1: RETURN
I came back to Haiti just as it seemed like everyone was leaving. The arrivals section of the airport, normally packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people awaiting their loved ones, was almost deserted. The motorcycle taxis and brightly painted tap-taps that usually cram the road from the airport to the MCC office were strangely absent.
There’s no gas, said my colleague, by way of explanation.
Since I left the country two years ago, the violence that had begun while I was living there has spiraled out of control. Gangs now control large swathes of the country’s capital, turning the simple act of going to work into a minefield. Even those not directly affected by violence suffer its secondary effects—the gas shortages, the moribund economy, the missed weddings and funerals and baptisms.
A few days after I arrived, my colleagues and I travelled to Desarmes, a rural town far from the chaos and violence of the capital where MCC has worked for decades. When I arrived at the offices of partner Konbit Peyizan for the first time in two years, I noticed some new faces, and some others that were missing. One former colleague, I was told, was in the United States and had successfully applied for TPS.
TPS (Temporary Protected Status) grants citizens of countries suffering extreme circumstances, usually disasters or war, temporary legal status in the United States. After years of providing TPS for Haitians based on conditions after the 2010 earthquake, the US had recently updated the designation to reflect the insecurity and violence currently plaguing the country. Essentially, the US government had acknowledged that conditions in Haiti are not safe for anyone.
And yet, there I was.
2: UNEXPECTED JOURNEYS
Lachappelle is a small town about a half-hour moto ride from Desarmes. It’s picturesque, with brightly painted houses lining narrow streets, surrounded by lush mountains. The day we visited, however, my colleagues and I were more interested in the wifi than the view. It had been days since we had received Internet of any kind in Desarmes, and if at first our digital isolation had been relaxing, we were starting to feel anxious about the unread emails piling up in our inboxes. After hearing there might be signal in Lachappelle, we piled on a couple of motorcycle taxis and made the dusty, bumpy journey to the Lachappelle Community Library.
Later, our Zoom meetings completed and emails responded to, we sat with one of the library volunteers as we waited for our taxi drivers to return. She asked where we were from.
We’re Canadian, I said, but we’re staying in Desarmes.
Are you married?
No, I said, laughing. Are you?
I have a boyfriend, she said, but not here. He’s in Turkey.
Turkey? I said, surprised. I had expected Port-au-Prince, or the Dominican Republic, or Chile, but certainly not a country as far away and with no obvious connections to Haiti as Turkey.
Yes, she said, there are a lot of Haitians in Turkey. A lot of people from Lachappelle leave to work there.
A few weeks later, I did some research. Migration from Haiti to Turkey is a recent phenomenon, one that has exploded over the last few years as other countries have closed their borders to Haitians. Some see the country, which is not part of the European Union but adjacent to it, as a stepping stone to EU countries like Germany. Many of the Haitians who arrive in Turkey have fallen victim to scammers or traffickers, and even ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring Greece.
Our driver arrived, and we said goodbye. The Artibonite Valley whipped by, palms and mango trees and the huge sacred mapou trees, all a brilliant green from the summer rains. Eventually, everything blurred together as our driver accelerated, trying to beat the dark clouds on the horizon.
3. REMITTANCES
Desarmes is, in some ways, a strange town. It doesn’t coalesce around a central plaza with a neat little grid of streets like the nearby towns. It’s a loosely scattered community, or set of communities, that blend into one another without any clear indication that you’re leaving one community and entering another. Houses are generally small, sometimes almost invisible behind cactus fences and fruit trees. Sometimes it hardly feels like you’re in a town at all.
But as we drove through Desarmes in the course of our daily tasks, I started to notice big houses that hadn’t been there two years earlier. Some were half constructed, others finished and painted pale pink or yellow. Instead of cactus fences, they had elaborate walls made of concrete and iron. There were spaces for large windows, to be filled with iron grates or maybe even glass.
Yes, said a colleague when I asked about the new houses. He laughed. Desarmes is becoming a city.
We speculated on who was building these new houses. Do you think they’re people with family overseas? I asked. My colleague agreed this was likely the case. While we couldn’t know for sure, incongruously large houses in rural areas are a common sight in communities with high out-migration throughout the region. While surely some of the houses were built by people simply doing good business within Desarmes, remittances make up almost a quarter of Haiti’s GDP. That money makes its way all over the country, even the smallest and most remote villages.
A morning horseback ride seemed to confirm our theory. We stopped near a large lot on the way the riverside, which contained nothing but a fence and some rebar. Another colleague explained that the land had been bought by a family member living in the US, who planned to build a hotel there. Within a few months, that colleague too would leave for the United States.
4. BORDERLESS VIOLENCE
On July 7th, a couple weeks after I arrived in Haiti, I woke up to a barrage of messages on my phone. My heart sank. Are you OK? Good morning, if you can call it that. It wasn’t even 7 o’clock.
