-the-scenes second-tier politicians and socially connected people who represent power centers, who oil the often creaky mechanisms of city and state governments, and who urge forward politicians who will further their own and, theoretically at least, society’s betterment.

It hasn’t always worked that way. Machines have often been notoriously corrupt, especially New York’s Tammany Hall under the leadership, from the 1850s through 1877, of the infamous Boss Tweed. Even in the machines’ less brutal incarnations, the words patronage and pressure were integral parts of the lexicon. My grandfather bothered, at one end of the spectrum, to recommend friends’ kids for jobs as toll takers on the New Jersey Turnpike; he also worked, at the other, to shape or browbeat New Jersey congressmen and senators on policy issues dear to the machine and the party.

Kennedy siblings (L-R) Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, John, and Jean, working on John’s Senate campaign in Boston, Massachusetts, September 1952. [Yale Joel//Getty Images]

The Kennedys came out of a similar club in Boston, which was run alternately and inimically by various Irish Americans, including John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and P.J. Kennedy, both grandfathers of President John F. Kennedy, the Boston machine’s greatest creation. (According to political legend, my grandfather helped organize New Jersey to give JFK a victory there in his 1960 presidential bid against Nixon.)

The Kennedys came out of a similar club in Boston, which was run by various Irish Americans. President John F. Kennedy was perhaps the Boston machine’s greatest creation.

From the early 1900s through the 1980s, the American justice system sought to dismantle old-school machines and root out the most egregious instances of cronyism. Tammany fell early on; many others faded away with changing mores and political templates. Still, their latter-day iterations exist as political bases for fund-raising, social climbing, and political agency—especially for the wealthy. San Francisco’s is probably the most visible of these today: It is covered by local media, known to residents of the city, wired into every aspect of municipal political life—and it produces big characters nationally.

“One reason that San Francisco’s political culture produces so many success stories is that it’s a really intensely political community, from its citizens in general to journalists in particular,” says Dan Newman, a San Francisco political consultant and strategist for Governor Newsom. In this small town of 880,000, he says, politicians are recognized on the street and approached as if they were movie stars or famous athletes. “You could hear people on public transportation [in pre-Covid days] talking about a board of supervisors meeting, which they followed like a sport,” Newman says. “Politicians here learn to hit major league pitches before they even take a step out of the city. There’s none of that youthful struggle you often see in other, less seasoned politicians when they step up to the next level in the state or in DC. They have already been through a lot with voters, reporters, complex rivalries, etc. They already know the game.”

President Barack Obama is greeted by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom after stepping off Air Force One in San Francisco in May 2010. [MANDEL NGAN//Getty Images]

For newcomers to the sport, like Silicon Valley moguls, the machine offers entrée to the political fray and influence over their industry’s policy future, while also affording them a route into San Francisco’s social swirl and its media limelight. (Which is one of many reasons they don’t all want to live in Palo Alto.)

The Social Swirl

When I see Harris and Guilfoyle in action, I know that they’ve both had to curry favor with powerful people, especially men, and that they’ve had to work hard for that approval. I know that money, sometimes big money, has played a part in their success and in how they rose to their respective levels and positions. I know, too, about the political game-playing and the quashing of rivals. Like all operatives in a political machine, they have had to struggle to prove their indispensability and to ingratiate themselves. (But training in politics and game-playing isn’t the be-all and end-all, of course. There is also character. The opposing personalities of Harris and Guilfoyle have led one—Harris—almost to the very zenith of the political hierarchy in America, whereas Guilfoyle’s alleged on-the-job behavior at Fox seems to have led to early dismissal from her job as a host on The Five, and now a public airing of professional misconduct.)

Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump, Jr. sit with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump during Christmas Eve dinner at Mar-a-lago in 2019. [Andrew Harnik/AP//Shutterstock]

Many politicians who are San Francisco machine beneficiaries were, unlike Harris, in it from birth or arrived there through old family connections to its society figures—people like Gordon Getty and his wife, the late Ann Getty, of the Getty Oil fortune, as well as other families with deep pockets and a history of political giving.

The Pritzker family, whose fortune originated four generations ago in Chicago, is also a money minter for San Francisco-produced candidates like Harris. As is the Fisher family, which founded the Gap clothing chain. The Fishers are traditionally Republicans, but they support Democratic candidates if they like them. And they like Harris. Dede Wilsey, widow of the real estate developer Alfred Wilsey, is another Republican donor who is not always a party loyalist and supports Harris. (As the Republican Party wanes in California, social connection grows in importance relative to party affiliation.)

The late Ann Getty, wife of Getty Oil executive Gordon Getty, in the living room of her San Francisco home in 1977. [Horst P. Horst//Getty Images]

The fundraising side of the machine is, of course, a formidable engine. Harris began auspiciously enough in 2002, when she convinced real estate developer Mark Buell to manage the money for her very first campaign, for San Francisco District Attorney, against a former mentor of hers, Terence Hallinan, who was the longstanding incumbent. It helped that Harris was good friends with Buell’s stepdaughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, a figure on the youthful social scene whose mother, Susie Tompkins Buell, Buell’s wife, is a founder of North Face and Esprit and also a legendary Democratic giver. Harris and Mark Buell envisioned a finance committee for Harris peopled by youthful socialite women, and those were among the people who helped make Harris into a fast-rising Democratic star.

Like Summer Walker, many of these young heiresses had somehow already become Harris’s friends, including Vanessa Getty, daughter of Ann and Gordon, and Susan Swig, who is from yet another real estate family with a progressive political and philanthropic bent. Other sectors of California’s economy have also supported Harris, most notably Silicon Valley, including the Benioffs of Salesforce (also part of the San Francisco swirl); the Silicon Valley investors Tom and Theresa Preston—Werner (also of San Francisco); Drew Houston of Dropbox (likewise a San Francisco dweller); and Laurene Jobs (who lives in San Francisco).

All in the Family

As integral as social connections and fundraising prowess are to the machine, so are the interconnections among careerists who have passed through San Francisco’s board of supervisors and district attorney’s office, fertile grounds for future California Democratic superstars.

Often, the web of relationships can read like a gothic romance or a telenovela.

Former governor Jerry Brown’s father Pat Brown was San Francisco district attorney, then state attorney general, and then governor. Often this web of relationships can read like a gothic romance or a telenovela. Soon after she graduated from college, Nancy Pelosi, who was born into an important Baltimore Democratic machine family, moved to San Francisco with her husband Paul, a San Franciscan. Her brother-in-law Ron Pelosi, who was then married to Belinda Newsom, Gavin Newsom’s paternal aunt, was on the board of supervisors there. The Pelosi brothers, in other words, were already wired into the motherboard of the machine.

With that connection, Nancy soon began her stunning ascent to the upper reaches of California and national Democratic politics. Gavin Newsom, whose father William (brother of Belinda, the aunt married to Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law) was a state appeals court judge and the administrator of the enormous Getty family trust, rose through the city’s board of supervisors after founding a successful wine business—with the backing of family friend Gordon Getty.

Nancy Pelosi with her husband, Paul Pelosi, on Capitol Hill, 2019. [Zach Gibson//Getty Images]

And long before she made her startling appearance at the RNC this year, Guilfoyle, who had studied law at the University of San Francisco Law School and spent four years as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles—and had also been, briefly, a Victoria’s Secret model—headed back to San Francisco, where her father Tony was a real estate investor and a big political macher known as “the Godfather” in the city’s Democratic Party. Tony Guilfoyle was especially close to Gavin Newsom, and he was a central figure in Newsom’s campaigns for board of supervisors and then for mayor.

In 2001, Kim Guilfoyle and Gavin Newsom, two heirs of San Francisco power, married—to great local hoopla, and even some national attention. A Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot of Gavin and Kimberly, spooning in full evening dress on the carpet in Ann Getty’s gilded, almost Trumpian living room, with its panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, provides a window into the kind of rarefied atmosphere the machine affords its favorite offspring.

