Poster of Orinoco Tribune's interview with Kim Ives, English language editor of Haïti Liberté. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—The current popular expressions of protest and rage in Haiti are the beginnings of a social revolution, said journalist Kim Ives of the Haitian media outlet Haïti Liberté.
“The slogan in Haitian demonstrations since I was a kid has been: ‘One Solution, Revolution.’ And I think that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a revolution,” he said during a special interview given to Orinoco Tribune on Friday, March 22.
“This is Haiti’s second social revolution, which is where the means of production change hands, that is, the factories, the land, the banks, the stores, the foundations of the economy change ownership to the underclass,” he continued. “And this is a very messy problem. It hasn’t been easy in any revolution, whether it’s Russian, Chinese, Cuban, you name it. It’s been a protracted long-term period, and those revolutions had organized communist parties leading them. In this case, you don’t have an organized communist party… So I think it’s very easy to infiltrate it and to disrupt it and to confuse it and to destabilize it when you don’t have that core party of seasoned militants, but nonetheless, Haitians have shown determination.”
Kim Ives is a journalist, documentary-maker, and an authority on Haitian issues. He is one of the founders of the weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, where he is a writer and an editor. Previously, he wrote, edited, and photographed for Haïti Progrès for 23 years. He has also written for numerous other publications such as The Guardian, The Nation, The Intercept, The Progressive, Jacobin, and NACLA Report on the Americas. Some of his well-known documentaries include Bitter Cane, Ayisyen Leve Kanpe, The Coup Continues, Killing the Dream, and Rezistans. His most recent work is the documentary series Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising, jointly directed with Dan Cohen. Ives is a member of Crowing Rooster Arts, a film collective specializing in films on Haiti. He is also one of the four pundits in the very popular Kreyòl-language two-hour Sunday afternoon program Haiti en Ondes/Serum Verité, broadcast on Radio Panou, based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a frequent guest on radio and television networks and shows, including Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, CGTN, National Public Radio, The Hill, The Real News Network, and several Pacifica Network and Progressive Radio Network programs.
He is a founding member of the International Support Haiti Network (ISHN), formerly the Haiti Support Network (HSN), and has led numerous delegations to Haiti since 1986 to investigate human rights violations, union struggles, peasant land conflicts, and state-enterprise privatization campaigns.
On March 22, Orinoco Tribune interviewed him on the current socio-political situation in Haiti, the so-called gang violence problem, the looming US invasion, and the geopolitical effect of the Haitian crisis.
Haiti’s “gang problem”
According to Kim Ives, the narrative about the gang violence in Haiti is an imperialist narrative “to demonize and criminalize any resistance,” as imperialism has done historically in Haiti. He explained that these groups “are fundamentally neighborhood committees [that originated] with the debilitation of the state due to neoliberal reforms that began in earnest in 1986… The neighborhood committees became, in fact, the State in many neighborhoods of the city [capital Port-au-Prince], especially as it began to mushroom as peasants were driven off the land by these same neoliberal reforms.”
The journalist did recognize that some neighborhood committees have turned to criminal activities, while other such committees are the targets or victims of the criminal gangs, and have banded together to drive out the criminal gangs from their localities. Jimmy Cherizier, who is vilified in mainstream media as a notorious criminal, belongs to the second group, explained Ives. Cherizier succeeded in creating a “crime-free zone” in the impoverished Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, “and then he tried to ally with other neighborhoods which were doing the same thing, with other neighborhood leaders who had the same vision.”
This gang-neighborhood committee struggle is a feature not only of the capital city but also of the Haitian countryside, where there is little to no police presence, and the people are obliged to take justice into their own hands. “In any case, this growth of the fight between these anti-crime neighborhoods and the criminal gangs has basically been the story of the past five years in Haiti,” Ives commented. “The US called anybody with a gun, who is of the popular classes, a gang. The bourgeoisie up in the hills of Port-au-Prince—they’re all armed. They have whole arsenals in their homes, sometimes 100, 200 guns. The US doesn’t call them gangs, but any popular person who has a gun is a gang member… They’re putting the good guys and the bad guys all in one basket, called the gangs. People have to understand the nuances and the political purpose of the use of the word gangs and gang violence, which is really nothing more than the terminology that the US is using to justify foreign military intervention once again, for the third time in three decades.”
Transitional Presidential Commission: United States’ tool of disguised invasion
When asked about de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s announcement of resignation, Ives commented that Henry is no longer useful for the Unites States’ continued hold on Haiti, and hence it needs someone else, some other group to prevent any revolution from taking power. That was the reason behind US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s emergency visit to Jamaica to create a Transitional Presidential Commission (CPT), “using a blackface diplomatic front in the form of CARICOM [Caribbean Community],” Ives explained. “It’s not all of CARICOM, but three countries in particular. Blinken’s relying on Guyana, whose president, Irfan Ali, is one of the principal proxy tools in the war against Venezuela, over the debate over the contested territory of Essequibo, and Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Motley, who has been showing herself to be more royalist than the king, and of course, Jamaica’s Andrew Holness, who is the prime minister there, who has been hosting many of the CARICOM meetings.”
The journalist further explained that in Jamaica, Blinken first held a meeting with these three CARICOM heads of state, without the presence of any Haitian. “Then they brought in a few Haitians on Zoom, and they announced their big new formula—a seven-member transitional presidential commission—which is essentially the entire Haitian political class, with seven voting members, two observers, civil society, and the religious sector,” he described. “Obviously, it had all been decided at the State Department days before.”
