Haiti’s Political Impasse
In Port-au-Prince today, roadblocks and barricades carve up nearly every neighborhood. Residents who haven’t already fled wake each morning wondering what dangers they’ll face simply trying to move through their own city. They swallow their rage at the armed groups holding the country hostage, carefully navigating the gang-controlled chokepoints that now define urban life.
The insecurity stems not just from the gangs, but from the state’s near-total disappearance as well. Haiti has had no elected national government for years. Since April 2024, a Transitional Presidential Council (CPT)—created by international actors to manage the crisis and shepherd new elections—has held nominal power and been mired in scandals. Yet for many residents, the gangs and the CPT are marasa—twins, two faces of the same failed system.
For decades, Haiti has been described as a country at a crossroads. But crossroads suggest choice, possibility, movement forward. What defines Haiti now is something different: an impasse—a condition of blockage and immobility that traps millions in place. This impasse is both concrete and metaphorical, connecting the physical roadblocks fragmenting Port-au-Prince with the political deadlock preventing any resolution to the ongoing crisis. The impasse represents more than political breakdown—it’s a transformation in how politics works. Controlling who moves where has become the main source of political power in Haiti today.
The “Gangsterization” of the Haitian State
The current stranglehold didn’t emerge overnight. Its roots stretch back to the post-2010 earthquake reconstruction, when donors, the state, and local actors all made politics about infrastructure, promising to build houses, roads, hospitals, and schools. These were all urgently needed after the earthquake, but the reconstruction period was defined more by its failures than its successes, including the introduction of cholera to Haiti by UN soldiers or the displacement of residents from their neighborhoods.
This infrastructure politics often served as more of a cover for resource extraction and outright graft rather than genuine development. By 2018, growing awareness of corruption in reconstruction projects—particularly the theft of billions meant for development and reconstruction—sparked massive protests against the government of then President Jovenel Moïse.
These protests evolved into a movement against what civil society groups have called the “gangsterization” of the state—the increasing collusion between officials and armed gangs. As protests continued through 2019, demonstrators adopted tactics known as peyi lòk (country lockdown), using strikes, marches, and road blockages to shut down the capital. The protests were some of the largest in the country’s history, though they did little to weaken the international and elite support of Moïse’s government.
President Moïse’s assassination in July 2021 created a constitutional vacuum that accelerated a transformation of the Haitian state. With no clear succession process and most elected officials’ terms expired, political authority became increasingly detached from formal government institutions. The international community’s backing of Ariel Henry as acting prime minister—despite his lack of electoral mandate or constitutional legitimacy—further gutted Haiti’s already fragile state institutions.
This period also saw the consolidation of gang power. In the summer of 2020, former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, known as “Barbecue,” announced the formation of the G9 Family and Allies—a federation of nine powerful gangs. This marked a shift from neighborhood-based groups to coordinated entities with national political ambitions. Gang federations signaled a new phase where armed groups could effectively challenge both state and international authority.
By March 2024, the transformation of Haitian political power was complete. Gangs prevented Prime Minister Henry’s return from Kenya, where he’d gone to arrange an international policing mission. Armed gangs demonstrated their ability to dictate terms to what remained of the government. They showed no interest in taking over the state but made clear they could decide whether any government would govern.
Life Under “Chokepoint Governance”
In Martissant, a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince where I’ve conducted research for two decades, immobility has become the defining feature of daily life. Once a relatively accessible neighborhood connecting southern regions to the capital, Martissant has become one of the most contested zones in the metropolitan area. Armed gangs have established numerous checkpoints along Route Nationale 2, the main road traversing the neighborhood, effectively controlling movement between the capital and southern Haiti.
Roadblocks—barikad in Haitian Creole—have a long history as tools of protest. But current deployments represent something fundamentally different: semi-permanent features that mark boundaries and create zones of control. Major gangs target what logistics experts call “chokepoints”—strategic locations in the city’s circulation system where movement can be controlled with minimal resources.