Eyes on the Prize

Harris’s rise seems predictable now, but it wasn’t always easy to imagine that she would be accepted and promoted by San Francisco high society and the machine. She was, after all, the daughter of two immigrant academics (one from Jamaica, the other from India, neither a political operative or office holder), a graduate of historically Black Howard University, and originally from Oakland, across the bay, with all that that connotes. She was an outsider, in so many ways. And yet she propelled herself, after graduating from UC Hastings College of the Law, to loftier and loftier professional heights: from prosecutor in the Alameda County district attorney’s office in Oakland (1990); to the San Francisco DA’s office, where she became head of the Career Criminal Division, an office that attracts a lot of media attention (1998); to San Francisco DA (2003); to state attorney general (2010); to United States senator, replacing Barbara Boxer (2016); to presidential candidate (2019); and now to vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket.

Kamala Harris’ rise seems predictable now, but it wasn’t always easy to imagine that she’d be accepted and promoted by San Francisco high society and the machine.

The credibility that others brought to the machine by birth or money, Harris had to earn though charm, intelligence, presentability, and ambition. But the machine in San Francisco is like that.

“It has room to evolve continually and grow and embrace diverse newcomers,” Newman says. “At the progressive forefront of a city like San Francisco, a group like this can continually produce people who truly represent the moment. The big San Francisco families turn up again and again, and there’s this kind of incestuous overlap. The generations are self-consciously progressive; they don’t want to be a retrograde group, but the opposite.”

Harris penetrated this group not only by making friends with wealthy socialites but by doing the necessary jobs: by attending every gala, every cocktail party, every social event she was invited to, and then by being featured frequently at those events on the cover and in the pages of the monthly society gossip paper, the Nob Hill Gazette, as a figure to watch; by serving diligently on every not-for-profit and for-profit board she was appointed to, which early in her career included lucrative but unglamorous positions on the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and on the California Medical Assistance Commission; and by befriending major power figures like the Gettys, the Buells, the Swigs, the Newsoms, and many others.

Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr. in 1998. [CBS Photo Archive//Getty Images]

Her early and important mentor was the long-time state assemblyman and assembly speaker, and then mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, the first Black person to hold that office and a major operator in the San Francisco machine of his day; he is still living. You could say, in fact, that the world of the San Francisco machine today was concocted by Willie Brown. Harris and Brown dated for a time. She was 29 when they first met, and Brown was 60. It was Brown who, presciently recognizing talent and rewarding it, appointed Harris to those two early seats, on the Insurance Appeals Board for $97,000 a year, and then on the Medical Assistance Commission for $72,000 a year. Willie Brown also gave Harris a BMW that became an infamous symbol, among San Francisco gossips, of their complicated ties, political and personal. (The relationship was over by 1995.)

San Francisco Values

When I moved to Los Angeles two decades ago from New York, I looked around and knew I was a foreigner in this supposed never-never land of sun, warmth, and friendliness, and of (on the other hand) noir made fantastically actual (because of the state’s numerous spectacular crimes). But I soon learned that this was a state with systemic problems, like many other states, and I felt comfortable with problems, since I’m originally from New Jersey. Because California is so huge—geographically (the third largest state in the country), demographically (the most populous), and economically (the world’s fifth largest economy, by GDP)—its issues reflected the world’s; and if it found solutions to problems, those resonated beyond its borders.

The seeds of its national importance were sown early: It was the first Western state admitted to the union, in 1850, making the United States a full continental nation by adding the Pacific coast to the Federal map. Many from the East Coast and the Midwest moved to the newly minted state, and also immigrants from the Pacific rim and elsewhere. Today, California is a huge engine of technology, agriculture, and infrastructure, and a harbinger of the demographic change that is altering the nation: In 2000, it became the first large-population state to become majority minority. It is a repository for new ideas and culture, and also, on the downside, a place of enormous income inequality, arguably the worst in the nation: It has the greatest number of people living in poverty of any state (adjusted for cost of living) and the greatest number of resident billionaires.

An aerial view of San Francisco’s first temporary sanctioned tent encampment for the homeless, with marked spots for social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. [Justin Sullivan//Getty Images]

More important than all of this, it is the state that is perhaps most immediately and visibly facing and addressing the challenges of America’s future: climate change, demographic change, and population density. And because it is a behemoth, what it does affects world markets and global behaviors, the greatest example of this, perhaps, being the state’s early and stringent regulation of tailpipe emissions: California’s smog standards are now followed by automakers globally. It was San Francisco politicians who came up with the idea .

The California Candidate

These days, the city continues to push the state to set progressive environmental and social standards in various areas. Governor Newsom just recently issued an executive order that would require all new passenger vehicles sold in California to be zero-emission by 2035. Indeed, if a Venusian were to land on earth and begin reading on Wikipedia about pollution controls or pesticides or a variety of other environmental and social issues, she’d understandably believe that California was one of the globe’s leading progressive nations, with San Francisco as its capital.

In 2018, at a GOP event where she introduced Vice President Mike Pence, Kimberly Guilfoyle told the audience, “I have fully recovered from San Francisco,” which sounded like a requisite disavowal before embarking on the extremist right-wing chapter of her life, and in light of recent news seems like an understatement.

Yet quite apart from whether Biden and Harris win or not, this election may reflect, in part, how America as a whole reacts to the ferment and vitality in Northern California surrounding precisely those progressive ideas and policies that the California Republican party used to call, mockingly and dismissively, “San Francisco values.” Meaning: support of gay marriage, progressive taxation, regulation of industry, pro-environmental policies, pro-labor policies, choice on abortion, marijuana legalization, fair immigration policies, higher minimum wages, etcetera—the whole nine yards of forward-looking thinking in this country.

There are those who “poke fun at squishy California,” says David Ulin, editor of Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, among other books. “But California is a modern society in a state that shouldn’t even exist. Forty million people living at the edge of the continent on unstable ground… but they’re here because of planning, confidence, and will. These are American attributes, and in California we have had them and still have them.”

No matter how the presidential election turns out, “San Francisco values” are not going to disappear from the political culture of contemporary America.

No matter how the presidential election turns out, “San Francisco values” are not going to disappear from the political culture of contemporary America. By picking Harris, a San Francisco powerhouse, as a running mate, Biden has implicitly said many things. Among them: A woman makes a valid president; a child of immigrants is an appropriate president; a second Black president is a fine idea. And his choice also suggests that the political landscape of San Francisco, which has helped build California, will be a rich field from which future national policies can be plucked.

That said, Harris may also have been chosen because, while seeming to rep all those liberal trends by virtue of her political upbringing, she is also a former prosecutor who had held some less than progressive positions on a variety of law-and-order issues.

Senator Kamala Harris speaks during a forum on gun safety in Des Moines, Iowa. [Stephen Maturen//Getty Images]

Translated: she has always been careful to ensure her political future by walking a middle ground. That’s a habit with a machine pol, who will always have his or her eye on the next and more important election.

But one of Harris’s useful attributes is that she doesn’t look like a typical machine product. She seems fresh, different, kind of sparkling. She’s biting and clever, stylish and energetic. But in a sense, too, she’s a great fat man, his cartoonish pot belly straining at the buttons of his business suit, with a lit and smoking cigar hanging from the corners of his mouth, like the old caricatures of Boss Tweed and his friends. Like Boxer, Feinstein, and Pelosi, Harris has already gone beyond the machine, yet for the San Francisco “club,” a victory for her ticket this year would be the greatest success ever.

Amy Wilentz

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir for 2013, among other books. Named a Guggenheim fellow in 2020, she writes frequently on politics and culture in California, is a contributing editor at The Nation magazine, and a professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine.

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People walk by the tribunal set on fire the previous day by armed gangs in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 6, 2024. Haiti’s capital was largely shut down on March 4, as authorities imposed a state of emergency after an attack on a prison freed thousands of inmates. (Clarens Siffroy / AFP via Getty Images)

This past week, CARICOM, the Caribbean trade group, announced a new “consensus” plan to deliver Haiti from the hands of roving gangs and paramilitary groups and into the tender care of democracy and free and fair elections.

