How Naval Interdiction Could Help Curb Haiti’s Gangs

Money is the sinew of all wars. In Haiti, feuding gangs are financed by illicit traffic of all sorts, including narcotics and weapons. Disrupting that flow of cash could help provide some leverage to the authorities trying desperately to re-establish order. Considering that Haiti is insular, cutting seaborne illicit traffic would be a practical and effective step for countries that wish to help the Haitian population but are hesitant to contribute boots on the ground.

This could be achieved by leveraging the Joint Interagency Task Force–South, whose mission is detecting and monitoring the traffic of illicit narcotics destined for the continental United States. Were it allocated the appropriate number of surface and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, the agency could effectively coordinate the joint and combined effort to seal off the Haitian coast and deter the use of its waters for illicit purposes.

The Struggle

Haitians have faced a great deal of political turmoil in their recent history. The latest Haitian societal breakdown creates an impression of déjà vu that, to a degree, explains the reluctance with which first world nations have responded to the country’s latest call for help. More concretely, the experience of the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti, which ended in 2017, has left a sour taste, conveying the impression that efforts to help Haiti come with unacceptable risks.

Then, in October 2023, Kenya overcame strong internal political and legal opposition to lead a multinational security force in the troubled country. Today, a few months into the mission, Kenya’s forces are faced with serious and difficult challenges. Backed by a mandate similar to the latest U.N. military foray in Haiti, the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti, Kenya is running its current mission with only a fraction of its resources. The previous U.N. mission was led by the most professional of militaries, and yet it took 13 years and a succession of failures to finally declare success. At any given time while the mission operated in Haiti, the number of military and law enforcement personnel allocated to its execution varied from 6,000 to 13,000. To do the same work today, the current Kenyan force package is not even close to that size and still remains a fraction of what was originally promised. Kenya committed 1,000 law enforcement personnel, the Bahamas 150, and Jamaica 200. But today only 400 Kenyans and 20 Jamaicans are on the ground. The current mission is short staffed and not well set up for success.

What also became clear during the U.N. efforts was that tactical force has “limited impact on the presence and power of political-criminal networks” on the island. Gang violence in Haiti is not simply the product of competing criminal organizations but is the result of political, criminal and business factions instrumentalizing criminal groups through fluid networks of influence. In other words, the gangs may be a problem, but the political elites hiring them to do their bidding are at the root of the violence. Sending a small contingent of law enforcement officers won’t address the cultural roots of the issue.

The challenge facing any peacekeeping mission stems from the fact that dysfunction in Haiti’s governance is systemic. As Louis-Alexandre Berg noted, “Gangs and their involvement in criminal and political violence are deeply rooted in Haitian politics.” The country’s institutions and various civil groups are divided into factions, and every faction’s loyalty is up for grabs by the highest bidder. While operating in that context, the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti was dragged into controversies and accused of taking sides.

Arguably, the social breakdown has worsened in the last few years, making the work for the Kenyans even more difficult. The number of gangs has exploded; there are now 200 of them. The escalation of violence and the corruption have decimated the ranks of the Haitian National Police. Already ill equipped to keep the peace, the law enforcement institution is in crisis. From 16,000 active police officers in 2021, the police corps today only numbers 10,000, 3,000 to 4,000 of whom are operational. Political actors are hiring gangs to gain and exercise control over territories and markets, circumventing what’s left of the few “clean” law enforcement elements. Gangs kill five officers on average every month. The armed gangs have effectively overpowered the Haitian National Police. In those circumstances, the Kenyan mission to Haiti needs all the help it can get.

Transnational Criminal Organizations and Narco-trafficking

Gangs need money to operate and purchase their weapons, as do all the other political and private actors in the Haitian society. Handguns worth $400 or $500 on the U.S. market can be resold for as much as $10,000 in Haiti. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest countries in the world; the gross domestic product per capita amounts to just $1,745. Where, then, does all that money to sustain the gangs and private security agencies come from? This subject is not well documented, but a few revenue streams are known.

Kidnappings for ransom, a lucrative activity for the gangs, have increased a spectacular 83 percent in 2023. As noted by the United Nations agency for children in 2021, “Criminal gangs are using children as bargaining chips and making money off parents’ love for their children.” While this practice may be somewhat lucrative, it is hard to believe that preying on already impoverished families constitutes the main source of financing for those criminal groups. Illegal trafficking of narcotics and weapons may offer better returns.

Based on my experience, Haiti is a blind spot for international law enforcement when it comes to transnational criminal organizations. The country doesn’t have the infrastructure to collect information on drug trafficking or the ability to actively interdict illicit activities in and around its territory. For that reason, there are no reliable statistics on the nature and quantity of drugs that pass through the country. In fact, the official numbers on illicit drug seizures are so low that some assume that the transnational criminal organizations are avoiding the country due to its instability in favor of its safer and more predictable neighbor, the Dominican Republic. This assessment may be incomplete.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime concluded that Haiti is “a transit country for the movement of cocaine and cannabis.” In 2021, many areas in Haiti experienced an uptick in illegal air traffic used to transport cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela. Airplanes employed by transnational criminal organizations use Haiti to transfer thousands of kilos of cocaine and to refuel to pursue their voyage toward the Bahamas. The illicit air traffic in the Colombia-Barbados corridor has doubled in 2023. Notably, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a group of 28 mercenaries, mostly Colombian nationals and retired Colombian special forces officers, one week after having ordered the destruction of the illegal airstrips in Savane Diane. It may not have been just a coincidence.

