At the UN, Haiti’s Crisis Has Only One Author: The “Gangs”

By Kim Ives, Haiti Liberté, July 22, 2026

On Jul. 20, 2026, the UN Security Council convened its 10198th meeting to review the situation in Haiti — a 90-day briefing that fell on the same day Haiti officially launched voter registration amid what BINUH chief Carlos Ruiz Massieu himself called a country facing “persistent insecurity, acute humanitarian needs, and institutional challenges with devastating consequences for its population.”

Over roughly two and a half hours, a parade of officials and diplomats offered a picture of Haiti’s crisis that was, in its broad strokes, coherent, alarming, and almost entirely one-sided: the country’s agony, as told to the Council that day, has a single culprit — the neighborhood armed groups the briefers uniformly called “gangs.”

Three voices set that frame most forcefully: Ruiz Massieu, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative and head of the UN Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH); Jack Christofides, the newly installed Special Representative for the Gang Suppression Force (GSF); and, above all, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz. Between them, they described a nation held hostage by criminal violence, requiring international muscle to save it.

What none of them mentioned — not once, according to the meeting record — was the role that Erik Prince’s Vectus Global mercenaries and the Haitian National Police (PNH) have played in killing hundreds of Haitian civilians with kamikaze drones and death-squad-style operations in Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighborhoods. Nor did anyone raise the UN’s own financial crisis, which threatens the logistical backbone of the very force the Council was there to praise. Nor were the documented human-rights concerns about unvetted Sri Lankan troops, among others, bound for the GSF given any airing.

Massieu and Christofides: security first, always

Ruiz Massieu told the Council that Haiti’s “transition stands at a critical moment,” pointing to a revised electoral decree and a newly agreed electoral budget as grounds for cautious optimism. But he was equally clear that “gang violence remains the country’s most severe threat,” warning that it continues “exacting a heavy toll on a beleaguered population.” He urged that the full deployment of the GSF “remains critical” to protect the political process — folding the entire security narrative into the register of “gang violence,” without reference to who else has been killing Haitians in the neighborhoods where that violence is concentrated.

Christofides, named to his post in December and briefing the Council in his new capacity for the second time, offered an operational update presented almost entirely as a story of professional progress: a headquarters stood up, command arrangements and intelligence structures established, an early operation in Tabarre on Jun. 21 that saw suspects detained and gang barricades removed. “Implementation is progressing steadily,” he said, describing the force’s early raids as evidence of “growing tactical capacity and commitment.” For the skeptics viewing, he offered the characteristic bromide that the GSF’s actions so far “will not transform the situation overnight” but “they are essential building blocks for long term peace, security and the rule of law.”

Nowhere in their remarks did either the BINUH chief or the GSF’s spokesman address the mounting toll of Vectus Global’s and the PNH’s drone and armored-vehicle operations against the same neighborhoods the GSF is meant to secure — operations that human rights investigators have identified as killing more civilians than combatants.

Waltz: international villains without evidence

It was Ambassador Waltz, however, who delivered the meeting’s most sweeping and least substantiated indictment. Recounting his brief Jul. 10 visit to Port-au-Prince, Waltz described Haiti’s armed groups as having turned “entire neighborhoods, an entire city” into a “kill zone,” noting that “gangs” have seized roads, the country’s main port, hospitals, and prisons. He said he found it “incredibly disturbing” that gang members were “celebrating” their violence on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, “portraying themselves as revolutionaries as they recruit children to their cause.”

Then Waltz went further, making a claim about global reach with no supporting evidence offered to the Council: that Haiti’s neighborhood armed groups are not just a local threat but an international trafficking network. As he put it, “these gangs move guns and drugs and terror throughout the Caribbean” — extending, in Waltz’s telling, “onward to West Africa, Europe, and the United States.” It is a striking, and totally unfounded, assertion.

Haiti’s neighborhood-based armed groups  — mostly part of the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) alliance, founded in September 2023 and concentrated in greater Port-au-Prince’s slums — were presented to the Security Council as a transnational security threat stretching across two oceans, without a shred of documentation, seizure data, interdiction record, or named source offered in support. No UN sanctions panel report, no law-enforcement case, no evidence trail was cited. The claim simply floated into the Council record as fact, because a U.S. ambassador said it.

This is Washington’s attempt to justify its violation of the UN Charter, trying to cast a purely internal Haitian class struggle into a threat to “international peace and security.” The Charter’s Article 2 specifically forbids the Council’s meddling in internal affairs: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

At one point, Waltz became so hyperbolic and carried away in his presentation that he stated: “The UN has had to step in, in some cases, uh, they are empowered with an offensive mandate.” That is not the case today. The GSF is not a UN peace-keeping force deployed by the Council. It is a “Coalition of the Willing,” assembled by Washington, which the Council only gave a green light to deploy.