In part because of escalating gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, the meeting to put this plan into action was held in Kingston, Jamaica, after talks that included the leaders of the CARICOM states; numerous Haitian stakeholders; US Secretary of State Antony Blinken; the State Department’s head of Western Hemisphere affairs, Brian Nichols; Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; and other foreign diplomats. As part of the plan, a seven-member transitional presidential council, representing seven Haitian stakeholder groups, will be charged with naming a new interim prime minister.

Shortly after the CARICOM announcement, Haiti’s much-reviled de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, subject of mass demonstrations in Haiti this past year calling for his ouster, promised to step aside as soon as the plan was instituted and an interim prime minister had been named. Henry spoke in solemn presidential tones from an undisclosed location in Puerto Rico, where he had made a surprise landing on March 5 after his plane, a private jet, failed to find a welcoming gate anywhere on the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. (Henry was returning home from Kenya, where he’d worked on a long-standing but troubled UN/US plan for a 1,000-officer Kenyan police force to help Haiti reestablish order.)

As one Haitian friend said to me, “How do you step aside when you’re already in Puerto Rico?” Henry’s speech was widely seen as effectively his resignation. The Kenyans have now put the multinational intervention plan on hold until a new interim prime minister is selected.

You should pity the new prime minister—whoever that person may turn out to be. It won’t be fun to preside over the wreckage that Henry leaves behind. In the past two weeks, the Haitian National Penitentiary and another large prison were emptied by the gangs and the University Hospital of Haiti was closed down, while the US Embassy and missions from several other countries, as well as the World Bank, airlifted their remaining staffs off the island, and the gangs fired on and shut down the seaport of Port-au-Prince and the international and domestic airports. Beheadings and street assassinations have continued. In response perhaps to the impending CARICOM announcement, some of the largest gangs have been joining forces and trying to curry favor with the population by releasing kidnap victims and apologizing vaguely for “collateral damage.”

As is often the case in Haitian political disputes, the battles become more intense the less valuable the prize. Henry would probably have much to say about the personal value of sitting at the top of the Haitian powder keg, especially in the next phase—where every political step taken will be momentous and closely scrutinized but is unlikely to bestow the tangible financial perks that customarily accrue to political power in Haiti, whether through corruption or other means.

It’s worth noting that the CARICOM plan is a nonstarter in the opinion of many Haitians—including even some of those who have been accepted as part of the transitional council. Like many rescue plans the international community has been promoting since the assassination of president Jovenel Moise on July 7, 2021, it has a kind of immediate planned obsolescence built in.

Sitting around the CARICOM roundtable—for as long as it lasts—will be members of groups who not only mistrust and dislike one another but who have all been jockeying for power since even before the Moise assassination. It would take a miracle—or a cataclysm—for them to come to any mutual understanding (one likely candidate for cataclysm is the gang warfare against the state, currently under way). The setup seems less like a plausible plan than a device designed to prove that Haitians cannot come to a democratic agreement—even with Grandpa Sam herding them to the table and Barbecue (the nom de crime of gang leader Jimmy Chérizier) at the door.

The original seven groups participating included five associated with political figures, including former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Henry, as well as representatives from the Montana Accord (a progressive grassroots coalition) and the Haitian private sector. This was already a fractious assemblage, to put it mildly. One group has already left the table because its members are supporting declared presidential aspirant Guy Philippe, a former Haitian senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate who recently served seven years in a US prison for money laundering for drug traffickers.

Philippe’s story is complicated—a macédoine of political ideologies, folk appeal, shifting alliances, and criminal and political activities. In November, the United States quietly deported him into the confused and violent Haitian political scene, and he immediately began amassing his own paramilitary force and proposing himself as Haiti’s next leader. Unlike Henry—an icy but dignified-seeming 74-year-old who is a neurosurgeon by profession—Philippe is youthful, energetic, and outspoken, and seems to be thought of, especially by young people, as the kind of courageous patriot who stands up to the establishment, like the hero of a narcocorrido. But Philippe’s first claim to fame was helping lead the second coup against President Aristide—a popular leader of an earlier generation.

In any case, the rules of the CARICOM agreement explicitly forbid participation on the council by anyone who has been charged with or convicted of crimes. They also bar a future presidential candidacy for any participant. So Philippe’s supporters were out on two counts, and they have walked away from the council. Philippe rejected the CARICOM solution the morning after it was announced, and a coalition of religious groups stepped up to replace his supporters as one of the seven member groups.

Rather than the beginning of a real rescue, what we’re seeing now from Kingston is the endgame of the failed international plan for Haiti, which has been undermined both by outsiders’ continuing manipulation of Haitian actors and by the international community’s fear of working too visibly alongside a nontraditional Haitian solution that might fail—to say nothing of endless infighting among members of the Haitian political class.

Over the past 30 months, against all advice, it has seemed simpler to the Biden administration to stick with Henry than to encourage the members of, say, the Montana accord—who at least had the distinction of having worked for years to cobble together a large group of grassroots organizations from around the country.

The US had many chances during that time to leave Henry behind and to support inclusive interim government proposals from the Haitian grassroots—but it chose not to. Thus when the gangs threatened civil war if Henry did not step aside, and then he finally did step aside, it was the gangs who took credit for ridding the country of a despised and illegitimate prime minister. Because they effectively were the ones who got it to happen, while the US and friends fiddled.

The CARICOM plan has been a long time gestating, but the international community, as led by the United States, still balks at trying anything novel. Both the US and the UN—who each have an ongoing physical presence in Haiti—seem incapable of imagining new ways for Haiti to move forward. Sometimes it seems that Haiti’s problems can be attributed not—as is usually assumed, at least in the high ranks of the State Department—to the corruption or incapacity of Haitians but to the psycho-political mania of the US, which just can’t seem to let go of the idea that the world’s first Black republic is not equipped to govern itself and must never be allowed to do so. But there are some grounds to hope that this latest version of the international plan for Haiti can work—if only because the pressure from the current explosive and dangerous conflagration on the ground in Port-au-Prince makes it seem like a last chance. Perhaps against their better judgement, groups that might wish to leave the table have not. One item in the CARICOM plan that is particularly galling to the member groups is a requirement to support the Kenyan police intervention, which goes against Haitians’ fierce devotion to their country’s sovereignty, as well as against the political necessity, in this case, to demonstrate that devotion publicly. Many of them are also irked by Henry’s non-resignation resignation. One Haitian whose group is part of the council told me on Tuesday, “Not good. We are probably out.” But two days later, their group was still at the table. We’ll see how long that lasts.

(From The Nation: Haiti’s Hour of Deliverance or Despair)

I was having sushi on Wednesday night in Los Angeles, sitting outdoors. All day long I’d been reading about the Hamas attacks in Israel and the Israeli bombings in Gaza. Now, sushi. What a disconnect. At the table next to ours was a young family we didn’t know. Their 14-month-old daughter, Birdie, was sitting in a restaurant high chair taking in the scene. This Birdie was a very alert child with wispy brown hair on a round head and intelligent, curious hazel eyes. She used her neck like a periscope so that she could see the world from every angle as she picked crispy bits off the tops of her mother’s sushi roll.

While I was eating my yellowtail, and Birdie munched and watched, I thought: Now, how much rage, anger, nihilism, and dehumanization would it take for a person to shoot Birdie in the head? Instead, you’d dash through flames to her cribside, grab Birdie up, and rush out of the burning house with the baby in your arms to the cheers of your fellow men and women.

Below Birdie’s table was the new family dog, Fritz, a Cavalier spaniel. Fritz was just the kind of dog I’d read about that morning, in Amira Hass’s transcription of a phone call she’d had with a woman in Gaza City during the bombing, published in Haaretz. Neighbors’ families had gathered in the one remaining house still standing in the zone as nearby apartment buildings crumbled beneath the bombs, and this one little dog lived in the house with all the people, now, everyone with hardly any remaining water and not much food and dwindling medicines. Like the people, the dog was terrified of the bombings, and he hadn’t eaten in days. His owner was carrying him in her arms all the time because she didn’t want to risk abandoning him there if they all had to evacuate in a rush. Birdie’s Fritz.

