Haiti has been held hostage by a bloody regime and its backers in the West for the past decade. The right-wing PHTK party, founded by former pop singer turned president Michel Martelly, has held power since 2011, and over that time, there has been a dissolution of Haitian institutions, repeated failures to hold elections, and reported affiliations with armed groups that people widely refer to as gangs.

Over the past five years, armed groups have become significantly more powerful in Haiti. Under President Jovenel Moïse’s administration, a commission for disarmament advised several gangs to form a federation in order to facilitate communication with the government. In the years that followed, the groups in that federation became more powerful and more heavily armed in a country that does not produce weapons and is subject to an official arms embargo — despite which, many illicit firearms are trafficked into the country from the United States. Some political analysts have concluded that these groups, who have turned their weapons on the people, seized control of entire territories and paralyzed the capital by blocking major gas terminals, operate more like paramilitary groups than gangs.

The insecurity bringing the country to its knees is part of a long-term effort to quell resistance, particularly in working-class neighborhoods. In 2018, popular uprisings erupted after a senatorial commission reported that most of the Petrocaribe funds had been stolen or squandered by government officials in the PHTK party. [Petrocaribe is a program by which Venezuela sells petroleum to a number of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America at a preferential rate to allow these governments to use the money saved to pay for developmental projects instead.] For three years, the movement held regular marches across the country, with thousands asking where these funds went, demanding the ouster of the PHTK party and denouncing the United States’ imperialist hand in Haiti’s plight. In response, the state has perpetrated a campaign of violence and repression against activists in the form of massacres and kidnappings. At the same time, it has abandoned some working-class neighborhoods completely, with even the police in retreat. Gender-based violence in the form of gang rapes and forced labor for gangs is a particularly ubiquitous practice.

Today, Haiti is led by a transition government headed by a recently formed presidential council. On June 25, at the request of the PHTK party’s former prime minister and the so-called international community, foreign boots are scheduled to arrive in Haiti for a confusing mission led by Kenya and funded by the U.S. in response to the insecurity that has swallowed the capital and many of its surrounding cities. This latest episode continues a long history of foreign intervention into Haitian politics, from the forced indemnity payments to France after its independence, a U.S. invasion and occupation in 1915, to U.S. corporations’ undermining of the Haitian Parliament with the explicit support of the State Department. Such foreign intervention has historically been disastrous for the Haitian people, especially Haitian women. In May, I met with a group of Haitian women activists to talk about how the current climate has changed their everyday lives and how Haitian women are responding to it.

— Nathalie “Talie” Cerin

Nathalie The current climate of insecurity has presented so many threats for the Haitian people, and the masses are the main victims. With whole regions of the country cut off from the rest because of armed groups, it is understandably impossible to organize at a certain level. How has the current conjuncture affected your work as an artist, activist, or academic? What are the limitations you are facing?

Nahomie I live in Pòtoprens in Nazon. I am a factory worker in the textile industry. I am an activist who works to help women understand their rights, especially their labor rights. I entered this work because when I looked around, I saw workers being mistreated, and they accepted it. The reason why they accepted it was because they did not know their rights. I am the coordinator of a trade union organization called ROHAM (Respect for Haitian Factory Workers), which is there to ensure that workers’ rights are respected and to support workers who are legally pursuing their employers and other concerned bodies. When the workers have demands, we help them through the means provided by Haitian law, either through strikes or popular mobilization.

I will first speak as a factory worker on the issue of insecurity. Because of the inability to transport materials, 200 people were laid off at the factory. After more time, the plant had to close down altogether. To me, the current climate of insecurity poses the biggest danger to women, especially women laborers who get up early in the morning in the dark to come to work. We are coming from everywhere. There is one woman at the factory who was raped, and two months later, her husband was shot in the same area.

The insecurity has completely killed me as a union woman. In the factory where we work, we have a union. We try to recruit as many women as we can. Inside the union, we also have a women's organization. Whether or not a woman chooses to join the union, she has the right to join the women’s organization if she wishes. We would often go to other places for various trainings, and then we would return to share what we had learned with the other women inside the factory. After the closure of the factory, we kept fighting to work with the women, but in the end, we couldn’t.

Insecurity has affected me deeply and in so many facets of my life. But this specific facet, making it so that I can’t do my work as a union woman, this work that I love so very much, helping women, talking to women, making them understand their rights as workers — this has completely demoralized me, in every sense. I cannot find the words to explain how this insecurity has played out in the lives of women workers.

