Haiti's rescue is being run from abroad

The story of Haiti's spring is that the country's own survival is being decided by other governments. The Kenyan-led police mission that had spent two years failing to dislodge the gangs finally gave up. Its last large contingent flew home from Port-au-Prince in mid-March, and a new United Nations-backed Gang Suppression Force began moving into the space it left. The new force is built to a different design, roughly five times larger and told to hunt armed groups rather than guard buildings. Haitians watched the changing of the guard from the sidelines, having had little say in either mission.

The new force is a coalition of strangers. The first boots on the ground came from Chad, whose soldiers trained in the United States before deploying. Troops from Guatemala and others were pledged behind them. The money came from elsewhere again. More than two hundred million dollars flowed into a UN trust fund from thirteen states, with Canada and Germany the largest donors and Qatar adding a multiyear pledge. A standing group led by the United States and Canada vets who gets to fight in Haiti and who pays for it. The arrangement gave Haiti a security plan, but not one Haitians wrote.

Who would govern was settled the same way. When the transitional council that had run the country since the prime minister's 2021 assassination wound down in February, the United States publicly threw its weight behind Alix Didier Fils-Aime as acting leader and warned rivals against improvising a new structure. That endorsement made him Washington's man as much as Haiti's, with elections promised for August on a timeline almost no one believes the gangs will allow.

The one neighbor acting on its own terms was the Dominican Republic. Even as the gangs raged next door, President Luis Abinader pressed deportations toward a target of ten thousand Haitians a week, sped up a border wall and added soldiers to patrol it. Tens of thousands were pushed back across the line each month into a country that cannot feed or police them. Haiti could only protest. The asymmetry is the whole point of the season: everyone else holds the pen.