The late 2022 blockade of the main fuel terminal provides the clearest example. By controlling access to this single facility that processes most of Haiti’s imported fuel, gangs paralyzed the entire country for months. The blockade demonstrated how vulnerable national infrastructure had become to localized control and ushered in a form of rule that I term “chokepoint governance”—power that works not by controlling territory but by controlling the flow of essential goods and people.
For Port-au-Prince residents, navigating this fragmented urban space takes more than good luck—it requires strategies for moving through the city that account for gang territories, checkpoint schedules, personal connections, and real-time information sharing. Many rely on informal networks to share information about passable routes. Others develop complex detour systems, sometimes traveling hours through mountainous terrain to bypass gang-controlled areas.
The Global Architecture of Immobility
While the impasse manifests most visibly in Port-au-Prince’s blocked streets, it’s fundamentally shaped by transnational dynamics that extend far beyond Haiti’s borders. As the late Haitian-American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted, Haiti represents “the longest experiment in neocolonial rule.” The current crisis continues this pattern through new experiments in political control.
The United States has historically shaped Haiti’s political landscape through military interventions, economic policies, and backing favorable political figures. More recently, the United States influences the situation by controlling what moves in and out of Haiti, making it easy for weapons to flow in while blocking people from leaving.
The flow of firearms into Haiti exemplifies this selective permeability. Despite having no domestic weapons manufacturing, gangs have acquired sophisticated arms, mostly from the United States. Meanwhile, the ability for Haitians to emigrate faces increasing restrictions. The Dominican Republic has kept its border closed to Haitians since September 2023 and has launched a mass deportation program targeting Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. The United States, too, has continued aggressively deporting Haitians—including migrants who had previously received parole—despite UN recommendations against returning people to such an insecure country. The Trump administration also recently included Haiti in its list of countries under a travel ban.
This asymmetrical mobility management—weapons flowing in while people are prevented from exiting the crisis or are sent back into the fray—intensifies the experience of mobility many Haitians now feel. International actors, particularly the United States, play a decisive role in determining who holds political power. The support for Ariel Henry after Moïse’s assassination, despite Henry’s constitutional illegitimacy and possible implication in the assassination, exemplifies how external recognition substitutes for internal democratic processes.
The recent U.S. designation of certain Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations further complicates this dynamic. While the move is popular in Haiti, where residents are weary of living amid gang violence, the designation may function more as migration management than addressing the roots of the crisis. As analyst Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research notes, the designation risks creating an effective embargo on Haiti, since conducting any business in gang-controlled territories, now including much of Port-au-Prince, could violate U.S. anti-terrorism laws.
Politics as Survival
The current impasse represents more than a breakdown of governance—it deepens blockages that have long defined Haitian politics. In his analysis of Haiti’s history, Michel-Rolph Trouillot identified a political system blocked in two ways: first, by keeping the peasant majority out of politics entirely, and second, by limiting political competition to elite fights over state resources.
When a political system is completely blocked, traditional politics is replaced with rivalries between individuals, parties, and interest groups. Haiti’s deep social problems, rather than being addressed through real political engagement, have historically been fought out through elite competition for control of the state.
The gangsterization of the state, followed by the takeover of much of the country by the gangs, represents a new version of this old pattern. But where the old blockages kept political rivalry within formal state institutions, the new impasse has pushed politics beyond the state entirely. Politics is no longer about administration or governance, but about what we might call “life itself”—the daily work of just trying to survive.
In this context, ordinary Haitians engage in politics not through voting or protest, but through the constant work of getting by, around, and through—navigating roadblocks, finding safe routes, and securing basic necessities. Every trip to the market, every journey to work, every attempt to access services becomes a political act of resistance against imposed immobility. This represents a fundamental shift: politics as navigation rather than participation, politics as survival rather than representation.
The question facing Haiti is whether these new forms of political practice can ultimately break through the blockages that created them, or whether they will simply reproduce patterns of domination in new forms. The answer lies not with gangs or international actors, but in the everyday practices of resistance and survival that ordinary Haitians continue to develop as they navigate an impossible present while working toward a different future.
Greg Beckett is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. He studies Haitian history, culture, society, and politics. He is the author of There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader.
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression, injustice, and economic and political subordination.