Then I turned my attention to myself. There I sat, now eating blue fin tuna. For a lifetime, I’ve paid taxes to the US government, and some of that money, in some way, has gone to pay for the bombs currently being dropped on the little dog and everyone else in his neighborhood, and on all of Gaza. Every four hours, the bombs fall, as if those brief intermissions were some kind of humanitarian kindness. The president of my country has promised Israel our unconditional support, with my money.

I’d also lived in Israel for four years as a journalist and young mother at the time when representatives of the two sides participating in all of today’s killing were involved in a quaint effort called the peace process. I knew what it was to fear a terrorist attack and to worry about my children’s security, and I also knew the strange ability of Israelis to simply forget about the Occupation whenever possible, and live as if Tel Aviv were Miami.

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Famously, this translates as “they make a desolation and they call it peace.” We used to quote this bit of compact eloquence by the Roman historian Tacitus during the Americans’ scorched-earth campaigns in Vietnam. It was also used to describe the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Tacitus himself was writing about the behavior of the Roman Empire.) The quote has come up again many times when the Israelis have bombed Gaza. But this bombing, and the attack that provoked it, are different: Now they make a desolation, and they don’t even bother to call it peace. They call it annihilation. You can’t demand the evacuation of 1.1 million people in 24 hours, in a place with no exit, and call it peace. But that’s what Israel called for in advance of a possible ground invasion in Gaza. Peace is no longer a goal on either side.

Describing the siege now being launched against Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “No power, no food, no gas.” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said that the country’s impending attacks on Gaza would be unprecedented in their violence, and that’s saying something. When the IDF is finished, Hagari said, Gaza “will be something else.” A desolation. We see it already in photograph after photograph of gray craters and rubble.

The anger, revulsion, and indignation of Israel is wholly understandable, after what Hamas’s militants did in the kibbutzim near Gaza and at the Supernova rave. But the inability of Israel’s leaders to respond with any sign of balance, sobriety, or maturity is more than disturbing. It’s criminal. And it’s dangerous. Its precedent, of course, is George W. Bush’s disproportionate and incorrectly targeted military response to the attacks of September 11.

And it was not always thus. During the peace process, when I lived in Jerusalem, it was not rare to hear a bomb go off and discover that dozens of people, usually all Israelis, had been killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber on a bus, or in a pizza shop, or in a market. Israeli forces then went after associates and masterminds, and probably also picked up a lot of people who had little to do with the particular situation. They razed the homes of the families of the killers. But they didn’t bomb Gaza or the West Bank, where many of the bombers lived. And thus, in spite of the acts of militants, a semblance, at least, of a conversation could continue between Palestinians and Israelis.

Now, it’s different. Why? In part because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, flummoxed by huge and regular protests against him and under continuing indictment, was asleep at the wheel of Israel’s intelligence and military when Hamas broke holes in the barriers surrounding all of Gaza and moved into Israeli territory.

Netanyahu is pounding Gaza into the ground to show that—although he has proven an unbelievably negligent steward of Israeli security—he sure can drop bombs on Palestinian civilians. It’s almost as if he’s been revived and invigorated by the Hamas attacks. As Alon Pinkas wrote in Haaretz on Friday, “Netanyahu is on brand: no responsibility, no accountability, no remorse.” Pinkas is talking here about the prime minister’s responsibility for the security of Israel, but he might equally apply this to Netanyahu’s responsibility toward humanity in Gaza.

According to the Netanyahu mindset, there can be no Israeli villains where the Palestinians are concerned. I once heard an Israeli mother express this very well after a soldier was killed in a suicide bombing. “There is nothing more innocent,” she said, “than an Israeli soldier.” For Hamas, on the other hand, even the foulest deed committed against Israeli civilians is a cause for celebration, as we saw last week, because for Hamas, there is no possibility of an Israeli victim. Even a kibbutz baby is an oppressor. Equally for Bibi and his cohort, every Palestinian baby is a future terrorist. On both sides, it seems, the life of a child who is born into the opposing “nation” is not valuable. It’s not just that Birdies don’t matter—they are justifiable targets. This week, both sides have abundantly proven this.

It’s clear that the immediate results of Hamas’s rampage have not been positive for the Palestinians. Israel of course is not cowed, and thousands of Palestinians, especially children—who make up more than half of the Gaza population—will die in the coming days. However, in the long run, Israel’s extreme and (even in response to such a horrific inciting incident) disproportionate response may finally discredit it with its Western supporters, may finally shame them. Already, Biden has cautioned Israel to “operate within the rules of war…the rules of war…and there are rules of war.” Not exactly a full-throated warning, but something. For the moment, though, Gazan civilians continue to die.

Meanwhile, back in LA, the sun is setting. Birdie’s mother extricates the baby from her high chair, straightens the ruffles at the hem of her daughter’s little brown sweater, and gives the dog’s leash to Birdie’s father. And off they go.

(From The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/haiti-kidnappings-gang/)

Here are the rules from the US Embassy for being president of Haiti, or just de facto Prime Minister (maybe you’d like the job?):

1. Don’t interfere with Haitian business people who are old friends of the American Embassy, no matter what corruption they’re into: customs, ports, energy, protection, banking, etc. They are our old friends.
2. Understand that you are president, but the business people run Haiti, as they wish, as we wish. We support them, even if they might plausibly have been involved in your death.
3. You too may steal and let your friends steal. You too may assassinate and let your friends assassinate. Massacre likewise. Please try to do it quietly, but frankly as long as you obey rule 1, we don’t care. We will never stop you. We don’t care if you have millions of dollars from unknown sources stowed away in cash in your house, as Moise reportedly did when he was killed.
4. If you need gangs to run the country because you’ve destroyed all democratic institutions and all law enforcement through attrition, firings, and corruption, okay. We don’t really care what they do. (however, see rule 9)
5. Do not worry about the Haitian people. They are long-suffering, philosophical, fatalistic. Resilient! They are proud and uncomplaining and they know how to make a buck a day in a failed economy. They can put up with your neglect. If they die of COVID because you wouldn’t and couldn’t provide vaccinations… Don’t worry. Also: They won’t starve and if they do… we don’t care.
6. BUT don’t let them leave the country. We’ll help you stop them. If you let them leave, we will send them back.
7. Never think we respect you or will protect you. We don’t, we won’t — but do what we say or you’re out. You are not independent. You are not the leader of a sovereign nation. Don’t kid yourself.
8. Remember: Only some Black lives matter. Black American lives.
9. Thus: Never let the gangs kidnap white Americans. Never.
10. Never admit that these are our rules for you.

(excerpted from The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/haiti-kidnappings-gang/)

from Reuters, video still

Oh, mesi, Bon Dye, one can imagine Ariel Henry, the interim Prime Minister of Haiti, saying this morning. Thank you, Lord… not because Henry likes earthquakes or doesn’t care about the people of his country but because a 7.2 earthquake just off shore—with hundreds of buildings down, and more than 700 counted dead so far and doubtless several thousand more to come, and roads impassable, and a possible tsunami rising, and a tropical storm on the way to create mudslides and more destruction and death—is easier to deal with than the investigation of the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise. The quake also struck on an important day for Haitians: today, August 14, which is the day when a legendary Vaudou ceremony was held at Bois Cayman in 1791, inaugurating Haiti’s world-changing revolution against France. Demonstrations against Henry’s government were planned for today. Cancelled. More for Henry to be thankful for.

Dealing with the limited Haitian judicial system in a highly politicized assassination is difficult and dangerous, and the assassination investigation already shows signs of a probe that will be interminable and probably fruitless.

On the other hand, Haitian governments know how to deal with earthquakes: They invite the international community in.

Not much more that they can do: you can see it all online today. They can pick up rubble with their bare hands, and they are doing that and rescuing people. They can bring the injured to local clinics that haven’t fallen down, and they are doing that. They can give them first aid themselves, and they’re doing that, using the water in their personal water bottles to wash wounds, among other acts of generosity and personal kindness. They can run from the possible tsunami toward the hills, and they’re doing that.

