INVESTIGATION: Haiti, the capital where 90% of the territory belongs to gangs

Introduction: A city held hostage, a state that barely exists anymore

A statistic that says it all

According to concurring estimates from the UN and Human Rights Watch, armed gangs now control roughly 90% of the territory of Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas. This figure, confirmed repeatedly since 2025 in successive UN reports, is not journalistic exaggeration — it is the measure of a systemic collapse. The Viv Ansanm coalition, formed in September 2023 through the merger of the G9 and G-Pèp gangs under the leadership of Jimmy Chérizier, known as "Barbecue," now dominates the Haitian capital and has spread into three of the country's ten departments: Artibonite, Centre, and Ouest.

The US State Department designated Viv Ansanm and the Gran Grif gang as foreign terrorist organizations in May 2025, explicitly acknowledging that these groups pose a direct threat to national security in the region. This is no longer classic organized crime. It is a structured attempt to seize power, with declared political ambitions — the gangs have publicly demanded an amnesty and a seat in transitional institutions.

The vacuum left by a state assassinated at its summit

To understand the origin of this spiral, one has to go back to July 2021. The assassination of President Jovenel Moïse at his home left an institutional void that no legitimate authority has since managed to fill. Haiti has not held elections since 2016. Executive power rests on a fragile Transitional Presidential Council, whose mandate, originally set to end in early 2026, had to be extended amid general confusion. Meanwhile, the gangs have a clear chain of command, financial resources drawn from widespread extortion, and absolute control over strategic road networks.

There is something deeply disturbing about the fact that in 2026, a capital of more than two million people is governed 90% by armed men rather than elected institutions. This is not just a Haitian failure. It is a collective failure of the international community, which watched this collapse for years without ever committing the resources needed to stop it.

Viv Ansanm, the anatomy of an unprecedented criminal coalition

A hundred armed groups under a single banner

According to analysis from the Bloomsbury Intelligence & Security Institute, Viv Ansanm now brings together more than a hundred distinct armed groups under a federated structure — the largest ever observed in the Americas. This is not a neighborhood gang. It is a criminal confederation capable of coordinating simultaneous offensives on multiple fronts, negotiating internal truces between rival factions, and projecting de facto authority over millions of civilians.

The human toll of this consolidation is staggering. Between January and September 2025 alone, at least 4,384 people were killed in the metropolitan area, according to data compiled by conflict-monitoring organizations. Across the entire crisis since 2021, cumulative estimates run well into the tens of thousands of dead, wounded, and missing. Nearly 1.5 million people have been displaced within the country, a figure confirmed by the International Organization for Migration in June 2026.

The tax-extortion-terror system

What distinguishes Viv Ansanm from classic gangsterism is the sophistication of its economic model. The gangs have built a genuine parallel administration: they tax merchants who wish to travel on roads they control, impose levies on basic necessities, and run kidnappings for ransom as a systematic revenue source. This structure of criminal governance, documented in several human rights reports, explains why military repression alone will never be enough to dismantle the system — its parallel economy would also have to be destroyed.

Haitian gangs are often described as a formless, chaotic mass. That is a dangerous analytical error. What Viv Ansanm has built is a state within the state, complete with its own taxation, street justice, and internal diplomacy between factions. Underestimating this organization is a guarantee that any outside intervention will fail.

Civilians, permanent hostages of a war they never chose

The child soldiers of Haiti's chaos

One of the most troubling figures documented by the United Nations concerns the age of the combatants. According to the UN's designated expert on human rights in Haiti, William O'Neill, roughly half of gang members are under 18. This mass recruitment of minors, often drawn from the very neighborhoods already ravaged by violence, creates a vicious cycle in which each generation of Haitian children grows up without a functioning school, without legal economic prospects, and with gang weapons as the only visible path to survival.

The United Nations also reports an explosion of conflict-related sexual violence: more than 20 women and girls assaulted every day on average, according to data presented by Secretary-General António Guterres during his visit to Haiti in June 2026. This violence is not collateral damage — it is an integral part of the terror methods gangs use to entrench their territorial control and punish communities that resist.

An economy and an education system at a standstill

The gangs' blockade of main roads has catastrophic economic consequences far beyond direct violence. Access to medicine, food, and essential supplies is systematically disrupted, according to testimony gathered by several international outlets covering the crisis. Roughly 243,000 children have had their schooling interrupted by attacks directly targeting schools, a figure reported by the UN as early as spring 2026. An entire generation is growing up without a classroom, in overcrowded displacement camps.

What strikes me most in this story is not the violence itself — tragically, violence has been part of Haiti's recent history for decades. It is the international normalization of this suffering. How many times have we heard "the situation is alarming" without any action matching the scale of the disaster following it?

