While many Americans ponder what the November 2024 election will bring, they are hardly alone; Latin American and Caribbean countries are keenly interested in how the U.S. political landscape will evolve in the upcoming months.
The U.S. can help build on Haiti’s transitional milestones and pave a sustainable path out of Haiti’s long-running crises.
In the wake of the announcement of a Kenyan police-security deployment to Haiti, public attention to the crisis the country is facing shifted from general appeals for multilateral action to concerns that the Kenyan deployment would not resolve the crisis—simultaneously debating the logic of a fourth international intervention in a span of three decades. A common variable throughout is that the crisis in Haiti is deepening, and that even with some conditionalities, most Haitians desperately want outside help.
Haiti is headed toward a catastrophic humanitarian and political crash. With an estimated 90 percent of the Port-au-Prince region under the chaotic control of gangs.
Outside of targeted sanctions against several high-profile Haitians as well as some notorious gang leaders, a perplexing disconnect remains between the international community’s response and Haiti’s pleas for help.
Diagnosis of the crisis has been easy—but what key actors in Haiti and its international partners can agree on what to do about has remained muddled.
[International] efforts are not sustainable without a credible Haitian political consensus in place. Hence, a policy disconnect persists between multilateral diplomacy and street-level reality.
If there is a consensus among most of Haiti’s political factions and, belatedly, among much of the international community, it is that rushing toward elections in 2022 is unrealistic and simply dangerous for both voters and candidates. To hold a credible vote, Haiti’s leaders will have to work against the shaky track record of the past three decades.
The challenges Haiti faces are immense and cannot be easily addressed without active international policy coordination, leadership by US diplomacy, and close and sustained interaction with key Haitian actors.
The international community’s role in Haiti is adrift. None of this is going to end well.