Islanda I live in Pòtoprens. I am a young feminist, militant woman. I am a member of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti), a national peasant organization, and I am a coordinating member ofLa Via Campesina, an international peasant movement.

We have been facing significant challenges over the past three years, stemming from when armed groups cut off the Great Southern region from the rest of the country. Now, the Great North is also blocked. In our organization, we accompany and activate solidarity with the peasants. But lately, we have been unable to go to the field. Food production and transportation activities are paralyzed. When we try to move forward in the face of all the risks, when people in rural communities try to move ahead with their work activities, they cannot manage to reach the capital or the major cities. In large cities like Okap, Gonayiv, and Sen Mak, food does not arrive from the countryside because people are blocked en route, especially the Madan Sara [women who purchase produce from rural farms and sell it in larger regional marketplaces]. We know how the Madan Sara works. These women largely rely on credit from banks and microfinance organizations. Many of these women are unable to pay their debt because they are not able to sell in the big cities.

Vanessa I am a singer, composer, creative director, and feminist activist. I work with the feminist organization Dantò Feminis, which specifically works with women workers, street vendors, and women living in working-class neighborhoods in Pòtoprens. I am a founding member of Bosal Mizik, a record label that works on art and resistance in working-class neighborhoods through workshops with young people.

I will not only name the general state of insecurity because this has been a situation long in the making. I will say instead that after 12 Janvye [the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that killed 300,000 people], when Michel Martelly came to power, there was a shift when it came to being an artist in the country. Certain questions became more urgent. Who are you creating for? Whose side are you on as a musician? What categories of people is your art speaking to?

With Martelly coming to power, many other artists in music went on to government positions. This created a division among musicians working in the country. Many musicians decided to align themselves with the PHTK regime; then there were other artists who automatically became marginalized because they had chosen the other side. This means there are gigs they would not accept and certain establishments they would not play for anymore based on principle. This completely transformed the cultural scene in Haiti.

This has really highlighted the Haitian artist’s duty to resist, a duty of solidarity toward the Haitian people and toward ourselves as well. Because we are also affected by the political climate, our families are affected. I have moved from Pacot to Turgeau, to Laboule, to Dèlma over a short amount of time because of all of the violence and armed groups gaining territory. There is an implicit responsibility that artists have to resist through the work we produce. But the context I’ve described means that there are also challenges to this resistance.

Sabine I am a sociologist and a feminist activist. I want to talk about my work in political thought and academia, which is an extension of my activism. It is another way to be an activist. There are many ways to be a militant.

I have witnessed many things as a professor at the State University of Haiti in Pòtoprens. Students who came from areas where insecurity was more pronounced, such as La Plaine, Kafou Fèy, and the southern part of the capital, had to flee their homes. I realized that many of them were living on campus. I would arrive in the morning to teach and find students who had not yet woken up.

This puts the students in such a vulnerable situation. How do they live their lives? How do they eat? How do they wash their clothes? What if, for example, they have a health problem — how are they keeping up with their medication? This meant that I had to lower my academic expectations of my students, give less work, and stop pushing the students the same way I used to. I had to adjust my rigidity. The relationship of professor to student in an ideal world looks like one generation accompanying the next in their pursuit of knowledge. But in a context like this, the role of a professor becomes impossible. Since the space where you do your work is no longer an academic space, there are different dynamics at play; it demands different things from you. How do I show solidarity with my students? What is allowed and what is defended in this space?

Then I realized that there were professors who were in the same situation, who found themselves having to sleep on campus along with the students. How do we maintain the intergenerational dynamic in such a space? How are we redefining the relationships so that the transmission to be made between professor and student can still happen? This is what the political context has made of our work.

Nathalie We know that the widespread terror is a tactic to break resistance efforts and to quell any uprising, especially in working-class neighborhoods. I’m thinking about what Nahomie just said about the insecurity hurting women the most. If this insecurity is made to break resistance, targeting women means that women pose a very specific threat to power. What are the many ways we see women blocked from doing organizing work and resistance work in our society as a whole, especially in a time of political instability?

Nahomie This climate of insecurity has someone powerful controlling it, someone who is leading it and telling it where to go. This person has designed this insecurity specifically for us women. And it plays on our lives in every sense — it plays on our precariousness, how we are, and how women fight. I don't know if everyone sees it the same way I do, but the places that are most attacked are marketplaces. When you go to the marketplace, it is mostly women you find. They attack the churches. When you go to church, it is mostly women you find. We are targeted because the person controlling this understands that we are the backbone of our communities.