The international community, spectator to a foretold collapse

Repeated warnings, ignored year after year

This is not as if no one saw this catastrophe coming. As early as 2022, reports from Haitian NGOs described gangs controlling 60% of the capital. That figure rose to 80% according to the UN in 2023, then to 85% in 2024 and 2025, before finally reaching the 90% documented in the most recent reports. This linear, well-documented progression should have triggered a proportional international response far earlier. Instead, it came only in fragments, underfunded, and often too late to reverse the dynamic on the ground.

The Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS), led by Kenya and deployed starting in June 2024, is the starkest illustration. Designed to number 2,500 personnel, it never assembled more than roughly a thousand, for lack of sufficient funding from contributing countries. An undersized mission, facing off against roughly a hundred well-organized armed groups, could not reasonably have been expected to reverse the balance of power on the ground.

Cross-cutting responsibility, from Washington to New York

The suspension, in January 2025, of roughly 80% of US-funded humanitarian programs in Haiti — a decision made by the American administration as part of a broader review of foreign aid — worsened an already critical situation, according to humanitarian officials cited by the UN. This was no accident of timing: the funding cut directly reduced agencies' capacity on the ground to respond to a humanitarian crisis already ranked among the most severe in the Western Hemisphere.

One can support a foreign policy of budgetary firmness without turning a blind eye to its direct human consequences. Cutting funding to programs that fed Haitian children displaced by gang violence is not fiscal rigor. It is a choice with a measurable human cost, and it needs to be named clearly, even by those who otherwise support a firm geopolitical line.

Barbecue, the face of a criminal insurgency that dreams of politics

From police officer to warlord

Jimmy Chérizier, a former Haitian police officer turned gang leader, embodies on his own the trajectory of this crisis. Under the nickname "Barbecue," he orchestrated the merger of Port-au-Prince's main rival factions into a unified coalition, turning a fragmented territorial war into a near-military force capable of toppling a prime minister. It was under the pressure of his coordinated offensives, in 2024, that former Prime Minister Ariel Henry had to announce his resignation while stranded abroad, unable to return to his own country because the Port-au-Prince airport was under gang control.

This ability to bring down a government through armed pressure alone illustrates a reality few international observers had anticipated: Haiti is no longer facing a simple public-security crisis. It is confronting an organized insurgency that effectively claims veto power over national governance.

A criminal coalition's political ambitions

According to analyses from think tanks specializing in conflict, Viv Ansanm is actively seeking to exploit the ongoing political transition to secure a blanket amnesty and infiltrate formal state structures ahead of elections planned for late August 2026. Should this strategy succeed, it would transform a criminal organization into a legitimized political actor — a dangerous precedent that would validate armed violence as a legitimate path to power across the entire hemisphere.

Granting amnesty to warlords responsible for thousands of deaths, systematic sexual violence, and the recruitment of child soldiers would not be national reconciliation. It would be capitulation dressed up as pragmatism. History will judge harshly anyone who validates that equation.

The Artibonite corridor, the new frontier of gang expansion

Beyond the capital: territorial contagion

While Port-au-Prince draws most of the media attention, Viv Ansanm's expansion into the Artibonite and Centre departments may be the most alarming development of recent months. The coordinated March 2025 attack on the Mirebalais prison, which freed more than 500 high-risk inmates and forced the displacement of more than 51,000 residents to neighboring towns, demonstrated the gangs' operational capacity to strike far from their historic stronghold. This is no longer a crisis confined to one city. It is methodical territorial contagion.

These rural areas, rich in farmland, hold crucial strategic importance for the country's food supply. Their control by armed groups directly worsens national food insecurity, which already affects nearly six million people according to the most recent UN figures. Every hectare seized by the gangs is a hectare taken from the country's collective survival.

Trade corridors, new front lines

Control of the major roads linking Port-au-Prince to producing regions remains one of the most powerful levers the gangs hold. By systematically blocking or taxing these corridors, they paralyze not only the flow of humanitarian aid but also all legal domestic trade, pushing the Haitian economy toward growing dependence on the informal and criminal networks they themselves control.

The Haitian gangs' strategy reveals a chilling tactical intelligence: they are not content with terror alone, they engineer economic dependency. Every road blocked, every tax imposed on merchants strengthens their grip while further weakening the legitimate state. This is a siege strategy, not merely a crime wave.

The Dominican Republic, the front line of a regional crisis

A neighbor on the front line of the consequences

Haiti's collapse does not stop at the border. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, absorbs a disproportionate share of the migratory consequences of this crisis. Dominican Foreign Minister Roberto Álvarez Gil described before the UN Security Council the acceleration of Haiti's collapse as generating enormous human suffering, which translates directly into growing migratory and social pressure on his own territory. This dynamic creates recurring bilateral tensions, with the Dominican Republic tightening border controls and carrying out waves of mass deportations of Haitian nationals, including people born on Dominican soil.

This situation illustrates a simple but often overlooked geopolitical principle: instability never stays confined to its country of origin. A failed state a few hundred kilometers from American shores generates regional shockwaves — migratory, economic, security-related — that eventually reach, in one form or another, neighboring countries and, by extension, American strategic interests in the region.

