David Pratt: Just what is going on in Haiti?

When I first visited Haiti back in 2004, aside from the country’s legions of poor, it seemed almost entirely inhabited by these two species of individual.

The capital Port-au-Prince was in meltdown back then, the city’s ramshackle streets a labyrinth of barricades and blazing tyres, looters, shooters and partygoers.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was in the process of being deposed from power. In the space of a few weeks, I would watch those same "boulevards" once consumed by violence and littered with corpses turn into one giant carnival as thousands crammed to dance the night away to Haitian and Caribbean music.

Everywhere around the national palace that had been Aristide’s lair of power, giant floats drifted by while women in flamingo pink dresses, and voodoo priests, partied against the pure white backdrop of the whitewashed palace facade that dazzled in the nighttime dark like an edifice of snow.

There are few countries in the world that I’ve been to quite like Haiti. Even fewer that have seen so much turmoil and destruction. It really does beggar belief that such a place exists an hour-and-a-half’s flight from glittering Miami, and less than three hours from New York City. As the books and experts will attest to, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere and the world’s least developed outside of Africa – and believe me does it show.

At night in the city’s Marche en Fer or Iron Market district, crushing poverty forces sex workers, some little more than children, onto the filthy fire-lit streets.

This is a two-tier nation that rises from the slums of Cite Soleil and Saint Martin, where hundreds of thousands cram into reclaimed swampland and cemeteries.

So congested is it here that people I met said that “shift sleeping” is common.

With many single cupboard-sized rooms too small to house an entire family at any one time, people have been known to bed down on a rota basis, four hours inside and four hours in the alleyways outside.

It might be a short distance as the crow flies in Port-au-Prince, but these teeming, humid slums are a world apart from the cool hills above where the wealthy live in the gated communities of Petionville, with their fine restaurants catering to a very different side of Haitian life.

Right there in that very juxtaposition Haiti’s inequality lies encapsulated. A chasm between haves and have-nots that for decades has led to political instability and violence which these past weeks has once again reared up and gripped the country.

“After each election, we are deeper and deeper in a crisis. People are living day-by-day ... If you don’t resolve the situation, you’ll have another uprising,” warned Jean Clarens Renois, a former journalist and presidential candidate last week as street protests in the country intensified.

For the last two weeks now, almost unnoticed by the international media, thousands of Haitians have taken to the streets, asking for US-backed president Jovenel Moise and his government to resign. Writing in the New York Times a few months ago, Jake Johnston, an international associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington and an expert on Haiti, told the story of what sparked the current round of unrest.

“It started with a few keystrokes in a living room in Montreal,” he wrote.

“Gilbert Mirambeau Jr, a Haitian filmmaker and writer, took to Twitter on August 14 to post a photo of himself, blindfolded, holding a piece of cardboard with a simple question written on it in Haiti’s Creole: “Kot Kob Petwo Karibe a???” – Where is the Petrocaribe money???

As Johnston went on to explain in the article, just a few days after Mirambeau’s tweet, an informal group of young Haitians organised on social media using the hashtag #PetroCaribeChallenge and since then Haitians from all sectors of society have taken to the streets demanding an answer to Mirambeau’s original question about what became of the Petrocaribe cash.

This vast sum of over $2 billion is part of low-interest loans provided by Petrocaribe, a Venezuela-led oil-purchasing alliance of Caribbean states that since 2008 was aimed at helping Haiti’s ailing economy. The funds became crucial emergency money to the country following the devastating earthquake of 2010 that laid waste to swathes of Port-au-Prince and beyond.

Since then, the missing cash and whole Petrocaribe affair has become a political cause celebre in a country where ordinary people have seen a 40% hike in fuel prices and double-digit inflation that has made day-to-day survival extremely challenging for more than 60% of the population.

For decades, ordinary Haitians have felt themselves powerless when confronted with this ongoing legacy of corruption and misgovernment. Presented with few alternative options, invariably they take to the streets as a last resort when trying to change things for the better.

With so many locked in the grip of protracted poverty their frustration with the country’s level of corruption is understandable. To take but one example following the 2010 earthquake, it became clear that despite foreign donors pledging more than $10 billion in aid, less than 1% of that emergency aid spent in their names went directly to Haitians.

