Haiti, gangs keep sowing death despite the international mission

Introduction: Jean-Denis, a village wiped off the map by violence

A night of horror pieced together detail by detail

On March 29, 2026, around two in the morning, members of the Gran Grif gang swept through the rural village of Jean-Denis, in the Artibonite department, shooting indiscriminately at residents trying to flee, dragging others out of their homes, and setting houses on fire with residents still trapped inside. A Guardian investigation, published on July 2, 2026 and based on dozens of verified videos, photographs, direct testimony, and satellite imagery, pieced together hour by hour this night of terror that killed at least 70 civilians.

Among the victims named in the investigation are Marie Elvire Louis, aged 80, Estimable Fils-Aimé, 85, and eight-year-old Berlancia Dor. One survivor, Merçide Daniel, lost five family members that night, while another witness, Gerno Théophile, lost six.

A massive exodus in the attack's wake

In the wake of this mass killing, thousands of residents of Jean-Denis fled their village, leaving everything behind, in a national context where more than 1.4 million people, roughly a tenth of Haiti's total population, are now internally displaced because of gang violence.

This mass flight illustrates a reality that has become almost routine in Haiti: entire communities wiped off the map overnight, with no national or international security force able to intervene in time to prevent the worst.

The international mission's clear failure

The MSS, an intervention that never delivered on its promises

Deployed in 2024 under the leadership of Kenyan police officers and largely funded by the United States, the multinational security support mission, known by the acronym MSS, was initially meant to restore order against the expansion of armed gangs. According to the Guardian investigation, the mission formally left Haiti in April 2026 without having managed to curb the continued growth of criminal groups' power across the country.

This failure, documented by multiple human rights organizations, illustrates the structural limits of underfunded and poorly coordinated international interventions against increasingly well-armed and territorially organized gangs.

A replacement force arriving too slowly

A new force backed by the United Nations, the Gang Suppression Force, is theoretically meant to take over from the MSS, but it is not expected to reach its planned strength of 5,500 personnel until fall 2026, leaving a dangerous transition period that gangs are actively exploiting, according to on-the-ground findings reported by the international press.

This bureaucratic slowness in deploying a replacement force, even as the security situation continues to deteriorate on the ground, illustrates a persistent gap between the real humanitarian urgency and the usual sluggishness of international response mechanisms.

The nationwide scale of ever-expanding violence

Numbers that show continuous deterioration

Nationally, nearly 6,000 people died from gang violence in Haiti in 2025 alone, according to data collected by humanitarian organizations on the ground. The number of violent incidents involving gangs and self-defense groups rose from 615 in 2021 to 1,626 in 2025 nationwide, a surge that illustrates the scale of the security deterioration in just four years.

In the Artibonite region alone, violent incidents rose from 39 in 2021 to 238 in 2025, while the Centre department saw its violent incidents climb from seven to 111 over the same period, confirming the steady geographic expansion of areas under criminal influence.

Armed groups now present in half the country

Organized criminal groups are now active in five of Haiti's ten departments, a level of territorial penetration that far exceeds what Haitian authorities and international forces had anticipated when the first security interventions launched in 2024.

This continued expansion, despite the presence of international forces on the ground for more than two years, raises legitimate questions about the real effectiveness of the strategies used so far to contain, or even simply slow, the territorial advance of armed groups across the country.

Drone strikes, a controversial state response

A technological escalation with deadly consequences for civilians

Faced with conventional forces' inability to regain control of the territory, Haitian government forces have increasingly turned to small explosive kamikaze-style drones, a strategy that drove a 120% increase in deaths linked to drone strikes and aerial fire in the first quarter of 2026, compared with the last quarter of 2025.

According to data reviewed by Human Rights Watch, at least 1,243 people were killed in 141 drone strike operations carried out between March 2025 and January 2026, with several of these explosive devices detonating in densely populated residential areas.

A security dilemma with no obvious solution

This escalation in the Haitian state's use of force, however understandable given the scale of the criminal threat, raises serious questions about the proportionality of the response when civilians regularly find themselves caught between gang gunfire and the airstrikes supposedly meant to protect them.

This dynamic illustrates the especially complex nature of the current Haitian conflict, where the line between protecting civilian populations and collateral damage is becoming increasingly difficult to draw clearly, for authorities and international observers alike.

The many faces of criminal terror

Beyond the killings, a full-blown economy of fear

The armed groups that now control vast portions of Haitian territory are not limited to mass killings: they also engage in kidnapping for ransom, burning churches and schools, systematically extorting merchants and travelers, and controlling strategic checkpoints on the country's main roads.

This diversified criminal economy, which also includes drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, and acts of piracy aimed at extorting payments from commercial vessels, confirms that Haitian gangs have moved beyond being simple groups of violence to become genuine parallel criminal governance structures.

A clear UN warning over drug trafficking

Last December, the United Nations warned that Haiti was rapidly becoming "a central hub" for international drug trafficking, a development that risks further turning the Haitian security crisis into a problem reaching far beyond the country's national borders.