The PDF in the group chat was small, and blurry, and in French. I squinted. Le président de la République a été mortellement blessé, I read: “The president of the Republic has been mortally wounded.” It took my stunned, sleepy brain several seconds to understand what that meant. The president had been murdered. We were living in a country without a government.
As details emerged over the next few days and weeks, the story became stranger and stranger. A group of armed men had entered the President’s home. The armed men killed the president and injured his wife. The armed men were Colombian mercenaries. The Colombian mercenaries were still in Haiti, and then they were in custody. Some of the Colombian mercenaries had received US military training. The Colombian mercenaries had entered Haiti through the Dominican Republic, and had spent quite a lot of time in Port-au-Prince before whatever happened, happened.
Jovenel Moise’s assassination, and the violence that is now engulfing Haiti, feel in part like the unintended consequences of a borderless war that stretches from the United States to Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia to the Caribbean. The US exports counterinsurgency techniques developed in Iraq and Afghanistan to Colombia—and vice versa. Colombians trained in these techniques retire in Colombia, and sell their services—that training–to the highest bidder. Weapons produced in the United States end up in the hands of overzealous militaries and organized crime all over Latin America. The president of a Caribbean country is murdered by those same mercenaries and the population is terrorized by those guns. The country becomes increasingly unlivable, and people make what feels like the only viable decision: they leave.
5. DETERRENCE
In the uncertain days after the assassination, many wondered if the US or UN would intervene; some even called for it. After all, the US and its allies have always played a heavy hand in Haitian politics, approving or discarding presidents as they see fit. A UN peacekeeping force first arrived in Haiti in 2004, during another period of political instability and gang violence. It was the first and only peacekeeping force ever sent to a country not at war.
Somehow, despite my knowledge of the centuries of foreign intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean, I found it hard to imagine the US sending an expensive military force to Haiti at this particular moment. For years, the US had been growing increasingly isolationist—just weeks later we would witness the their dramatic withdrawal from Afghanistan. So what did the US want from Haiti?
It soon became clear that the US was more concerned with what it didn’t want—Haitian migrants. Just weeks after I returned to Mexico from Haiti, a caravan of Haitian migrants entered Mexico. Those who managed to escape the US-funded zone of militarized checkpoints on Mexico’s southern border eventually arrived in the United States only to be chased down by mounted CBP agents brandishing whips like cowboys in a bad Western.
While the whip-wielding border patrol agents were unexpected, the general attitude was not. James B. Foley, US ambassador to Haiti during President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s removal from office in 2004, wrote in an op-ed that his express instructions from the US government during that crisis had been to do whatever possible to avoid mass migration to the US—and that Aristide, knowing this, used the threat of migration in his negotiations with his US counterparts. While you probably shouldn’t trust everything you hear from US officials about what happened in Haiti in 2004, this information is included almost as a throwaway statement, which I think is revealing. The role Haitian migrants played, and continue to play, as bargaining chips in the political machinations between the US and Haiti is taken almost for granted.
And political crises haven’t been the only events to get the United States worried about Haitian migrants showing up at their door. Barely a week after the 2010 earthquake, a US Air Force plane flew over the devastated capital, telling Haitian citizens not to attempt an ocean crossing to the United States: “they [the Coast Guard] will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”
6. SOMOS MIGRANTES
Among the Haitians who didn’t quite make it to the United States was an acquaintance who had left Desarmes for Chile several years ago and had since decided to try his luck elsewhere. Another friend and I went to visit him in the fall.
Besides getting to know the city where he was living, we also wanted to help him regularize his migration status—he doesn’t speak much Spanish, and it’s hard to find work without papers. On the last day of our visit, we all got in a taxi and headed to another part of the city to meet with a lawyer at a migrant rights organization.
Our friend wants to get his papers in order, we said, our accents unplaceable but definitely not Mexican.
Of course, come in, said the lawyer, ushering him into her office. Then she looked at us. And you two, you have your papers already?
It caught me off guard. Oh, no, I almost said, I’m not a migrant. But I am, of course. So I just said yes, thank you, and sat down to wait.
As I waited, I remembered the stories our friend had told us about his decision to leave Chile, and the journey to Mexico. Like many Haitians in Chile, opportunities had dried up for him over the course of the pandemic. He wanted a better life for himself, but he also wanted adventure. He wanted to challenge himself and see the world.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, he said. But it was a beautiful experience.
I worried that if he described his experience that way, instead of recounting a sad tale of persecution and terror, he would be told he didn’t have a case and deported. This seemed unfair. After all, I moved to Mexico to see the world and challenge myself. During my entire migration process, I’ve never been asked a single question about why I should be in Mexico.
It often feels like there’s two different narratives for migration, where some people get to migrate simply because they want to, and others have to justify their presence by proving they’ve experienced a sufficient amount of trauma.
Migration has been a beautiful experience for me. I hope one day it will be just as beautiful for my Haitian friends.
Annalee Giesbrecht is the Context Analyst and Advocacy and Communications Support Coordinator for MCC LACA. She lives in Mexico City.