The year 2026 has seen successive examples of President Donald Trump’s campaign to reverse the course of history through policies of imperial coercion and war. Seeking to restore the incontestability of U.S. power in the world, Trump has so far ordered the capture of Nicolás Maduro, successor to the populist president Hugo Chávez, as well as waging a joint war with Israel on Iran whose goals remain as unclear as Trump’s declaration that he has the right “to do anything I want” with Cuba. By all accounts, the head of Cuba’s Communist Party and its president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, is next.
Yet this year also marks the 40th anniversary of the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s brutal dictatorship in Haiti, created three decades earlier by his father, Dr. François Duvalier. Like Trump’s recent actions, President Ronald Reagan’s administration not only played a decisive role in that process, but authored a script of de-democratization that serves as a parable for understanding the short- and long-term costs of foreign intervention.
On January 31, 1986, Reagan White House spokesman Larry Speakes announced that Jean-Claude Duvalier had resigned his post and left Haiti, even though the declaration was not only unexpected but entirely untrue. Indeed, it was only a week later, on February 7, that the Haitian dictator boarded a U.S. Airforce jet bound for Paris with hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the national treasury on board.
Until then, Duvalier had had no intention of voluntarily surrendering power. On the contrary, when his father “Papa Doc” died in 1971, 19-year-old Jean-Claude assumed the position of “President for Life.” Over the next 15 years, “Baby Doc,” as he was known, inspired the entry of the word kleptocracy into global political parlance.
Together with his mother and advisor, Simone Duvalier, Jean-Clean presented himself to the world as an environmentalist champion of reforestation in Haiti’s still unelectrified countryside. His claims generated a tenfold increase in international aid, which Baby Doc used not only to enrich himself but to embellish the forested plots of vacation homes owned by his cronies who, in turn, extracted profits from selling wood to impoverished peasants. The scheme only further exacerbated poor Haitians’ dependence on charcoal as their main source of fuel. Other achievements of Jean-Claude’s rule included the launch of “enclave tourism” in Haiti with Club Med, a popular five-star beachside resort that opened its doors to thousands of international tourists.
Until 1986, when the Reagan-Bush administration publicly threatened to abandon Baby Doc before the outrage of his terror-ravaged citizens if he did not resign, it had annually granted between $33 million and $45 million in aid to Haiti.
Much of the Reagan-Bush administration’s aid to Haiti served to ramp up the counter-insurgency training of an elite fighting brigade. The brigade complemented the Haitian Army and the paramilitary force founded in 1959 by Papa Doc popularly known as the “Tonton Macoutes,” or “bogeymen,” for the atrocities they committed while preying on the poor. Ironically, given First Lady Nancy Reagan’s domestic “Just Say No to Drugs” campaign, Reagan had tolerated Haitian security forces’ transformation of their country into a major drug trafficking depot. This naturally raised speculation that getting rid of Baby Doc was simply a cover-up related to Reagan’s illegal “resupply missions” to the Contras in Nicaragua. Whatever U.S. officials’ motivations, however, they helped Generals Henri Namphy and Prosper Avril, both graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas and the architects of Haitian narcotrafficking, to form a six-member military junta to take charge of Haiti after Baby Doc fled.
In the coming months, international pressure prompted the creation of a civilian-led electoral council that organized elections for a National Assembly and carried out a popular referendum for a new Haitian Constitution in 1987. Its articles promised to ban Duvalieristes from holding office for 10 years and to prosecute Tonton Macoutes and the military on charges of corruption and massive abuses of human rights.
Tragically, Haiti’s first foray into freedom after 30 years of U.S.-backed dictatorship ended in late November 1987 when thousands of voters, lined up at the polls, faced gunfire and bombings in a massacre that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Hours later, General Namphy famously explained these events with the comment: “Haiti has only one voter: the Army.” By 1990, the Haitian military had carried out five more coups.
Permanent Intervention
From that moment until today, the United States and its backers in the international community have continued to shape Haiti’s political destiny. Their role has been not only decisive but devastating.
This involvement included support for the Haitian military’s 1991 coup against democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide—and the subsequent deployment of 20,000 Marines to re-install him in 1994. During Aristide’s absence, the army carried out a mass assassination campaign against grassroots leaders of Lavalas, Aristide’s political movement, killing between 3,000 and 6,000 activists.
U.S. policies implemented then and continued in similar form today have guaranteed that the many-headed hydra of Haiti’s Duvalier-era security state would eventually surge forth.
Finally, after Haitians elected Aristide for a second time in 2000, the George W. Bush administration engineered what it described as a “rescue” of Aristide from “a rebel movement” composed of former soldiers, armed thugs, and ex-Tonton Macoutes threatening to take Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Aristide was then deposited in the Central African Republic, where he remained under virtual house arrest until 2011, when he was permitted a temporary turn to Haiti.
Throughout the intervening years between Aristide’s two presidencies, Haitians lost more than the chance to end the political impunity of their military, build infrastructure, and reconstruct the economy as Lavalas had once promised them. It lost the chance to disarm the people responsible for terrorizing the nation. As part of the deal that Aristide negotiated with Clinton officials for his return to office in 1994, the Haitian army was to be officially disbanded in favor of a new, 3,000-man national police force.
Yet the U.S. Marines in charge made no effort to disarm the rank-and-file soldiers—let alone the officers—of Haiti’s supposedly “disbanded” army. Today we are seeing the legacy of that failure.