I well recall in the wake of the earthquake talking to ordinary Haitians who had lost almost everything. One was a woman called Gladys Pierre, a mother who described that day back in 2010 when just before five o’clock the mirrors fell from the walls in her family home and the furniture rose up and flew through the air as if thrown by a giant malevolent poltergeist.

“A big beam slid, and from the chest up Rachelle was crushed against the wall like a mosquito, and I knew my little girl had died,” Gladys told me, her voice trailing off.

Unimaginable as the horror of her story was, it didn’t stop there. Steeling herself, she continued to tell of how her daughter’s semi-crushed skull became a grotesque prop for part of the apartment block wall that remained standing.

In the following months, so dangerous were those ruins teetering on their macabre headstone that no-one dared enter to remove Rachelle’s corpse.

Like many ordinary Haitians who found themselves now living in one of the tarpaulin cities that became semi-permanent fixtures in Port-au-Prince, Gladys and her husband Joel held out little hope of those in power doing much to improve their lives.

“You only see them in their beautiful cars and big jeeps driving up and down but they never stop, never get out of the car, talk to us or even congratulate the women and children on their courage,” I recall Joel telling me at the time.

And so, in the eyes of many Haitians, this sense of helplessness and frustration remains the way they see their lives and once again anger has boiled over in the country.

While president Moise has pledged a crackdown on corruption few see little signs of it. Those who have taken to the streets as part of the protest movement in recent weeks have no clear political leader, but Haiti has a huge diaspora that has harnessed social media in its non-violent #PetroCaribeChallenge, campaigning among a population more than half of whom are under 24 years old.

As ever, though, tensions have risen as government repression against the campaigners has become more unrestrained and brutal. Even in the early stages the signs of this were all too clear when last November armed gangs close to the ruling party, together with corrupt police officers, massacred at least 60 people just days before protests were due to begin.

All this time, US influence – official or unofficial – has never been far from the surface in Haiti. In the latest case of murky US interference, five heavily-armed Americans were arrested in Port-au-Prince last week along with a Haitian man and two Serbians.

The Americans are former Navy Seal officers Christopher Michael Osman and Christopher Mark McKinley, and Marine veteran Kent Leland Kroeker, as well as Talon Ray Burton and Dustin Porte. Burton is a private investigator once employed by the controversial private security company formerly known as Blackwater and the State Department’s diplomatic security service. Inside their vehicles the Haitian police found six automatic rifles, six pistols, two professional drones and three satellite phones, and they were also carrying sets of licence plates.

“They said that they were here on a ‘government mission,’ “ Miami Herald reporter Jacqueline Charles told US National Public Radio. “They did not specify which government, but then they did tell the police that ... their boss was going to call their boss.”

Whether they were mercenaries, “government contractors” of something else, the arrest of the Americans while failing to make global headlines triggered wide speculation about why they were in Haiti, particularly among Moise’s political foes.

The possible explanations range from a desire to protect the central bank or foreign assets to potential attacks on anti-government demonstrators and leaders. According to the Haitian police, the men claimed they were on a “government mission” when they were pulled over about a block away from the nation’s central bank.

The US government only subsequently intervened after Haitian prime minister Jean Henry Ceant, speaking on CNN, called the group “mercenaries” and “terrorists”. That they were released from prison and immediately flown back to Miami where they faced no charges has only further fuelled the rumour mill and caused political uproar in Haiti.

Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defence Network in Haiti, blasted the decision by US authorities not to charge the men.

“What the Haitian government did is grave. It shows that they had something they were looking for. The fact that the US took these people and did not charge them, it shows there was a conspiracy. They didn’t want them to go before Haitian justice,” he told the Miami Herald.

On Friday, the protests on the streets of Port-au-Prince showed no signs of abating. “Today we lock down the country again,” opposition leader Schiller Louidor told people who gathered for a funeral of two protesters killed earlier in the week, before they marched on the national palace carrying one of the coffins. “We are asking for justice. We are going to continue to protest. Jovenel Moise can kill as many people as he wants, he still has to go,” said Josef Dicles, a cousin of one of the dead men, Onique Gedeus.

And so Haiti is mired in turmoil again and just what the future holds is anybody’s guess. But the mysterious presence of armed Americans and the cancellation of this month’s scheduled carnival in Port-au-Prince certainly bodes ill for this long-suffering nation born out of slavery and still consigned to poverty.