It is the same in how people put down women who want to be politically involved. People tell you things like, “Aren’t you a woman? What are you doing at protests?” I remember when there were demonstrations demanding the Petrocaribe money. Where I was working, 20 women and I went down to protest. When we came back, there were many people — when I say “people,” I mean men, leaders inside the factory who saw us and wanted to shame us — saying, “Leaving to protest during your work day? Will the person who made you go also pay for your missed wages?”

Sabine Everywhere we go, women are doing the same work regardless of the space. We take care of people. We take care of the collective. The Madan Sara take care of the child with no family, just like the woman inside the church does for the children around her. The food vendor on the street knows to leave a plate of food for the mentally ill person who is always on the block. She also knows that in the pot of food she’s cooked for the day, there is a plate of food for her neighbor and her children, who have been without food since morning.

Author Rita Segato talks about what is happening in Latin America, how when we talk about women's bodies, they are part of the community, so attacking women’s bodies means attacking the space, it means attacking the territory. This means that for the hand that used to reach through the fence of her neighbor’s house to feed the children inside, if the child she used to feed now holds a weapon, that hand can no longer cross through that fence to continue care work. Violence destroys everything that creates the bond of solidarity between us inside our communities. I don’t think it’s possible to remove from Haitians what they are, but I also think that the urgency of our problems does not leave our minds free enough for us to have the same political engagement we used to as a society. And it leaves our communities tense and hostile.

One of the biggest blows is that they attack the soul of the community. When you attack the marketplace, you attack the soul of the community. We are realizing, as Nahomie said, that it is all the spaces where women are thriving: where women are making deals and organizing sòl [a group money-saving method], where women exchange and forge new connections with each other, where women are gathering donations for people in need. Whether it’s money being exchanged, energy being exchanged, people exchanging words, or goods being exchanged, these are the spaces that the armed groups are directly targeting.

In the process, they’ve destroyed the relationships that women of different social strata have built with each other. I used to have so many women I was friendly with. I had a network of relationships, not necessarily with people I met in professional spaces or went to school with. This was the network of relationships that I had built by living and moving through the city because I have my footprints in the city, and I have people that I knew and talked to. Today, I don’t know what has become of these people. These casual relationships are the ones that allow us to connect, where we can gossip about when something isn’t right, and then we can create a political dynamic linked to the fact that we have an understanding of when something isn’t right. This is what’s broken. It’s not just our capacity to resist — they have taken away our ability to occupy the streets. In Haiti, the streets are the first spaces of citizenship. One of the biggest problems that this crisis brings is that we cannot truly be citizens.

Vanessa They have completely crushed all resistance movements. Insecurity is not something that comes on its own. We recall, from the first moment when there was the petro-mobilization, where the people were demanding, “Where is the Petrocaribe money?” there were key neighborhoods where protesters would get stones thrown at them or shot. However, from July 6 or 7, 2018, they began to target a specific social class of people who were more likely to be politically involved and actively participate in the protests: people from working-class neighborhoods. This led to the Lasalin Massacre [killing 71 people in the Lasaline slums of Pòtoprens], which officially took place on Nov. 13, 2018, but which began on Nov. 1, according to the survivors. Armed groups started entering people’s houses to rape women, to repress them. There has been a whole process where, at first, people were attacked on the street for resisting. Now they come inside your house to put pressure on you, kill the people in your home, rape children in your home, prevent schools from functioning, burning key spaces such as schools and marketplaces — all spaces where the reproduction of life takes place.

Those who resist are also attacked through the denigration or assassination of their characters. I’ll go back to the example of the mobilization around Petrocaribe. These people have undergone a series of social attacks. But if you look closely, they mainly attack the women who led that movement. They receive the same vitriol feminist movements received: accusations of being homosexuals, hating men, being promiscuous, etc.

Islanda I want to talk about migration, which is another thing that breaks the momentum of mobilization. Dating back to 1915, we start to see people in the rural areas leave their hometowns to come to the city to work in factories in the industrial parks. There are those who left to work in the batèy [sugar mill], either in Cuba or in the Dominican Republic, during the first wave of occupation until today. This continues to break the spirit of mobilization.