The ambiguous role of regional powers

Several countries in the region, including Canada and the United States, have contributed financially to stabilization efforts in Haiti — Canada in particular committing 40 million dollars to support the new security force. But these contributions, while useful, remain largely insufficient given the scale of the challenge. The question now is one of strategic coherence: can the West claim to defend a rules-based international order elsewhere in the world while watching a neighboring state methodically collapse before its eyes, for lack of adequate funding?

You cannot simultaneously present yourself as the guardian of international order and treat Haiti as a secondary file. Geopolitical coherence begins in one's own backyard.

What Haiti reveals about the fragility of the international order

A precedent that extends beyond Haiti's borders

The Haitian situation raises a question that far exceeds the Caribbean: what happens when the international community identifies a threat, documents it precisely year after year, and still fails to mobilize a response equal to it? The West, which presents itself as the guarantor of a rules-based international order, bears part of the responsibility for this slowness. A country located a few hundred kilometers from American shores, whose collapse generates major migratory flows toward the United States and the Dominican Republic, has not received the strategic attention its geographic proximity should have warranted.

This slowness contrasts with the speed of mobilization seen for other international crises deemed higher priority. It legitimately fuels criticism of a humanitarian-urgency hierarchy shaped by geopolitical rather than human criteria.

The risk of a permanent failed state on America's doorstep

The worst-case scenario is no longer hypothetical: a permanently failed state, where no security force, neither the Haitian police nor any international mission, ever manages to regain lasting territorial control. This scenario would turn Haiti into a permanent security vacuum in the Western Hemisphere, with inevitable repercussions for arms trafficking, irregular migration, and regional stability as a whole.

I do not believe in a geographic determinism that would condemn Haiti to perpetual failure. This country has a history of resistance and dignity that deserves better than the miserabilist clichés too often attached to it. But dignity is not enough against hundreds of automatic rifles. It takes resources and real international political will, and that has been missing, year after year.

Conclusion: A test for the credibility of international engagement

A number that must remain an alarm, not a normalized statistic

Ninety percent. That is the proportion of Port-au-Prince now under the grip of armed groups, according to the most recent and most corroborated UN estimates. This figure must never become a mere line of context repeated mechanically in wire reports. It describes a concrete reality: millions of civilians living under the rule of groups that tax them, recruit their children, subject them to violence, and have acquired, through sheer force, veto power over their country's political future.

The Viv Ansanm coalition, led by Jimmy Chérizier, is neither a passing anomaly nor a simple law-enforcement problem. It is the symptom of a prolonged institutional collapse, worsened by chronic international disengagement, despite documented warnings issued for years.

What the West still has to prove

The arrival of a new international force, now engaged on the ground, represents an opportunity — perhaps the last one before the situation becomes entirely irreversible — to reverse this dynamic. But an opportunity is only worth something if it is seized with the necessary resources. The world has had Haiti in plain sight for years without acting to match the documented scale of the disaster. This investigation is not meant to end on an easy note of hope — it is meant to remind readers that inaction has a price, and that price is counted in Haitian lives.

Haiti does not need our pity. It needs our memory — so that a number like 90% never again becomes just another routine line in a UN report.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial positioning

This investigation adopts a committed editorial line: it holds the international community, and the West in particular, accountable for a state collapse documented for years without a proportional response. This positioning does not excuse Haiti's own internal responsibilities, but it rejects the fatalism of reducing this crisis to a mere "local problem" with no implication for Western powers and international institutions.

Methodology and sources

The facts, figures, and statements cited in this text come from verified sources: Geopolitical Monitor (starting source), UN News, Human Rights Watch, the Bloomsbury Intelligence & Security Institute, the US State Department, along with reports from international news agencies. No fact has been invented or extrapolated. Territorial-control estimates, which vary slightly by source (85% to 90%), are presented with their respective nuances.

Nature of the analysis

This text is a committed analytical investigation, combining rigorous factual gathering with explicit editorial positioning. Maxime Marquette (MadMax) is a columnist-analyst whose mission is to interpret international crises in light of their geopolitical and human stakes. The italicized editorial passages are explicitly identified as personal opinions, distinct from the documented facts in the body of the text.

Sources

Primary sources

Gangs Beat Back the State in Haiti — Geopolitical Monitor, 2026

A turning point for Haiti? New security force takes fight to gangs — UN News, June 16, 2026

World Report 2026: Haiti — Human Rights Watch, January 2026

Secondary sources

Terrorist Designations of Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif — US Department of State, May 2, 2025

Gang Governance and State Erosion in Haiti — Bloomsbury Intelligence & Security Institute, May 11, 2026

First troops from UN-backed Gang Suppression Force arrive in Haiti — Al Jazeera, April 1, 2026

Undoing Haiti's Deadly Gang Alliance — International Crisis Group, December 2025