But the kind of resources that, say, Western European nations have for dealing with natural disasters (the stuff we saw in Germany during their floods, for example) Haitians don’t have, in large part because their state has been stolen from them by nefarious and manipulative businessmen, about ten to twenty of them in this era, who wheel and deal and steal, have taken over almost every important sector of the economy, and have convinced the international community that they are critical to Haiti’s development, when in fact they are among the biggest roadblocks that stand in the way.

Almost all of Haiti’s helicopters, for example, are privately owned by people in this group, and there’s not much money in the national coffer to pay the private sector for the emergency use of these things, the treasury having been massively looted during the previous two administrations of Presidents Michel Martelly and his protegé, the late President Moise. Of course, some of the members of this business mafya, as they are known in Haiti, will come through during an emergency, presenting themselves as patriots and offering things for free. But every favor in Haiti is paid forward down the line.

Another problem for Haitians trying to help each other during the earthquake’s aftermath are the gangs that have taken control of the southern exit of the capital and who thus block all access to the country’s biggest hospitals and best services. Today an ambulance carrying eleven victims was stopped by a gang and turned away from the southern entrance to Port-au-Prince in Martissant, which has been run by gangs for the past two months. Its passengers were held for ransom. Meanwhile major international media outlets had to rent helicopters to avoid the gangs and get out to where the damage is worst.

These street gangs are the leftovers of the Martelly/Moise era, and have been underwritten and armed by members of the mafya and their government cronies; they’re an essential part of the mafya’s business plan.

Soon, the U.S. will be back down in Haiti with a relief and recovery effort, along with Canada and no doubt others, same cast as after the even crueler earthquake of 2010, which struck at a shallower depth under the overcrowded, under-constructed capital of Port-au-Prince and killed an estimated 200,000 plus. This time relief and reconstruction will be run by Samantha Power, administrator of USAID under Biden. Last time it was Bill Clinton who ran the huge American response, under Obama, during which millions of dollars went unaccounted for and Haitians didn’t get much relief. Clinton along with his wife, who was then secretary of state, set the stage for all that has followed in Haiti: they helped certify the questionable elections of both post-earthquake presidents and thus allowed the rise of the corrupt and negligent Martelly-Moise administrations, and their criminal supporters… and the consequent ascension of the angry young shantytown gangs who now control the streets and highways of Haiti.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry

This morning, President Biden said, “I have authorized an immediate US response and named USAID Administrator Samantha Power as the senior US official to coordinate this effort.” We like to believe that Biden at least discussed this with Henry first, but…  We do know that Power had a good conversation with the Prime Minister after Biden’s announcement.

In any case, we can only hope and pray that Power does a better job than the Clinton duo. The last earthquake came at the end of the two-decade, on-and-off relay of the presidency between the progressive Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his protege René Préval. The questionable 2011 election of Martelly, a hardline right-winger, signaled to Haitians that the era of trying (though perhaps not achieving) real democracy had come to an end, and that the international community was once again willing to put its considerable weight behind Haitian politicians who seemed to have as their primary goal a kind of authoritarian pro-business stability, even if voters didn’t much like them. In the end, during the Martelly/Moise regnum, stability was nowhere on the agenda—no measures were taken to achieve it.

Biden and Power

Perhaps this earthquake will lead to a similar and more profound (reverse) changing of the guard. (Hands clasped together in fervent hope…) For the moment though, the Moise assassination has left the same element in charge of Haiti who were in charge when Moise was alive. That single chess piece has been eliminated, but the rest of the team is still in place. Indeed, the earthquake seems to have offered Prime Minister Henry a backdoor to a new U.S. military intervention in Haiti, which is something that was proposed immediately after he took office, with US benediction, in early July. That proposal was rejected by Haitian civil society, and Biden did not warm to it, but with the earthquake, things have changed. Steeples are fallen in the roads, hotels pancaked, schools destroyed… and perhaps Haitian sovereignty, as well.

Anyway, now Henry can work with Power to help Haitians cope with the earthquake, while possibly turning away from the supremely difficult task of naming, arresting, and trying the perpetrators of the Moise assassination. The earthquake is virtually a gift from God for him. Politically, bringing the assassins to justice is almost an impossibility for Henry, who was part and parcel of the governmental apparatus surrounding the late president, and—as Prime Minister—represents in a way the culmination and the continuation of Moise’s rule, his appointment to that position having been Moise’s last act in office, very shortly before Moise was killed.  Henry would be risking… a lot …. if he actually were to hunt down and prosecute the real perpetrators and intellectual authors of the crime. Because, and I will say this only once, the dead president, his friends, and his enemies were all part of the same corrupt group that’s been running Haiti for a decade. Any one of Moise’s cohort could have helped authorize the killing (obviously, there are others to suspect outside of that circle).

Already members of the investigative team looking into the assassination have had to go into hiding because they know or might reveal facts about the crime.  For now, the probe continues, and investigators scratch their collective chin. Who did it? Well, let’s say this: Someone knows.

Will the truth ever be revealed?

Ask the killers of Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in a massive explosion on a main street in Beirut in 2005. As Marlise Simons wrote in The New York Times this week, a tribunal established to prosecute the assassins of Hariri failed to show who ordered the attack, or why, after twelve years of investigation and $800 million spent.

That probe is now closed.

Jovenel Moise: “What the… ?”

Today, Haiti’s Department of Justice officially opened its probe into the assassination of President Jovenel Moise. It’s just shy of a month since the killing. That timing is typical of the whole “investigation.”

A Haitian friend and I have been talking the last few days about the “telenovela” that is the story of Haiti, post-assassination. In the days just after the murder, he said “it feels like an abscess emptying out, which could be good.” Now it feels more like the ranks closing and shutting down the investigative process, such as it is, while carrying out and elaborating the almost comic narrative the authorities have created to explain things and shield the actual perpetrators and intellectual authors.

At any rate, it’s a twisted narrative that most recently has swirled around the former first lady, Martine Moise—who witnessed and was shot during the event, was airlifted in critical condition to Miami, then returned for her husband’s funeral two weeks after the attack to give a fierce speech and announce she might run for president, and who most recently appeared on August 2 on CNN to tell everything she says she knows about the assassination, which it turned out is, seemingly, not much. Perhaps fear of reprisals has kept her mostly silent on the real facts.

In any case, her interview provided enough material to keep the rumor mills spinning, keep the telenovela’s plot moving. You don’t need much fuel to keep this beast active.

Martine Moise was composed, as a future presidential candidate should be, while she recounted on Anderson Cooper’s 360 how she lay there in the presidential bedroom of the Moises’ private residence, already injured, as the Spanish-speaking team of allegedly foreign commando killers searched the room while the president was still alive on the floor. They searched the room, she could tell from her perch on the floor at the side of the bed, asking each other “Is that it? Is that it?” until they said “There it is.”

She doesn’t know what they found (some Haitians say “a million dollars in cash”). The killers, Martine Moise said, then called someone and received confirmation of the president’s identity (“tall and skinny and black,” she claimed was the information given—this, to hired assassins allegedly flown in from outside the country, trained for at least a month, and heavily armed… ). How they then shot and killed her husband. As she left the house, she said she noticed there was no sign of the twenty or so security guards who usually protected the place and the family.

The gates of the president’s private residence; Try climbing that. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

Her testimony bears little resemblance to the story told by people with privileged knowledge, as well as by official Haitian investigators, like Justice of the Peace Carl Henri Destin, before they fled into hiding because of death threats. The counter-story (or one of them): That Moise was on the phone with his missing security for several minutes before the attack began in earnest, asking where they were and demanding that they come protect him. That not a single security officer of Moise’s was injured or killed during the attack, and someone inside (or with a key or combination) must have allowed the attackers entry (see photo of gate and walls, left). That Moise was killed at least half an hour before the foreign commandos arrived. That he was shot twelve times in various parts of his body and one of his eyes gouged out. That before the onslaught began, the Moise children, a boy and girl both in their 20s, were spirited along with the family dog to a lockable bathroom by their mother. That the kids walked their mother out of the house once the killers had fled. That when the First Lady was taken away to a hospital, Colombian “commandos” helped Moise’s daughter gather clothing and other essentials for the family.