The absence of maritime law enforcement presence and monitoring makes Haiti a “magnet for the transshipment of drugs.” Haiti’s 1,771-kilometer coastline is not monitored or patrolled and is effectively open for anyone to exploit. It is impossible for the Haitian government, equipped with a single coast guard operational vessel and without any intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities or support, to build any recognized maritime picture or to execute any sort of law enforcement. As a result of these gaps in situational awareness, cannabis is smuggled from Jamaica to Haiti by small boats in exchange for weapons, and cocaine enters by sea in the form of global positioning system–tagged parcels that are air-dropped into the water and retrieved by go-fast boats, then offloaded in coastal areas. 

Drug routes involving Haiti (2020–2022). Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Haiti’s Criminal Markets: Mapping Trends in Firearms and Drug Trafficking

Stopping Haiti’s Gangs

A further risk today is that Haiti’s gangs will consolidate into more coherent and powerful cartels working with larger transnational organizations in a key trafficking corridor. It should therefore be in the interest of all regional stakeholders to address Haiti’s gang problem before it spreads farther. Ideally, the current U.N.-backed mission in Haiti would help prevent the expansion of transnational criminal organizations before the situation becomes more out of control. A limited police presence on the ground will not suffice, but the support of a maritime element would be of great value.

Sending an international maritime element to enforce the law around the Haitian coast could help cut the source of financing for the gangs. To be clear, this does not mean an embargo, which would have a devastating impact on the local populations. The last embargo that was imposed on Haiti lasted from 1991 to 1994. The United States deployed six warships to enforce it in 1993. It is estimated that the embargo erased 200,000 jobs affecting more than one million people (15 percent of Haiti’s population), with all the social consequences this entails. The alternative, proposed here, is to simply properly police Haiti’s seaborne approaches to help curb the flow of illicit trafficking of narcotics and weapons. Transnational criminal organizations must also be denied unimpeded access to Haiti.

Naval operations are complex and costly; they require tremendous amounts of resources and a sophisticated degree of coordination. When the scope of operations is pushed beyond their purely military aspect, their level of complexity increases. Navies with a degree of high readiness can fight wars on order, but it would take some time and effort to integrate them into a law enforcement network. The stand-up, from scratch, of a task force to deny the gangs their maritime trafficking routes would require the creation of a dedicated command and control structure and a headquarters capable of coordinating operations as well as fusing information from a complex network of law enforcement, intelligence, and military assets in the entire area of operations. Today, that is unrealistic.

The good news, however, is that there isn’t any need to start from scratch, as such a task force already exists in the region. The U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force–South is already executing those tasks, every day, on a routine basis. Stood up more than 35 years ago, the joint agency has built a wide network of law enforcement and intelligence stakeholders to detect and track the movements and shipments of narcotrafficking organizations in the entire Central and South American region. Based in Key West, its headquarters are already equipped with a state-of-the-art operations command center capable of fusing information from law enforcement and intelligence units and coordinating daily operational and tactical activities of 13 U.S. agencies, including the Coast Guard, Customs and Borders Protection, and the Drug Enforcement Agency, and 21 different partner nations. Monitoring and detecting the movement of illicit narcotics in the Caribbean waters is the Joint Interagency Task Force–South’s bread and butter, executed every day on a routine basis.

This task force could seamlessly, and without any additional local resources, support the ground element of the U.N. mission and increase its chances of success. If mandated to do so, the joint task force could command and control such an international narcotics interdiction task force around Haiti. Indeed, the agency’s mandate would likely have to be tweaked to include other types of trafficked goods such as weapons. It would, however, be impossible to effectively shut down the drugs and weapons trade to and from Haiti with the assets that are allocated today to the Joint Interagency Task Force–South. Additional dedicated naval and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance units would be required.

Currently, it is reasonable to assume that the Joint Interagency Task Force–South disrupts no more than 5 to 10 percent of the illicit drug trafficking in its joint operating area. Even if the numbers seem grim, one needs to understand the context in which the agency operates. On any given day, the task force can count on four to six ships to intercept drug runners in a joint operating area that covers the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, an area the size of the entire continental United States. It is as if the agency were mandated to patrol the entire interstate network of highways with only 10 to 20 police cars. What seems to be a relatively low rate of seizures and disruptions is an indication not of an ineffective task force but rather of a lack of means. Therefore, considering that the Haitian coastline represents only a small fraction of the entire joint operating area, a surge operation to stop the illegal activity coming in and out of the island would have a great chance of success.

That is where G-20 nations could contribute at a very low risk. The command and control, the network, and the infrastructure already exist. Establishing a system of information-sharing between law enforcement elements on the ground in Haiti and the ones already present in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic would just be a matter of standing up the proper contact channels. All that is needed is the additional naval and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to do the job.

Most wealthy countries have been hesitant to commit any boots on the ground in Haiti due to the heightened risk to their personnel, a risk derived from the state chaos that exists in the country. That risk would not exist, however, for a multinational maritime enforcement effort. Gangs in Haiti don’t have any seaborne capabilities; therefore, naval and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets that would be operating around Haiti could act in total safety, without coming under hostile fire. In short, allocating ships and air surveillance assets to the Joint Interagency Task Force–South to help strangle the flow of gangs’ drug and weapon smuggling money would be a safe and effective way to contribute.

The situation in Haiti is more dire by the day. While civil society collapses further into complete chaos, the world is still hesitant to help. Kenya’s current efforts will likely not meet the challenge at hand. The U.N. mission needs all the help it can get. Employing the Joint Interagency Task Force–South as an integrator of a multinational naval effort could contribute to the effort by curbing the flow of narcotics and weapons that transits Haiti unimpeded today. Partner nations have an opportunity to contribute to the island’s security and the success of the U.N. mission at no risk to their own forces. 

Patrice Deschenes is a career naval officer in the Canadian Armed Forces currently posted at the Joint Interagency Task Force–South. The views expressed above are solely his and do not represent any official positions.

Image: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Erick A. Parsons via Wikimedia Commons

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