Poster for Orinoco Tribune's interview of Haiti Liberte's Kim Ives. Photo composition: Orinoco Tribune.
The United States is occupying Haiti through the “transitional presidential council,” a sort of “interim government” supposedly tasked with bringing stability and institutionality to the country, commented journalist Kim Ives during an interview with Orinoco Tribune.
“It is a puppet grouping… [US Secretary of State] Anthony Blinken put the entire political class of Haiti into one group for governing the country,” he explained further. “And this has created something that is completely dysfunctional and completely at each other’s throat—instability is built into the structure. Lenin said that revolutions do not happen when the masses are hungry and miserable. They happen when there is division within the ruling class. And that is exactly what is happening in Haiti now.”
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 latest 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 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 schemes. He is a frequent guest on radio and television networks and shows, including Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, CGTN, National Public Radio, The Hill TV, The Real News Network, Turkish TV, and several Pacifica Network and Progressive Radio Network programs.
On December 5, Ives gave an interview to Orinoco Tribune, where he discussed the current social and political situation of Haiti and the impact of US interventionism on the nation.
Haiti’s “second revolution”
Kim Ives refuted the characterization of Viv Ansanm (Live Together), a coalition of neighborhood defense groups led by Jimmy Cherizier, as an organized criminal gang. Instead, he called it a social movement building what he branded “Haiti’s second revolution.”
“In the past 30 years, we have seen two types of revolution in Haiti,” he explained. “The first was a political revolution that happened in 1990, with the Lavalas Party and Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s accession to power. It was the first time that a people’s candidate got to power instead of one selected by the US empire—the first time since 1915 when US Marines invaded the country. It was a political revolution in the sense that Aristide captured the presidency, and that was the only thing he captured because the economy, the infrastructure, the deep state of Haiti remained as it was.”
Winning the presidency was not enough for a popular force, which soon became evident through the coups that removed Aristide from power the two times that he became president.
On the other hand, Ives pointed out that “a social revolution is where the masses take over the means of production, the factories, the land, the resources, all the infrastructure of the country—as we have seen in Cuba or China or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917… It was a social revolution that happened in Haiti in 1804, when the slaves freed themselves and kicked out the French. That was the first social revolution of Haiti. And what is underway now—I call it the second social revolution.”
In this regard, Ives stressed that the characterization of Cherizier as a “gang leader” and Viv Ansanm as “a tool of the bourgeoisie” by some organizations ostensibly on the left is “fundamentally the position of the US State Department, of the Haitian bourgeoisie, to vilify the guy who is threatening the system.”
He went on to explain that Cherizier, a former police officer, founded the organization G9 in 2020 “to stop kidnapping, extortion, rape, all sorts of crimes in the poor neighborhoods, and to get services for those neighborhoods: hospitals, roads, schools, electricity, sanitation, all the fundamentals of civilization. The next day, the bourgeoisie set up a counter-front called G-Pep, basically consisting of the criminal groups which were involved in the crimes. Thus started three years of war between G9 and G-Pep.”
The G-Pep, backed by the Haitian bourgeoisie and later by the government of Ariel Henry, who had filled the power vacuum after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in February 2022, was on the point of defeating G9 when Cherizier decided to “win them over,” said Ives. “He has always said that these guys [of G-Pep] are not his enemies, that his enemies are the bourgeoisie, the imperialists… So, in September 2023, he managed to launch the Viv Ansanm, which was basically the merger of G9 and G-Pep.”
However, the Viv Ansanm coalition really came into being earlier this year, after Henry, on February 29, signed an agreement on the non-UN Multilateral Security Support Mission (MSS) for Haiti, nominally “led” by Kenya but fundamentally a US invasion scheme using the United Nations and Kenya as a façade.
In response to concerns about the gang nature of various groups within Viv Ansanm, Ives emphasized that the movement is not an imposition but is of organic nature, and the coalition has the potential to become a guerrilla movement. “That is why since February 2024, it has become the principal foe of US imperialism in Haiti,” he said.
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US interference: multilateral security mission, transitional presidential council
“The MSS has turned out to be a disaster,” Ives commented in reference to the security mission’s operations in Haiti. “It was supposed to have 2,500 troops from 10-12 countries. But right now, it is basically 430, mostly Kenyans, and a smattering of Jamaican and Bahamanian cops. Financially it is basically supported by the US, not the UN… The collection at the UN has been dismal.”
As for the MSS in Haiti, he reported that “the Kenyans have rarely left their US-built barracks down by the airport [in Port-au-Prince]. They have gone out for a couple of photo ops, where they go into a house which has been abandoned for four years and kick in the doors or shoot into a mattress.” The situation has become so dismal that the United States is pushing for a UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. “There was a Security Council session to this effect on November 20… but I think Russia or China would veto it,” Ives added.
In parallel, the United States has a more direct mechanism for controlling Haiti, the so-called Transitional Presidential Council (TPC), supposedly tasked with stabilizing Haiti and creating the conditions for holding “free and fair elections” in the country. However, according to Ives, the TPC is an unstable structure composed of rival groups with vested interests and, therefore, seems to be “in no condition to hold presidential elections by February 7, 2025.” In fact, the TPC has postponed the elections until the end of 2025 after its members held a meeting earlier this month with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), an arm of the US soft power funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that “advises” the TPC on electoral matters.
Regarding the structure of the TPC, Ives explained that it has nine members: seven voting members representing the various political sectors of Haiti and two non-voting members representing the NGOs and the Church. “They are all rivals, but they are basically in two different blocks,” he remarked. “These are the factions in the Haitian ruling class… and the bourgeois sector is running the show in Haiti, but of course under the aegis of the US State Department. The people have been kicked out.”
“One solution, revolution”
When asked for his view on a political solution in Haiti, Ives responded, “There is only one solution: revolution. I think Haiti is in mid explosion now, and it is going to be very hard to put the genie back in the bottle… In Haiti, where the US has always been held up as some sort of great arbiter and a great force for good, people are seeing that it has just not been the case, and that is why, to me, at this moment, Haiti has never had a more propitious alignment of the stars for revolutionary change.”
He urged all anti-imperialists to “accompany this spontaneous, almost autonomous uprising of the poor masses. The bourgeoisie gave them guns to fight among each other, and now they turn those guns on the bourgeoisie. We should be supporting this. We should recognize this as part of a process which has momentum, where people are beginning to see the need to break away from the empire worldwide.”
Special for Orinoco Tribune by staff
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