Viv Ansanm: How a gang coalition has transformed violence in Port-au-Prince.

Figure 1 Port-au-Prince and periphery, showing areas prone to gang violence.

On 29 February 2024, a coalition of gangs known as Viv Ansanm (Living Together, in Haitian Creole) was formed through the merger of two former rival alliances: the G9 Family and Allies, and the G-Pèp (G-People) alliance.¹ Collectively, Viv Ansanm, embodied by Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier, exerts control, or at least substantial influence, over an estimated 80% — possibly more — of the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince, as well as the zones immediately outside the capital.²

The coalition’s attacks have left a large majority of the capital’s population facing a dire humanitarian crisis (see the box). The first quarter of 2024 was the deadliest since the United Nations started monitoring gang-related violence in the country.³ According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), between March and June 2024, the number of internally displaced people increased from 362 000 to over 578 000.⁴

In the capital, gang-led violence has severely impacted daily life. At the peak of the violence, between March and May, hospitals, stores and schools closed or became largely inaccessible, while most people who lived in safer areas avoided venturing out of their homes. Moving around the capital became almost impossible, leading one contact to liken the city to an ‘open-air, gang-controlled prison’. Gangs forced the closure of the international airport between 3 March and 20 May, placing the country under almost total lockdown.

As the capital’s main shipping ports came under blockade by Viv Ansanm, the cost of fuel, food and basic goods has skyrocketed over the past months. The World Food Programme reported that since January 2024, the cost of a food basket has risen by 27%, ‘making food inaccessible for millions of Haitians’, while violence and the closure of critical infrastructure has driven more and more people to the black markets, where fuel prices, can be ‘40% to 50% higher than the official price’.¹⁰

Figure 2 Forcibly displaced persons, 2013–2023.

Note: At close to 700 000, the number of forcibly displaced reached an all-time high in 2023. The latest annual figure is more than twice that of any previous figure in the past decade.
Source: UNHCR

Figure 3 Inflation, 2003–2023.

Note: 2023 marked the largest annual percentage increase in the past two decades.
Source: IMF

Figure 4 Food insecurity, June 2024.

Source: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Famine and Early Warning System

While large numbers of the population are displaced, mostly in the capital and the south of the country, living conditions in gang-controlled areas still depend almost exclusively on the standards imposed by criminal groups. As they regulate daily life, including by enforcing restrictions on movement, the gangs have at the same time, through the Viv Ansanm coalition, leveraged their rhetoric of protecting the population. By distributing food or petty cash, or providing work and social recognition to children enrolled as foot soldiers,¹¹ the gangs seek to consolidate their legitimacy. This quest involves promising to protect the population from attacks by the police, or the MSS mission; they capitalize on their closeness to the people, in contrast to their abandonment by the state.¹² Chérizier, in particular, has put much effort into cultivating his public image, casting himself as an anti-state, anti-system and anti-elite hero of the people.¹³

These practices, classic of criminal groups, are aimed as much at rallying the population as solidifying the group itself, by reinforcing the separation between the gang’s territory and the rest of society. This division between the inside, presented as safe, and the outside, the land of danger, has been adopted in the rhetoric of the gangs, who called on the displaced population to return to their original neighbourhoods, despite the unprecedented level of destruction in much of the downtown.¹⁴ Residents feared that the gangs’ aim is to use them as human shields against the police and the MSS.¹⁵

Some residents of areas that have been controlled by gangs for several years, notably parts of Cité Soleil and Martissant, also express how they have had to adapt to living in a domain controlled by criminal bosses. Although they do not necessary place hopes in the promises made by the criminals, the stark reality expressed by interviewees is that it is the gang leaders who regulate daily life.

Other testimonies, however, illustrate the diversity of criminal leaders’ profiles. In certain territories, some of which are small enclaves, criminal leaders are seen as effective protectors, particularly against attacks by rival gangs. They are also seen as de facto authorities capable of maintaining a semblance of organized daily life. These gang leaders, who usually do not feature in the media, would appear to reflect the construction of the ‘legal bandit’. As such, and besides their social embeddedness in the neighbourhood, such gang leaders seek to position themselves as interlocutors with the authorities, with a view to the political sequence of events that will soon begin, especially with the MSS force now on the ground, and around future elections.

Despite efforts by gang leaders to project themselves as service and governance providers, only a small proportion of the population genuinely supports the groups. What dominates is a sense of abandonment by the state and despair in the face of a catastrophic economic situation. The state and the gangs are regularly pitted against one another, with both sides seen as responsible for the current crisis, leaving the population between a rock and a hard place. The MSS, as an external player, will need to rapidly deliver tangible security results to the community, so as not to be seen as part of the problem but part of the solution.

Beyond violence: The political and economic game

Since February, the gangs’ ecosystem has evolved in several ways. Viv Ansanm has now taken root,¹⁶ and criminal groups have got used to working together in the coalition, even though sporadic conflicts have occurred between them. The months of collaboration have nurtured a kind of institutional memory, a habit of cooperation that has produced positive results for the coalition and contributed to their feeling of being now more powerful as a collective. This is true in terms of territorial control, political and economic weight, and media exposure, as well as the capacity to arm themselves.