But Waltz plunges on: “Thanks to the work of this council, uh, they [the GSF soldiers working on Washington’s behalf] are empowered with an offensive mandate to take on the, the ‘Barbecues’ of Haiti, [a reference to Viv Ansanm leader Jimmy Cherizier] uh, these gang leaders and bring them to justice, frankly, and arrest [sic] Haiti back from these wannabe dictators who treated streets like a violent playground…. We’re particularly grateful to the Dominican Republic, who sees this rightly as an existential threat to its security and has been incredibly, I think, as accommodating as it can be and should be, and to facilitating, uh, the GSF into getting into, into position in Haiti, so to speak.”

That framing matters because it does real work: it recasts a domestic Haitian crisis, rooted in decades of U.S.-backed coups d’état, foreign military interventions, neocolonial and NGO undermining of the Haitian state, and a flood of U.S.-sourced firearms, as an outward-facing threat to the United States and to “West Africa, Europe” — a framing that justifies more aggressive, less accountable intervention while saying nothing about the deadly intervention already underway.

The massacres no one at the table would name

What Waltz, Ruiz Massieu, Christofides, and virtually every other speaker left out of the Jul. 20 meeting is the second half of Haiti’s violence story — the half inflicted not by “gang” members but by the very forces the Council was there to celebrate.

Since March 2025, Haiti’s transitional government has waged a campaign of “kamikaze” drone strikes against poor neighborhoods, carried out by the PNH under contract with Erik Prince’s Vectus Global — the successor firm to Prince’s notorious Blackwater. Haiti Liberté‘s ongoing coverage of that campaign has documented, strike by strike, what independent human rights investigators have separately confirmed: that a large share of the dead are not combatants but ordinary residents. Human Rights Watch found that explosive drone strikes killed more than 1,200 people between March 2025 and January 2026 alone, including dozens of confirmed civilians. Haiti Liberté‘s own reporting on the same period found a still higher civilian toll, including 30 people killed in a single New Year’s Day strike on Rue St. Martin.

The outlet’s June 2026 dispatch, “June’s Deadly Mercenary Offensive Kills Dozens More Innocent Civilians,” described drone attacks in Village de Dieu that killed at least four children on a single day, Jun. 3, along with a woman whose arm was severed by a blast. She died as a result.

Citing the Haitian outlet Verite Presizyon, Haiti Liberté reported witnesses describing the strikes as showing “limitless cruelty being perpetrated against the civilian population.” The same report documented a separate May 8 incident in which an armored police vehicle, after wounding a woman in the leg near Grand Rue with gunfire, returned to finish killing her, as it killed two other bystanders — the kind of point-blank execution that has become a recurring feature of PNH operations rather than an aberration.

Haiti Liberté‘s month-by-month accounting of the offensive against Belair, another dossier documenting continuing police and mercenary killings, and its retrospective on 2025 as “the year of kamikaze drones” collectively describe a pattern rather than isolated incidents: armored units and drone teams operating on the premise, as one PNH officer reportedly told France24, that there are effectively “no civilians” in the poor neighborhoods where the operations occur.

The single most searing incident came on Sep. 20, 2025, when two government drones struck a birthday party in the Simon Pelé section of Cité Soleil, where a suspected gang leader was distributing gifts to neighborhood children. At least eight children between the ages of two and ten were among the roughly 11 to 15 people killed, according to multiple human rights and news accounts; six more children were wounded. Nearly a year on, Haiti’s government has still not formally acknowledged responsibility.

None of this — not the systematic pattern, not the specific atrocities, not Erik Prince’s central role as the government’s paid executioner — found its way into the public record of the Jul. 20 meeting, at least as reported by the UN’s own meetings coverage and by wire services covering the session. The briefers spoke of children as gang recruits and gang victims; none spoke of children as drone casualties.

The financial crisis nobody mentioned

The meeting was equally silent on a structural problem that could hobble the GSF regardless of how many troops eventually deploy: the UN’s broader financial crisis, and the very real possibility that it will squeeze the UN Support Office in Haiti (UNSOH), the body responsible for providing the GSF’s logistics, rations, medical care, transport, and troop rotations.

As Haiti Liberté has reported, UNSOH’s mandate depends on funding streams tied to a UN system already straining under member-state arrears — with the United States the far-and-away largest and most recalcitrant debtor — raising the question of whether the logistical scaffolding underpinning the entire GSF concept can hold even as Christofides publicly touted its “momentum.” That tension went entirely unaddressed on Jul. 20.

Begging for planes to fight gangs while bombing Iran and encircling Cuba

One of the meeting’s more concrete threads was distinctly logistical: the U.S. representative used his floor time to call for more international assistance — “particularly the contribution of aircraft to accelerate the deployment of troops and equipment” for the GSF.

Roberto Álvarez Gil, the Dominican Republic’s foreign minister, put a number on the shortfall: the GSF’s authorized strength is 5,550, and as of the meeting, barely 1,000 troops were on the ground. The force, he warned, is being held back by “an obstacle of a purely logistical nature” — namely, the absence of the airlift capacity needed to move waiting Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, and Ivorian contingents into Haiti.