It is not without reason that different countries in Latin America offered work programs to attract Haitians. Countries like Chile and Brazil opened their borders. In the case of Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff met with Martelly in 2012 while Brazil was preparing to host the World Cup and needed to build stadiums. They needed cheap labor to do it, so they called in Haitian workers. Since then, Haitians have similarly ended up in Chile, Nicaragua, and Mexico. It is these same powers who are deporting Haitians once we arrive in the United States, the same ones who created the conditions to make us leave the country in the first place. This is all a well-coordinated and clear process to make Haitians leave and seize the agricultural land we have. Look at how they use the land: they put concrete on it to make free economic zones and tourist zones. This is what they do.

We see clearly that the whole project of imperialism — I'm talking about the U.S. in particular — is to make us dependent. Meanwhile, we leave everything that would make us regain our self-determination as a people. Today, young Haitians have only one goal and project: to leave the country. There is an erosion of values ​​that makes you see the question of struggle, the question of resistance. That is not what is on anyone’s mind; those are not the conversations being held. When we look at social media, the only message we see is, “Let’s get out of here, Haiti is unviable.” They create the chaos, they create the climate of terror, and then they are the ones coming up with a plan they have manufactured, a disguise to tell you that they are the ones who have the solution when the reins have been in their hands the whole time.

Nathalie We have entered a new phase of this conjuncture where we are bracing ourselves for a foreign intervention, coming under the guise of bringing law and order and security. But we know all too well that it means more violence toward the working class and gender-based violence toward Haitian women. How are we going to protect ourselves as women, protect our communities, protect our families? What hope, if any, are you seeing in terms of grassroots movements and the spirit of resistance in the people?

Nahomie We know that occupation has never brought anything good for us. I’m wondering what we can do to raise the consciousness of young people specifically — talk to them, teach them about what’s happened in the past. And for the women, talk to them about how they can protect themselves in the context of occupation because, in many ways, they are set up to be the most victimized. I see a lot of people minimizing what is about to come. Because the insecurity has become so overwhelming, many people think it’s normal for the situation to end in occupation. That’s the analysis many people have because that’s how this project has been designed. They have made bandits come destroy so that we can see foreign forces as our deliverance. The only thing we can do is educate the people, speak to them, bring them in, and make them see that occupation has never been good for us.

Vanessa As an artist who makes protest music and who produces cultural work that sheds light on the daily life of Haitians, I think the role of the artist is to continue to stand in solidarity with the people, whether that is denouncing or raising awareness of things that have been made invisible. I bring up invisibility because I have been thinking about gang rapes and other forms of violence women have been experiencing more lately because of the current political climate, and the state has said nothing. The media has said nothing. So, it is the artist’s role to bring this awareness.

Sabine Despite all our resistance, we find ourselves at the point of occupation again. Occupation is not what we were asking for. There are other ways to solve our problems. But this is the choice of everyone who proclaims that Haiti is an ungovernable, chaotic entity that cannot take charge of itself. They are the ones who have decided that these people must be infantilized.

I think we need to continue the work we are accustomed to doing on the ground: meeting with the communities, holding them, and mobilizing. The West is always going to come up with the easiest formula for them. The biggest question now is how we end this endless wave of death in the country — the endless wave of death, rape, dehumanization. I say let power do what it’s going to do. And in the meantime, let us do what we need to do. We won’t see the result now, but in the long run, we can build so that we can make a different kind of society, another way to live, another generation, another form of attachment for our children to this country.

Islanda This occupation is already at our door. Women will be subjected to violence. Whenever there is occupation, women’s bodies become the territory of war. We need women’s organizations to conduct self-defense training because when women are subjected to collective rape, there must be groups that can give them the tools to respond to these types of violence. Even though this is the government’s responsibility, until we find a government that is for the people, that will respond to these needs, we must find a way for women to have a self-defense capacity.

I will finish by pointing out something crucial. Despite everything, there is still an extraordinary capacity for resistance. When you look at Haitian women, despite the situation of women workers and the shut-down industries, the women find a way to make ends meet. Despite being chased out of major market spaces, these women head uptown to Petyonvil; they go up to Dèlma. There are parts of the city where cars cannot pass right now because the vendors who were chased out of the Salomon marketplace have taken up business there. Because these women want to live, you will see them in the street with baskets on their heads. They tell you there is hope and they can build an alternative.

This piece was published in collaboration with Woy Magazine. Mélodie Cerin provided editing support.