The commandos, apparently with no planned exit strategy after allegedly committing an assassination, tried to disappear into the surrounding communities but were soon either executed in the streets or scooped up in a singularly efficient Haitian police dragnet.

Martine Moise gives her version of events (CNN)

One element previously recounted by Martine Moise was that before they left, the killers “shone a light” in her eyes to make sure she was dead. She has now eliminated that detail from her narrative, probably having been told that a light shone into a living person’s eyes, especially in a dark room, will provide evidence of life, as their pupils contract against the brightness. So no more flashlight in the eyes.

Just that one tiny embellishment that’s now gone casts a strange light, shall we say, on the reality of the rest of her story. Why did she feel compelled to invent this telenovela element? (You can imagine the detective whipping his flashlight out of his belt on some show she may have seen…) Because: she knows as well as anyone that trained assassins who kill the sitting president of a country don’t leave witnesses behind. So conclusion: They must have ascertained that she was dead. Clearly Martine Moise, out of a feeling of survivor guilt or for whatever reason, felt she needed to explain why she survived the brutal attack, while her husband died in the same house in the same room.

Survivor guilt, or whatever reason, may also be pushing her potential run for president (“to continue his vision,” she has said, causing choked laughter among those who watched the Moise presidency, and Haiti, implode over the last five years) although if she is as worried about her personal security as she claims she is, a run for president of Haiti would seem a strange choice, especially right now.

The Duvaliers flee Haiti, February 7, 1986

My engagement with Haiti started during the year leading up to February 7, 1986. That year  I learned Creole from the Indiana University tapes, and bought their dictionaries, which were in notebook form. I went over to the Haitian Corner, a bookshop near my apartment that was run by Jacques Moringlane, who would sit amid his stacks of books and papers, talking on a big black telephone and surreptitiously taping the calls. That was my Intro to Haitian Politics. I read everything I could get my hands on, from Masters of the Dew, to Memoirs of a Third World Leader (by François Duvalier, cynically dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King), to The Comedians, and I read Thomas Madiou and Moreau de St. Méry, and Alfred Métraux, Jean Price-Mars, CLR James, Sidney Mintz. The biggies. My first trip down began around February 1st, because any fool who read Haiti Observateur with even the smallest amount of attention could tell that soon the bloody and infamous Duvalier dictatorship that had been started by François in 1957 would come to an end, and when I say soon, well, it was almost immediate. Until I arrived that first time, Haiti was a land of my torrid imagination: Toussaint, the Citadelle, the Marron Inconnu, the Presidential Palace, Papa Doc, the Tontons Macoute, Charlemagne Péralte, the sea, the palms, gingerbread houses, the French Revolution, conch, poulet creole, Boukman, Makandal, Creole, Vaudou. The country was nearly fictional.

Then suddenly it was very real.

I’ve written about February 7 so many times and thought about it so much, that it’s hard for me to recall the emotions that coursed through all of us as we waited for Jean-Claude Duvalier to leave Haiti on that day in 1986, thirty-five years ago—waited for him to let Haiti be, to stop inflicting his and his father’s “worldview” (if they could be said to have had one) on the Haitian people and peyi. Historians have written about what it’s like to be present when history is happening. Being in the French Revolution or the storming of the Bastille, or for that matter, within the mob at the recent attack on the Capitol in Washington, or at Waterloo or greeting the living skeletons at the liberation of the Nazi death camps… all these come to mind. Lived history is emotional and frightening and extremely real during the moments it’s lived. Of course it changes the the world and it changes the lives of those who experience it first hand. Then it turns into ink on the page and into thought and memory, and it loses some of its organ-churning, soul-cracking power.

But I do remember the wait, and what followed—especially what followed.

I remember those dark Haitian hours at Francois Duvalier International Airport in the very early morning. The whole country was holding its breath, with fingers crossed. The week before, the nights in Port-au-Prince had been filled with gunfire and the days with interviews with presidential hopefuls, both serious and un, in their brightly lit living rooms, with plastic flowers on the coffee tables and hopeful faces of family, friends, and followers looking up at the man of the house, all dying for a some portion of power for their candidate, or better yet, the fauteuil presidentiel itself. The Duvalier dynasty, and all the violence and repression it had engendered and supported, was falling, and falling fast. Jean-Claude Duvalier, scion of the 29-year dictatorship, son of Francois (Papa Doc), was on the verge of leaving the country, ousted by a combination of popular unrest and pressure from the international community.

Poverty and corruption would come to an end! Democracy would rule! Literacy, equality, fraternity! And justice for all!

I was sitting with my colleagues from the Haitian and international media on the sandy ground at the airport. Red ants were biting us. It seemed somehow right and fitting for us to be beset by angry fire ants at the fall of Duvalier. Reporters kept jumping up and stomping, shouting obscenities, and slapping themselves. You’d sit back down and the ants would continue their attack. An enormous U.S. cargo jet was sitting there, too, on the tarmac. This was the night we’d been waiting for. The U.S. embassy had alerted us to Duvalier’s imminent departure.

And off he went—at the wheel of a silver BMW (I have written about it so many times…) loaded down with his mother, his nonchalant, cloche-wearing, cigarette-smoking wife (ditto), his kids, and who knew what national treasure—right up the cargo jet’s ramp and off to Paris. Others in his close retinue accompanied him.  It was a night to remember.

The Duvaliers were gone. Democracy had come to Haiti.

Oh my God . I just got a Twitter notification. Nicolas Duvalier (you can see him in the photo at the top of this blog, the little kid in the back seat of the silver BMW; he too lived through that history at the airport…) just Tweeted out his thoughts on the coming 35th anniversary.

First in Creole: “Haiti has arrived at a dangerous crossroads. The game must end, it is time for all serious Haitians to unite for a national dialogue so we can give satisfaction to the people. The people are tired of misery while a small team makes off with everything.” and then in French (same Tweet): “For the good of the general interest, we must absolutely put our individual interests aside.”

I follow this blofeur, if you can believe it. He’s back in Haiti thinking about a possible future as president. The heir of the man who helped keep Haiti on the world’s sidelines and who enforced all the misery that echoes through the streets and fields there today, is calling for national unity to end Haiti’s poverty. Note how Ti Nicolas places himself among a certain “we.”  His “we” says everything: we politicians, we leaders, we elite, we thieves, we people who actually control this country, we who are at fault, we who alone can fix it…

Nicolas Duvalier, Grandbaby Doc

His dad used to drive around Port-u-Prince in his macoute-mobile, tossing coins out to the impoverished thousands like a French king.

Come on,  Ti Nic Duvalier, Grandbaby Doc, don’t you know that democracy has come to Haiti?  That it was supposed to arrive, anyway, on the very day you split for Paris avec la famille? That you and the rest are no longer supposed to be in charge?

“We must absolutely put our individual interests aside…”

Ah, yes. Democracy has come to Haiti.

How often we all repeated those words, Haitians and sympathetic outsiders alike. Democracy has come to Haiti. The morning of February 7, 1986, as dawn rose over the crowded capital, we said those words and wrote them with incredible joy. The Haitian people emerged at first light into Port-au-Prince’s broad boulevards, waving green branches like a human forest and dancing with mad happiness. I saw a tousled, cynical hard-bitten French war photographer with tears coursing down his face, undone by the crowd’s emotion. This was what it meant to live through history. It changes your life. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your own country’s history, or another’s.

