To Fix Haiti, Look to Colombia

In May, a Florida judge convicted four people of an extraordinary crime: helping recruit and finance a squad of two two dozen former Colombian mercenaries for the 2021 murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in his own home. The assassination and political vacuum that followed fed gang violence that has since swallowed Haiti. While the creation of a United Nations security force marks progress, the way out of Haiti’s crisis will require more than guns. Long-standing peace can only be built on truth, justice, reintegration, and state-building. In May, a Florida judge convicted four people of an extraordinary crime: helping recruit and finance a squad of two two dozen former Colombian mercenaries for the 2021 murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in his own home. The assassination and political vacuum that followed fed gang violence that has since swallowed Haiti. While the creation of a United Nations security force marks progress, the way out of Haiti’s crisis will require more than guns. Long-standing peace can only be built on truth, justice, reintegration, and state-building. Ironically, despite its connection to Haiti’s spiral into violence, Colombia offers such a model. To fix Haiti, look to Colombia—not because its peace is perfect, but because it knows the futility of trying to punish a country back into order. Haiti is in a fragile moment between intensifying violence and a renewed international security push. Chad has begun deploying troops to the new U.N.-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), with around 400 personnel already in Haiti out of a planned 1,500-member Chadian contingent. The force, intended to grow to roughly 5,500 personnel, is designed to restore basic security and help reestablish state authority. Meanwhile, Washington’s support for Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé after the dissolution of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council has helped the country avoid an outright leadership vacuum. Yet recent attempts to address Haiti’s crisis through force alone have shown the limits of security-first responses. Meanwhile the social and security crises continue to spiral. Over half the population is facing food insecurity, and around 1.4 million people have been displaced by the conflict. At least 1,642 Haitians have been killed and 745 injured between January and March. Gang members—who control key roads, sea routes, and large parts of Port-au-Prince—are responsible for 27 percent of those killed and injured. Women and girls are paying an especially brutal price as sexual violence rises. The test of recovery is whether the state can protect those most vulnerable and replace criminal governance with services, trust, and public authority. Voting alone cannot rebuild political trust. Since the creation of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council in 2024, international actors have pressed interim authorities to restore elected government. The first round of general elections—originally scheduled for Aug. 30—have been shelved indefinitely because of security concerns. Holding them before the U.N. forces have rousted the gangs and reestablished a government presence throughout the country would indeed be foolhardy. A premature vote risks repeating a past tendency by the international community to use imperfect elections as an exit strategy rather than as a means to increase citizen confidence and representation in the government. That said, consistently setting unrealistic dates for elections only to postpone them has its costs, too, on both citizen confidence and a collective sense of inclusiveness in the democratic process. Holding elections is made still more difficult because the problem is not only violence but coercive political control. Viv Ansanm—a gang coalition formed in 2023 through an alliance between Port-au-Prince’s two main gang factions, G9 and G-Pep—has given armed groups a more unified platform to destabilize the state, block efforts to restore public authority, and influence the terms of political transition. The GSF, the U.N.-backed successor to the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, is necessary but not sufficient. Even with U.N. logistics and operational oversight, the GSF will not be able to dismantle the marketplace of insecurity that gangs have built. Roads, ports, markets, fuel, food, basic services, and physical safety have become commodities which are priced, brokered, and weaponized by armed actors. Families, businesses, and public institutions are forced to negotiate protection with the very groups that produce the violence. An international strategy that only targets gunmen will leave untouched the financiers, patrons, corrupt officials, and business interests that allow gang rule to regenerate. Haiti’s justice system is too broken to absorb this burden on its own. In 2025, 82 percent of detainees in Haitian prisons were still awaiting trial, and the 2024 prison attacks that freed thousands of inmates showed how easily inse

To Fix Haiti, Look to Colombia

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