Under the banner of Viv Ansanm, gangs have not only extended their domination, but have also changed their strategy by systematically targeting key public and private institutions. These include prisons, one of them the capital’s main penitentiary, from which most of the inmates have escaped in March; a dozen police stations, which have been looted or destroyed; the international airport, which remained closed for almost three months; and the capital’s fuel terminal, which was blocked by the gangs for several days, between April and May.

Figure 5 Incidents of gang violence in Port-au-Prince and periphery, 2018–2024.

Note: Since 2018, close to 60% of violence has been concentrated in the capital.
Source: ACLED

Their modus operandi has also shifted. The most powerful gangs have shown they are capable of hours-long shoot-outs and have become more confident in how they conduct operations.¹⁷ Between February and June, the gangs moved from a strategy of maximum pressure, marked by daily, simultaneous attacks on multiple points of the city to more punctuated targets.¹⁸ This seemed to be a shift towards more strategic objectives, such as ambush attacks on police convoys,¹⁹ and destroying police stations and secondary jails.²⁰ The latter have been shelled in large-scale attacks in cat-and-mouse tactics that have left dozens of dead officers,²¹ and such tactics might be used again, including against MSS officers. Several of these attacks have been claimed by gang leaders in videos posted on social media.²²

The gangs have improved their coordination and tactical operating capabilities, presenting a huge challenge for the Haitian police and MSS force. A police officer told the GI-TOC that gangs have also become more powerful ‘because of the political influences that finance them’.²³ Media reporting corroborates this, with one report stating the Village de Dieu gang (led by Johnson André, ‘Izo’) has received support from the former head of presidential security, Dimitri Herard, who escaped from the central prison during the March attacks (the last story in this bulletin also examines elite political protection). Herard is allegedly helping train Village de Dieu members in operations to confront the police,²⁴ coaching them into a more organized, militia-type operation, as well as providing key connections for drugs and arms trafficking.

In the face of these tactics, the Haitian National Police (HNP), lacking in capacity, have been forced to adopt a reactive strategy, intervening following alerts or citizens’ calls for help.²⁵ Between April and May, however, the police progressively managed to retake certain strategic infrastructure, including the fuel terminal and the airport, thanks to more offensive operations,²⁶ while in June 455 new specialized officers were sworn in, a rare but crucial development.²⁷ The rebuilding of the police, and their coordination with the MSS (notably through strategic meetings and joint patrols), represents a crucial effort on the part of the government and builds the foundation for a public security strategy.

Military-grade weapons

Since February, however, gangs’ firepower has raised much concern. While it is unlikely that the most powerful groups acquired their entire arsenal in the months since then, the period has nevertheless revealed the scale of their weaponry power. The most structured groups are in possession of military-grade weapons, commercial drones and tactical equipment and gear, and are capable of mobilizing men who look like they are trained and kitted out for combat. In this respect, some gangs — Village de Dieu, in particular — are increasingly looking like small militias.

According to William O’Neill, the UN Designated Expert of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,²⁸ and a UNODC May 2024 report to the UN Security Council, gangs received shipments of weapons, ammunition and equipment, even during the total blockade of the capital and despite the UN arms embargo on the country. Moreover, evidence coming from judicial cases confirm not only the central role of the Florida-to-Haiti route used by arms trafficking networks — an axis that allegedly includes the Port-de-Paix area in the north of the country as a key entry point — but also the myriads of intermediaries that smuggle weapons and ammunition within the country.²⁹ These networks make use of individuals in the United States and Haiti to acquire legal weapons through straw purchasers in the US, before packing them — assembled or not — into containers, clearing them through customs and transporting them to Haiti.³⁰ In the capital, larger gangs are said to be in charge of bulk acquisition of firearms and ammunition, before reselling some of them to other, smaller gangs, that do not necessarily have access to the full chain of brokers.

Within these networks, the presence of Haitian officials, from customs and the police, has come to light. These actors are essential to facilitating the firearm trade. Reports have also indicated links between Haitian gangs and Dominican arms smugglers, as well as South American criminal organizations.³¹ The potential connection with Colombian traffickers has sparked alerts about combined cocaine and firearms routes, while the presence of Belgian FN FAL rifles, which can be manufactured in Brazil (under licence by Indústria de Material Bélico do Brasil),³² raises questions about potential links between Brazilian and Haitian criminal groups.

It is difficult to measure precisely the number of firearms in circulation in Haiti. In 2019, the head of the National Commission for Disarmament, Dismantling and Reintegration, said that around 500 000 illegal firearms were circulating in the country, more than double the figure announced by the HNP in 2015.³³ According to the United Nations Security Council Group of Experts, the figure for 2022 was around 600 000 weapons, the vast majority of which were illegal.³⁴ An estimate of the acquisition prices of firearms is shown in the table.

These dynamics illustrate the diversity of gang profiles in Haiti. While not all criminal groups have the means to acquire weapons of war, the consolidation of networks of intermediaries and the continual inflow of firearms pose the risk of ‘democratized’ access to weapons by medium-sized or small groups. Moreover, the situation requires the Haitian authorities, in coordination with the MSS, the governments of the countries concerned (first and foremost the US) and the international community (such as CARICOM’s Implementation Agency for Crime and Security³⁵), to step up the fight against arms trafficking and draw up an effective disarmament strategy for Haiti.

Notes