But soon after that beautiful day, the tone changed. You couldn’t help looking at what had happened on February 7, and asking how it happened, why, and what its results were. At first: in the tumultuous hours following Duvalier’s flight, a ruling junta was put in place with a general at the head. You perhaps asked yourself how this group had been selected to replace the dictatorship. You did remember that the U.S. embassy had alerted you to the exact moment of Duvalier’s departure. You did visit Ruelle Vaillant, the voting place where, in November 1987, during the first round of the first presidential elections to be held in Haiti after the fall of the dictatorship, voters were massacred by members of the Duvaliers’ former secret police and allies in the Haitian armed forces, and the election was cancelled (two candidates were assassinated before the scheduled election; 12 candidates were thrown off the lists because of their connections to the Duvaliers).

Ruelle Vaillant, massacre of voters, 1987

You then could not fail to note that the next  election, held almost two years  after the junta was installed, was a disciplined military exercise in which about 10 percent of eligible voters participated, and the candidate won by a fraction more than 50% of the vote, against ten other candidates. You did scratch your punditting chin when even so carefully selected a president was overthrown little more than four months later, by the military. The democracy that had come to Haiti didn’t look much like a democracy. But this was also true throughout Latin America at the time.

Over the decades, there were moments of renewed hope, of course. In 1990, the Catholic priest and liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected with 67.5% of the vote in a huge demonstration of electoral excitement, and in the face of threats against voters and voting places. It is thought to have been the first free and fair election in Haiti’s history. The people were invited into the Palace to celebrate.

I was WhatsApping with former President Aristide the day before yesterday, and discussing  all this. “The 1990 election was obviously a victory of the ballot against the murderous arms of the Duvalier dictatorship,” he wrote.

And he added: “It showed that the struggle against subhuman deprivation might eventually permit Haiti to pass from misery to decent poverty. But in order to maintain the status quo and the system of social exclusion, Haitian elites have always rejected the democratic principal that demands that government organize free, honest, and transparent elections, and that citizens respect the electoral results…. In this past decade, not one democratic election has taken place. All this is a clear expression of the establishment’s refusal to accept the norms and prerequisites of the rule of law.”

So far, the United States has never objected to one of these fraudulent elections. Obviously under Trump, that wasn’t likely. My readers will leap up, so let me say here not only did the U.S. not object, but it validated and supported those sham votes.

An aside, for Ti Nic: In 1961, Papa Doc (Ti Nic’s grandfather) won a presidential referendum asking Haitians to give him another six years in office. The vote was 1,320,748 for, 0 against. Looking at that amazing figure, you have to believe it’s entirely possible that Nicolas Duvalier could win the presidency of Haiti.

In spite of regularly scheduled though undemocratic elections, the Haitian people continued to be ignored by successive new governments. (It’s useful for one’s global analysis never to ignore the parallels between Haiti and the U.S., by the way: all the echoes.) There is still “a system of social exclusion.” Among many of the 15 leaders who have run Haiti in the past 35 years, the state has been considered a kind of cohort piggy-bank, with its money, wherever it might come from, to be shared among the administration. Very few of these leaders wanted to or were able to create programs that benefited the Haitian people. When they did that, they were ousted or threatened with overthrow.

For 35 long years, the best of Haiti’s possible leaders were refused entry into its government, either because they were too outspoken, too progressive, too wily, too independent, or too fierce to be stomached by the traditional international “Friends of Haiti,” the U.S., Canada, France, the U.N., and the OAS (and the IDB and the IMF). They became professors, human rights leaders, journalists, and lawyers for justice.  Some were assassinated, some silenced, some ostracized, while the small entrenched Haitian business elite who have an interest in the status quo continued to dominate the Haitian political scene. The best were for the most part eliminated from power, while the worst managed to grab almost everything, most often with outside powers quite aware but turning a blind eye.

Aristide slipped in there, but he was anathema to the business and social elite, who had friends in the Republican party and in Congress. After his exhilarating and astonishing victory in 1990, he was soon ousted. That was during the administration of the U.S. president we call Papa Bush. Aristide was reinstated in 1994 by Bill Clinton. In 2004, Aristide was overthrown again, this time during the era of Baby Bush. By the way, they didn’t send Aristide to Paris, where they’d sent Baby Doc in 1986. Instead, they sent him to the Central African Republic. Probably this was in some way related to the fact that in 2003, he had demanded that France pay Haiti about 21 billion dollars in reparations. (France did not agree.) Aristide is still beloved by Haitians (except for the ones who hate him), and has been back in the country for  almost ten years, but has kept himself in the background, politically.

Fate also wasn’t kind to Haiti. The cruel 2010 earthquake killed an estimated 250,000 and left behind mountains of rubble. Bill Clinton, the UN’s special envoy to Haiti, promised to help the country “Build Back Better” – that was his slogan. But in general, only businesses with traditional American connections were built back in any way at all. The rest of the country languished and languishes under rubble, literal and figurative.  Elections were notional, justice gestural, and outside help just a toss of money into the development hole. Current President Jovenel Moise, a former banana producer and auto parts dealer, was elected in 2016 with only 10% of eligible voters casting ballots. He was a protégé of his immediate predecessor Micky Martelly, whose electoral victory was questionable, and Moïse’s victory was also similarly suspect. When millions of dollars in public funds “disappeared” in the PetroKaribe scandal two years ago, his regime was fatally besmirched. “Spectacular corruption, mismanagement, and repression,” is how the Miami Herald characterized his administration in their February 7 anniversary editorial.

And yet he continues on. It’ll take a popular earthquake to dislodge this sticky character. Why would anyone voluntarily leave a coffer that keeps on giving…? And only the unimportant people he governs want him to leave. He doesn’t think much of them. And there won’t be any more serious elections, since the people of Haiti have been effectively disenfranchised.

People always wonder why Haiti has so much trouble when it’s only about 700 miles from the U.S.  For a long time, I didn’t know how to respond to this until I realized that it’s precisely because it’s only 700 miles from the U.S. that Haiti has had so much trouble. And it is not just too close to Florida, but also too close to Communist Cuba, which during the Cold War engendered all sorts of problematic situations between Haiti and  Washington.  Historically also, the slave-holding Americans  feared Haiti’s  free Black people, and more recently did not love it when Aristide demanded those billions of dollars in reparations from France, since reparations have now become an issue in the U.S. as well. Also its proximity meant that Haitians fleeing  a bankrupt economy tried to get to the U.S., which hasn’t habitually welcomed new Black immigrants with open arms.

People who were born as Duvalier fell are 35 years old now, and have lived with the carrot of democracy and a better life always dangling before them, unlike the Duvalier generations. Yet nothing practical and necessary has improved. Over here by the side of the road in Tabarre outside Port-au-Prince, a woman of about 35 sits naked on a doorstep, something almost unimaginable in Haiti of yesteryear, her skin covered in dust. Neglected, ignored, ill, destitute. She’s not the only one in her condition in Port-au-Prince. Starvation, which was rare in spite of all the reports of Haitian poverty, is now stalking the country. Families can’t afford their few cups of rice per week. Schools cost too much for most parents’ budgets. Kidnappings abound and no one is safe, not schoolgirls, not cashiers, not well-known lawyers, not priests, not foreign visitors. The kidnappers are violent, well armed, demand exorbitant ransoms, and are quick to kill their victims. Rarely are they captured. COVID is also a problem with few resources available to address it.

The one thing that has drastically improved during these 35 year is that for large chunks of time, Haitians have had the freedom to return to their habits of public expression and dissent, which have reemerged  to question and combat all the neglect, financial shenanigans and outright corruption of the state and its agents in the wake of that special moment when democracy was supposedly reborn. No one now would ever mistake the Haitians for a cowed or subservient population. Disturbances come in spurts as the situation worsens and security devolves, but right now, today, is a moment of serious popular unrest. Taking to the streets has become almost a seasonal event, and rightly so, given the grotesque corruption of government, the pornographic inequality of incomes, the dismissal of any and all needs of the Haitian citizenry.