There is an irony in Washington’s difficulty conjuring transport aircraft for a mission it has orchestrated and championed as an urgent regional priority, even as the U.S. military — by a wide margin the best-resourced armed force in human history — has spent recent months surging assets toward its illegal war against Iran, and mounting a substantial naval and strike buildup against first Venezuela and now Cuba, including a campaign since last September of lethal, extrajudicial strikes on small vessels (which it labels as piloted by “narco-terrorists,” without any evidence) in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The same superpower asking Colombo, Dhaka, Abidjan, and now nations anywhere, to help airlift a few thousand troops into Port-au-Prince has, by its own public accounting, tied up a considerable share of its airlift capability elsewhere in the hemisphere and the Middle East in patently unlawful aggression.

Sri Lanka’s unvetted troops: another silence

Also absent from the Jul. 20 discussion was a controversy that has been building for months among international human rights organizations: concern that the roughly 900 Sri Lankan soldiers and 140 police officers slated for GSF deployment have not been subjected to an independent, credible vetting process.

Human rights and victims’ groups have publicly called on the UN, the Haitian government, and the GSF’s Standing Committee to suspend the deployment until a screening mechanism involving the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is actually in place, warning that current vetting relies chiefly on information supplied by the Sri Lankan government itself — the same government whose military stands accused of grave rights violations during and after its civil war, and whose “peacekeeping” deployments have a documented history of misconduct, including a 2007 scandal in which more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were repatriated from Haiti over sexual exploitation and abuse allegations. None of that history, or the current vetting dispute, surfaced in the Council chamber.

Russia, China, and Pakistan push back

If the meeting’s American-aligned speakers offered an uncomplicated narrative, three Council members pushed back — and did so by pointing at the one actor conspicuously absent from Waltz’s account of Haiti’s troubles: the United States itself.

Russia’s delegate, Anna Evstigneeva, argued that “Haiti should decide its future independently, without nefarious external interference which is what caused many of the country’s problems in the first place.” She also noted that fighting Haiti’s “gangs” by force alone, without addressing the weapons that sustain them, was “akin to bailing water out of a sinking ship while ignoring the hole in its hull.” She went further, naming the U.S. directly as the principal source of the illicit weapons shipments fueling the violence and arguing that arms-embargo violations continue largely unaddressed.

China’s Ambassador Sun Lei: “Haitian authorities and all political parties and groups must genuinely demonstrate political will, build broader consensus through inclusive dialogue.” Photo: UN TV

China and Pakistan, both of which abstained alongside Russia when the Council blessed the GSF last September, used their turns at the podium to press for a faster, more credible political transition and free elections rather than an open-ended security buildup — an implicit rebuke of a strategy that, ten months after the GSF’s creation, still leaves the force chronically undermanned and dependent on outside airlift.

In a departure from the U.S. script, Pakistan’s Ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad did say that the “violent actions of vigilante groups are deplorable,” a reference to the government-aligned PNH paramilitary groups which have arbitrarily executed dozens of civilians – including women and children – for reasons as simple as the address on their national identity card.

China’s Ambassador Sun Lei also made the pointed observation that “the key to breaking the vicious cycle of crisis in Haiti lies in establishing a legitimate, effective, and accountable government and putting national governance back on the right track,” a diplomatic way of asserting that de facto Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé’s government is illegitimate, ineffective, and unaccountable.

China’s representative also counseled that “Haitian authorities and all political parties and groups must genuinely demonstrate political will, build broader consensus through inclusive dialogue,” a proposal which Viv Ansanm has repeatedly made but which Washington, and hence Fils-Aimé, steadfastly reject.

Thirdly, and most importantly, China emphasized that the solution to Haiti’s crisis would not come from “security” established by guns but rather that it is “imperative to continue to alleviate the livelihood challenges of the population. Haiti’s security turmoil is merely a symptom. The deeper problem lies in the decades of state failure, which has led to economic decline and chronic underdevelopment.” The state “must increase investment in people’s livelihoods, provide basic services and guarantees such as food, education, employment and effectively improve the living and development conditions of the population.” China was essentially echoing the repeated call of Jimmy Cherizier.

“Ultimately, Haiti’s future must be built by the Haitian people themselves. We support the Haitian people in firmly taking their destiny into their own hands and achieving lasting peace, stability and development,” China concluded.

A force approaching its first birthday, still far from its projection

The GSF will mark its first anniversary on Sep. 30, 2026, having been authorized by Security Council resolution 2793 at Washington’s urging, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio pressing for a force of 5,550 troops backed by UN logistical support drawn substantially (and aberrantly) from the broader peacekeeping budget. Ten months later, with barely over 1,000 troops, a fraction of its authorized strength, still waiting on the aircraft, funding, and vetted personnel needed to become the force its architects promised.

What the Security Council and world heard on Jul. 20, in other words, was a briefing built almost entirely around the narrative that all of Haiti’s problems result from violence which Haiti’s neighborhood armed groups supposedly inflict, delivered by officials and a superpower’s ambassador with every incentive to keep the story that simple.

What went unmentioned — the mercenary drone war on Haiti’s poor, the UN’s own fraying finances, the vetting gaps in incoming foreign troops, and the awkward optics of a global military hegemon pleading poverty on airlift while surging forces toward Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba — did not stop being true simply because no one in the chamber said it out loud.

Posted July 28, 2026