Demobilization without disarmament laid the foundations for the greatest internal problem facing Haiti from that moment to the present: the proliferation of illegal activities ranging from narcotrafficking to weapons and human trafficking. These new “industries” fueled the emergence of a whole new economy based on gangs that quickly embedded itself in Haiti’s foreign-backed political system and the violence on which Haiti’s tiny rich elite depend in order to preserve their way of life.
In other words, U.S. policies implemented then and continued in similar form today have guaranteed that the many-headed hydra of Haiti’s Duvalier-era security state would eventually surge forth.
The Architecture of Violence
Indeed, after a devastating 2010 earthquake left close to a quarter million Haitians dead, repeated foreign interventions by United Nations-financed “peacekeeping” troops from Kenya and Sri Lanka only expanded the gangs’ reach into the day-to-day operations of Haiti’s ports, as well as their ability to exploit the poor and acquire weapons. These troops’ crimes included the creation of brothels where soldiers committed rape and sexually assaulted children, in addition to the careless introduction of cholera to the earthquake-torn country, which resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people. Consequently, perpetrators were merely repatriated rather than tried and imprisoned. In response to the peacekeepers-induced cholera epidemic, the UN only begrudgingly issued a late apology.
The parable of Haiti’s history of foreign interventions then continued with the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. His death at the hands of Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm definitively unleashed the gangs on a war footing.
Up to half a million illegal weapons—from handguns to battle-grade automatic rifles—continue to circulate in Haiti, most of them in the hands of gangs. The human costs have been catastrophic. In 2024 alone, the UN documented over 5,600 killings of civilian Haitians by armed groups. In 2025, authorities recorded 8,000 cases of violence against women and girls. Violence against children has reportedly increased 1,000 percent. With gangs in control of up to 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, more than one million residents have been forced to flee the city.
Two factors explain why there seems to be no end in sight to the devastation.
First, the gangs have not usurped the role of the national police because, by all accounts, police officers themselves comprise a significant portion of their ranks. Worse yet, they have forced hundreds of young child conscripts to join them at gunpoint.
Many wonder whether the gangs are serving as a class-specific security force, as the wealthy elite remain protected economically and politically. Indeed, Haiti is under siege not because of the weakness of its wealthy aristocrats but because of their strength.
Gangs first consolidated control over the poorest areas of the capital, bringing down schools, businesses, hospitals, churches, and entire neighborhoods. There is an overlapping socioeconomic crisis, with double-digit inflation stripping everyday Haitian families of what they had to survive. Yet many of Haiti’s rich elite continue to operate their businesses in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince. The recent staging of Port-au-Prince’s 2026 jazz festival, hailed as a “show of resilience,” should more accurately be labeled a show of contradiction within a theatre state.
Many wonder whether the gangs are serving as a class-specific security force, as the wealthy elite remain protected economically and politically. Indeed, Haiti is under siege not because of the weakness of its wealthy aristocrats but because of their strength. That strength derives from the limitless control that extends from the barrels of guns into the homes and lives of Haiti’s poor.
While more than half of Haiti’s population of 12 million face hunger because of overlapping crises, the ports of Haiti’s capital are flooded with guns and heavy machinery. One shipment of arms acquired in Miami and intercepted in the Dominican Republic in February 2025 reveals what a typical cache destined for the gangs can hold: a heavy Barret M82 semi-automatic rifle, an Uzi submachine gun, sniper rifles, and more than 36,000 rounds of ammunition. Yet Haiti currently possesses not even one large-format scanner to enable its customs officials to identify and interdict the contents of a shipping container or vehicle containing such weapons. Poverty is not the cause. Complicity, if not direct collaboration, with this state of affairs is.
Second, the Trump administration has done nothing to control or even constrain the latest means by which the Haitian government alleges it can fight the gangs: hiring private American military contractors and weapons dealers such as Erik Prince, a Trump ally and the infamous founder of Blackwater Worldwide. Before resurfacing in Haiti after stints in Ecuador and El Salvador, Prince was best known for the conviction of four Blackwater employees in U.S. courts for the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians and the injury of 20 more in the Nisour Square massacre of 2007. In one of the last acts of his first term of office, Trump pardoned them.
Not surprisingly, secrecy rather than transparency defines the actions and operations of these private military contractors. Neither the State Department, which has simultaneously provided millions of dollars in funding to train and equip Haiti’s National Police, nor the Haitian government have released any details on how much U.S. military contractors are being paid or, thanks to figures like Prince, what exactly is being shipped. Although U.S. contractors doing defense work overseas are legally bound to obtain licenses from the State Department, those licenses are not public record.
The United States bears enormous historic responsibility for the violence that plagues Haiti today. The current principal conduit of that violence is also clear: the unrelenting hypocrisy of Haitian officials selected by the United States to spout promises of peace while they openly ensure that the enemies of peace have unchecked access to the means of war.
Today like yesterday, fear and terror are the reasons that Haitian society cannot prosper. The lessons that Haiti’s history teaches are easy to decipher. We simply have to find the political will to recognize and implement them.
Lillian Guerra is professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida. She is the author of five books of history, including a trilogy of works on the Cuban Revolution. She also serves as editor of the Caribbean Crossroads series at the University of Florida Press and editor of the journal Cuban Studies.