He also broke down the current situation of the Haitian political left. Lamentably, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party, Lavalas, has adopted an “accommodating” position and even refused to not recognize the fake PM Henry. Another leftist party, Pitit Dessalines, a breakaway group from Lavalas, headed by former Lavalas senator Moïse Jean-Charles, appears to be an opportunist. He had initially rejected Blinken’s formula but finally joined it. “He’s a very mercurial character who has generally had a left-leaning reputation, but who is ready to do pirouettes and totally go in the opposite direction after promising not to do so,” Ives said.
In addition to the left, the right and centrist forces, grouped under various coalitions, and several NGOs have become participants in the transitional council which the US is very anxious to impose on Haiti as soon as possible in order to get an official seal for the US-concocted proxy invasion.
Kim Ives also explained the role of G9 and other gangs in ousting Ariel Henry, who was a US asset imposed as “prime minister,” and who never had any legal or popular support. When Henry left the country to go to Kenya to discuss the possible nominally Kenyan-led non-UN security mission for Haiti, “Jimmy Cherizier gathered together his new alliance of armed groups [Viv Ansanm], and they shut down the airports,” he explained. This prevented Henry from returning to Haiti.
Is Haiti’s Former De Facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry Now a De Facto Prisoner?
Guy Philippe: an enigma
Kim Ives was asked about another emerging face of the current Haitian revolution, Guy Philippe, an ultra-left rebel leader who had played a pivotal role in 2004 in helping the United States overthrow the Aristide government. “He was ironically coming from an ultra-left position because his feeling at the time was that Aristide had betrayed his vows of the 1990s and become some kind of sellout, even though he himself, to cure this, ended up working with the US, getting funding and weapons,” he explained. “So when the US cast him aside and then a few years later accused him of drug trafficking and began to send teams to try to arrest him, which he eluded, he became very, very angry and quite bitter against the US for not only double-crossing him and betraying him, but pursuing him… In 2017, he went on to become the elected senator of the south, where he is very popular. He had his base in a town called Pestel, a very picturesque, beautiful town on the southern coast of Haiti, and he is some sort of hero of the south. Then when he went to a radio interview in Port-au-Prince as senator-elect, Haitian police with US backup swept in and arrested him, took him to Miami, and charged him with drug trafficking and money laundering. He has always vehemently denied those charges, and we’ve looked at them and found them to be pretty flimsy.”
Philippe, however, was advised by his lawyers to accept a plea deal for “conspiracy to commit money laundering,” and was sentenced to nine years in prison, though finally he was released after six years and half. He returned to Haiti on November 30, 2022, and since then has been touring the country, giving interviews and speeches. He is eloquent and his events draw in huge crowds. “His speeches are amazing… They’re anti-imperialist. They’re talking about Haiti’s self-determination, independence, history, denouncing the Americans, denouncing foreign intervention in Haiti and foreign meddling, and Haitians love it,” Ives explained.
Nevertheless, what has catapulted Philippe to popularity, especially in the Haitian countryside, was his visit to the canal that Haitian communities in the north are constructing on the Massacre River. There he joined forces with armed Environment Ministry agents called BSAP (Surveillance Brigade for Protected Areas) that is defending the canal from the Dominican armed forces, given that the government of the Dominican Republic is opposed to the Haitian canal (although DR itself has 11 canals from the Massacre River). “BSAP is a kind of a park ranger outfit; it began with 300 park rangers, but now numbers somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000,” Ives explained. “The confrontation between the BSAP agents and the Dominicans in November of 2023 made the BSAP heroes of Haiti, defending Haitian sovereignty and the canal… The director of this force is a guy who is associated with Guy Philippe, and so Philippe became sort of identified with this force.”
“He is, in many ways, the most popular figure in Haiti,” Ives continued. “Maybe even more popular than Cherizier, because Cherizier has been so demonized, had so much mud thrown at him to demonize him as a gang leader and a criminal that has made the Haitian public opinion a little uneasy about him in some quarters… Guy Philippe has some bad press too, but not as much, and he takes a lot of the themes that Cherizier has been saying over the years.”
Cherizier has even announced that he will not be against Guy Philippe becoming the head of a presidential council, while Philippe has called Cherizier “commander” and has called upon the gangs to lay down their arms. “So I think the two of them are basically looking for the same thing, giving the same message… Jimmy Cherizier is playing an important role, but to some extent in step with Philippe,” Ives opined.
Kim Ives called upon the international progressive left to push back against the US propaganda narrative that is being weaponized to justify the invasion of Haiti. He warned that if the United States can invade Haiti today without facing enough opposition, especially from Latin American blocs like the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), then it can use the same methods to invade other countries in the region in the future. “They have to realize that Haiti is just the prototype, the test case, so the US can apply it in other countries… It is very important for the CELAC nations to be aware of the danger that Washington presents,” he said.
“We really have to realize that right now, this is the moment where we have to get behind the Haitian revolution and push back in every possible way we can, and try to get some of our comrades who are confused by the disinformation blizzard to see clearly the potential and possibilities of this moment,” he concluded.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Saheli Chowdhury
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Saheli Chowdhury
Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She is a contributor and works for Orinoco Tribune.