Haiti revelers at Jacmel carnival Photo: Franck Fontain

And Carnival is coming, now, a time when, traditionally, political turmoil tends to overflow into the streets, songs are sung against particular politicians, and political trends can turn, and turn again. Of course Mardi Gras is always in February, so these annual protests always seem to arise around the anniversary of the Duvalier adieu. As Haiti gets ready for 2021’s weeks of celebrations—still on in spite of COVID—strikes and protests against the current regime have burst out all over the country with calls for Moïse to step down on the 35^th anniversary. There’s serious constitutional dispute over whether his term ends this year or on Feb. 7, 2022; not surprisingly Moïse himself sides with those who say 2022. He enjoys the presidency and its perks. Since last January, Moïse, who dismissed a large part of the Senate and the whole of the chamber of deputies, has been ruling by decree, often making new rules that enhance his executive powers. Now he is trying to replace the Haitian constitution. Many Haitian rights groups are calling this a dictatorship.

Though criminality and impunity continue, the ongoing protests in advance of the 35^th anniversary of the end of dictatorship show that all hope is not lost. Haitians’ worsening poverty is a disgrace to the whole world, like the slums of India and the favelas of Brazil. As protesters trudged down the hill from the wealthier suburbs toward downtown Port-au-Prince the other day, reporters there said they could be heard shouting quotes from sections of the 1987 post-Duvalier constitution declaring their right to food, education, and health care. After three and a half decades, all this is long overdue.

Haiti, the beautiful

As a small coda, I just want to thank Haiti and its people for allowing me to experience these past 35 years as an observer. I’ve learned so much and felt so much and am honored to have been there as a witness to change and growth and the possibility  of better things in the country’s future.

Here are those better things for the future:  free and fair and secure elections. Free and fair, not just for president, but for deputies, senators, and mayors.

OK, and on to the agenda for those government officials: a five-year and a ten-year economic plan, immediately published and posted online and on posts and billboards nationally, in Creole and French. Safeguards on government-held bank accounts to protect them from thievery. A professionalized police force. A reformed judiciary. Freedom for all in the National Penitentiary who have  been held for more than a year without seeing  a judge. Establishment of a committee to examine all jails and prisons.  A strong and bold ministry of women’s affairs. Enforced taxation at a certain level of wealth and on all foreign and Haitian businesses in Haiti, no exceptions. Public education (this means free!) for all, in Creole in the early grades and then moving on to French and English. Health insurance for all. A government that welcomes Haitians from the diaspora as consultants and participants. Pensions for the elderly. A rise in the minimum wage. And professional and technical and occupational training for the labor force. Seismic inspections and grants for rebuilding and rebolting, etc.

And expanded mental health care for an entire population suffering from the lifelong traumatic stress of poverty and neglect.

I couldn’t live with myself if I believed that this is a pipe-dream. I know bits and pieces of it were beginning under Aristide, and under the late President René Préval. I don’t think it’s too much to ask, especially once France begins to pay those reparations.

BULLETIN: U.S. legislators today called on Biden to support the assertion that Jovenel Moïse’s term ended today (rather than next year), while Moïse used today’s commemoration  of the fall of Duvalier to go full Duvalierist, rounding up more than a score of alleged participants in a conspiracy against his government and, he asserted, against his life, among whom a Supreme Court judge, a former presidential candidate, and a well-known police inspector.

It’s been 217 years since Toussaint died of cold, exposure, and neglect on April 7, 1803, at the Fort de Joux, on a high hilltop in the Doubs, France. He’d been arrested treacherously in Haiti by a French ally, and the French then had him transported across the Atlantic on the French frigate Créole, after his arrest in Haiti. He was held for a month at the Temple in Paris, where before him Marie Antoinette and other more important members of the royal family had been held before being taken to the guillotine. From the Temple, he was taken with his valet Mars Plaisir to the fort, and thrown into a bleak dungeon that can still be visited:

Here’s the loathsome and duplicitous letter sent by the French general Brunet, a supposed friend, that lured Toussaint to his arrest and kidnapping:

ARMY OF SAINT DOMINGO,
HEADQUARTERS AT GEORGES, June 7, 1802.

BRUNET, GEN. OF DIVISION, TO THE GEN. OF DIVISION,
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE:

Now is the time, Citizen-General, to make known unquestionably to the General-in-chief that those who wish to deceive him in regard to your fidelity are base calumniators ², and that your sentiments tend to restore order and tranquillity in your neighborhood. You must assist me in securing free communication to the Cape, which has been interrupted since yesterday, three persons having been murdered by fifty brigands between Ennery and Coupe-à-Pintade. Send in pursuit of these murderers men worthy of confidence, whom you are to pay well; I will keep account of your expenses.

We have arrangements to make together, my dear General, which it is impossible to do by letter, but which an hour’s conference would complete. If I were not worn out by labor and petty cares, I should have been the bearer of my own letter today; but not being able to leave at this time, will you not come to me? If you have recovered from your indisposition, let it be to-morrow; when a good work is to be done, there should be no delay. You will not find in my country-house all the comforts which I could desire before receiving you, but you will find the sincerity of an honest man who desires only the prosperity of the colony and your own happiness. If Madame Toussaint, whom I greatly desire to know, wishes to take the journey, it will give me pleasure. If she needs horses, I will send her mine. I repeat, General, you will never find a sincerer friend than myself.

With confidence in the Captain-General, with friendship for all who are under him, and hoping that you may enjoy peace,

I cordially salute you.

(Signed) BRUNET

P. S. Your servant who has gone to Port-au-Prince passed here this morning; he left with his passport made out in due form.

Toussaint was a former stable boy on the Breda plantation in Haiti, but he was also a shapeshifter and, over a long and complicated revolution that eventually won Haiti its independence from France eight months after his death, he showed himself wily enough to have made allies of enemies and harsh enough to have made enemies of allies. He knew what equality meant and once addressed a note to Napoleon “From the first of the blacks to the first of the whites.” But in the end Napoleon tore him from home and did away with him.

Madison Smartt Bell, author of a three volume series on the Haitian Revolution that begins with the masterful All Souls’ Rising, (all souls being the English translation of Toussaint), wrote this about Toussaint’s end:

In fact, Toussaint survived a little more than seven months at the Fort de Joux. In the conclusion of his memoir he had written, with a certain insight into Napoleon’s plan for him: “Is it not to cut off someone’s legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”  No one wanted to make him a martyr. His bones were lost in a potter’s field, but his spirit, never to be suppressed, helped carry the Haitian Revolution to ultimate victory.

Speaking of Haitians being moved around the globe by nonHaitians: today, 61 Haitian migrants who were deported from the US to Haiti in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak here. Haiti had already closed its borders last month in hopes of preventing an outbreak of the virus, but the US was allowed to violate that with this deportation. So far it has counted 25 cases. However, Haiti can’t possibly have adequate testing for the new virus, and certainly doesn’t have the ability to quarantine people adequately or to provide hospital beds or ventilators for the very ill. I’m thinking some savvy ICE official chose the day of Toussaint’s death to inject this possible death dose into Haiti.

A plantain leaf, some plastic, and a piece of nylon string, and the Haitian market woman, top, trying to ward off COVID-19, has managed ingeniously to duplicate an iconic part of the 17th-Century costume designed by a French doctor to protect medical men from the plague.

The old beak mask and a long waxed cape/coat were supposed to keep out the disease from head to toe. The engraving  above depicts a doctor in plague armor in Rome during the 1600s. The outfit, which must have struck fear into the hearts of patients, to put it mildly, was worn during the 1656 plague in Italy, during which some 300,000 Romans and 145,000 Neapolitans died.

You can see in the bottom left corner of the engraving a doctor in full costume who doesn’t seem to be doing the peasants much good.

A version of this beak or bird mask, actually many versions of it, are for sale in every tourist trap in Venice, which celebrates a raucous and crowded international carnival every year. The mask, called Medico della Pesta, or plague doctor, is a favorite at carnival time. Here’s an ornate one:

Haitians are clever with masks, especially at carnival time, as the brilliant photographer Leah Gordon has amply demonstrated in her work (two following photographs):

This year in February, Venice’s traditional weeklong carnival festivities were cut short by two days as Italian casualties from the new coronavirus began to rise. Below, the mixed masks people in Venice were wearing at carnival this year:

AP Photo/Luigi Costantini