This transnational dimension of the Haitian problem, often underestimated in international media coverage, should nonetheless alarm Western governments further, since their regional security remains directly affected by the continued expansion of these organized criminal networks.

Other regions hit by the same spiral of violence

Haiti's Southeast, an emerging new conflict zone

Haiti's Southeast region, long relatively spared from gang violence, recorded seven incidents linked to armed groups in the first months of 2026, compared with just one in 2018, a surge confirming the steady geographic spread of the criminal phenomenon well beyond its historic strongholds around Port-au-Prince.

In April, at least nine people were killed in what human rights organizations describe as the first significant mass killing directly linked to the spread of gang conflict into this previously less-affected region.

A capital still largely under criminal control

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, armed gangs continue to control around 90% of the urban territory according to humanitarian organization estimates, a situation that persists despite more than two years of successive international interventions meant to restore state authority over its own capital.

This persistent criminal control over the capital, the most visible symbol of the collapse of Haitian state authority, continues to seriously complicate any attempt at effective government coordination against the security crisis now spreading across the entire national territory.

What this crisis reveals about international priorities

A humanitarian emergency eclipsed by other geopolitical crises

While international attention remains largely focused on the war in Ukraine, tensions in the Middle East, and strategic rivalry with China, the Haitian crisis struggles to attract the diplomatic attention and financial resources that its humanitarian scale would nonetheless amply justify.

This relative relegation of the Haitian crisis within Western priorities, despite its direct geographic proximity to the United States, raises legitimate questions about the consistency of Western geopolitical priorities, which should logically include stabilizing their own immediate neighborhood.

A test for the credibility of collective security mechanisms

The international community's persistent inability to durably stabilize Haiti, despite several successive missions over decades, is also a telling test of the credibility of the collective security mechanisms the West continues to invoke to justify its leadership on the world stage.

If the West cannot resolve a security crisis in its own hemisphere, the legitimacy of its interventions elsewhere in the world, notably against the ambitions of Russia, Iran, and North Korea, risks suffering considerably in the eyes of international public opinion.

The ambiguous role of regional actors facing the crisis

Kenya and the question of the mission's leadership

The withdrawal of the Kenyan police officers who led the MSS left a command vacuum that the new Gang Suppression Force is still struggling to fully fill, with several troop-contributing countries hesitant to commit fully as long as the new force's funding and exact mandate remain unclear to the governments being asked to contribute.

This persistent uncertainty around the future command of the international mission illustrates a recurring problem with multilateral interventions in Haiti: every transition between successive missions creates a window of opportunity that armed gangs systematically exploit to consolidate the territorial gains they have made.

The United States and Canada, financial partners under pressure

The United States, the main funder of the security mission in Haiti, faces growing domestic pressure to justify continuing funding deemed insufficiently effective so far, even as violence keeps worsening despite the sums already invested in stabilizing the country.

Canada, also financially and diplomatically engaged in the Haitian file for several years, finds itself in a similar position, having to justify to its public the relevance of continued engagement in a context where concrete results remain difficult to clearly demonstrate to Western taxpayers.

Conclusion: a tragedy that demands more than a new mission

Lives that deserve better than prolonged indifference

The events that took place in Jean-Denis on March 29, like the thousands of other similar tragedies that have occurred across Haiti in recent years, are a reminder that behind every national statistic lie names, faces, and entire families destroyed by a violence that neither the Haitian state nor the international community has managed, so far, to effectively contain.

Replacing one international mission with another, however operationally necessary, will not by itself be enough to reverse a spiral of violence that keeps worsening year after year, with no coherent strategy yet able to durably slow its advance.

A call for more determined Western action

For the millions of Haitians living daily under the direct threat of armed groups, only a truly sustained international mobilization, adequately funded and maintained over time, can one day offer a realistic prospect of security and national rebuilding.

Until that still-hypothetical mobilization arrives, entire villages like Jean-Denis will keep paying, amid the relative indifference of the rest of the world, the exorbitant price of a security crisis the West still seems unable to treat with the priority it so plainly deserves.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my acknowledged biases

I sign this opinion piece as an observer concerned about the inadequacy of the international response to humanitarian crises in the Western hemisphere, convinced that regional stability should be a Western priority on par with major global geopolitical files. This acknowledged bias colors my interpretation of this crisis, even though the facts reported come from verifiable journalistic and humanitarian sources.

Method and limits of this opinion piece

This article draws on an in-depth journalistic investigation, reports from international humanitarian organizations, and data compiled by human rights organizations. I had no direct access to testimony from Jean-Denis survivors, whose accounts come entirely from the international journalistic investigations cited as sources, and I refrain from any claim beyond what these sources allow me to establish with certainty.

Sources

Primary sources

Al Jazeera — At least 70 killed, 30 wounded in Haiti gang attack, rights group says, March 31, 2026

UN News — report on the security situation in Haiti, March 2026

UN News — report on the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, January 2026

Secondary sources

International Rescue Committee — Haiti's gang violence crisis, April 17, 2026

Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026, Haiti chapter

CNN — Haiti awaits Gang Suppression Force, March 24, 2026