Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Confident of victory over Ukraine, Russia exhibits Western war trophies

Two women are seeking Mexico’s presidency. But the race is about a man.

Hamas in Cairo for hostage talks as Israel briefs aid agencies on Rafah

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Ask Amy: My boyfriend just confessed he’s almost $20,000 in debt

Miss Manners: Is it inappropriate to reach out to old girlfriends?

Carolyn Hax: Longtime friend won’t forgive being last-minute canceled for a guy

In a pinch, the Nationals finally find some offense

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

The Capitals, a team in transition, know what they want this offseason

Biden confronts campus protests; Trump hedges on accepting election results

Kristi Noem just won’t stop talking about killing her dog

Noem’s dog-killing isn’t popular, though Trump supporters are divided

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

The Post endorses April McClain Delaney and Tom Royals for Maryland’s 6th District

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

In photos: At least 39 dead as historic flooding hits southern Brazil

Sea level rise brings new era of dangerous flooding

Michael Cohen keeps broadcasting despite being a witness

Trump Media auditor charged by SEC with ‘massive fraud’

Google’s empire is massive. A judge will soon rule if it’s a monopoly.

Five tech products we actually like

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

The ‘Access Hollywood’ video cemented Trump’s air of invincibility

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Peter Andrew Bosch

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The crises here keep compounding. Armed gangs have forced more than 300,000 from their homes. The police are outgunned and overmatched. Half the people don’t have enough to eat.

This Caribbean nation of 11 million has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/21/haiti-democracy-crisis/" target=_blank>no democratically elected officials</a>. The National Assembly is empty. The presidency is vacant.

That’s left Ariel Henry, the unelected and deeply reviled prime minister, in charge. Appointed by President Jovenel Moïse days before Moïse’s still-unsolved assassination in 2021, Henry was due to leave office on Wednesday, but has so far successfully stymied a political transition.

Valerie Baeriswyl

Amid this stew of instability, Haiti faces a new challenge: Guy Philippe.

The charismatic rebel leader, who in 2004 led the uprising that chased then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the country for good, is now joining calls for Henry’s ouster. Freed last year from a U.S. prison, he has won the allegiance of an armed brigade in the Environment Ministry; called last month for “civil disobedience” across the country; and appeared in the capital on Tuesday alongside demonstrators demanding that the prime minister step down.

‘Collective rapes’ surge as weapon in Haiti’s gang war

Henry has dismissed the leader of the Brigade for the Security of Protected Areas, a close ally of Philippe, and ordered agents to disarm. A BSAP agent in northern Haiti called the prime minister a “rat that is going to die.”

“We’re telling the police and the army that we have zero problem with them whatsoever,” Jean Pierre Fritzner said in a video posted last week on social media. “If they put themselves against us, however, what happens to them is their responsibility.”

“Anything can happen,” Pierre Espérance, director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network, told The Washington Post. “The situation can become more chaotic, with more violence, more attacks, more death.”

Philippe, a former police chief of the northern city of Cap-Haïtien elected to the Haitian Senate, was arrested in January 2017 and extradited to the United States to face federal corruption charges.

Senators’ departure leaves Haiti without an elected government

Philippe pleaded guilty in June 2017 to money laundering conspiracy. He acknowledged having taken bribes to protect Colombian cocaine being shipped through Haiti to Miami. He was sentenced to nine years in U.S. federal prison.

In Haiti, he is accused of deadly attacks on police stations in 2004 and 2016.

Philippe was released from federal prison in Georgia in September and returned to Haiti in November.

His release “wasn’t really expected by Haitians,” said Diego Da Rin, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, and it landed “like a bomb.”

Luis G. Moreno, a former U.S. diplomat in Haiti, said he “was just completely baffled” by the decision to return Philippe.

“I’m sure there were legal considerations, so there were probably no legal options,” he said. “But I don’t know how people didn’t think outside the box and realize how devastating it would be to have him come back to Haiti, particularly this time.”

In the weeks since Philippe’s arrival, he has traveled the country to drum up support for a “revolution,” calling on Haitians to follow the example of protesters in Sri Lanka, who stormed the presidential palace in 2022 and forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign. He has railed against Western imperialism and pledged to end gang violence within 90 days. (He has declined to explain how.)

“The situation [in Haiti] really is dire,” Moreno said, “and I think that Guy Philippe is a wild card that could really upend everything.”

Haitians fight back against gangs, drawing support — and worry

Philippe isn’t the only one calling for Henry’s ouster. Prominent leaders including a former prime minister and former senator called for three days of protest last week to push him to step down.

In several communities, demonstrations shut down government buildings, businesses and schools. Police have used tear gas to disperse protesters, and there were reports of looting and government buildings being set aflame.

Henry had not yet been sworn in when Moïse was killed in July 2021. But in the aftermath of the assassination, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/17/haiti-claude-joseph-/" target=_blank>Core Group</a>, an informal bloc of envoys from countries including the United States, backed him to lead the country.

Henry endorsed what’s known as the Dec. 21, 2022, accord, which called for elections in 2023 and for a new government to take over on Feb. 7.

Haiti hasn’t been safe for elections. Still, opposition leaders said Henry had to leave by that date, which was significant as the date in 1986 that Haitians pushed out the Duvalier dictatorship and, in 1991, swore in Aristide, their first democratically elected president. It’s enshrined in the constitution as the date for the presidential transfer of power.

Gangs, armed mostly with weapons trafficked from the United States, killed more than 4,700 people in 2023, the U.N. office here reported last month, up 119 percent from 2022. More than 1,600 police officers left the Haitian National Police last year, a decline the U.N. office called “alarming.”

Kenyan court blocks police deployment to crisis-racked Haiti

The U.N. Security Council has backed a Kenyan-led police mission to restore order. But that plan hit a setback last month when Kenya’s High Court ruled such a deployment unconstitutional. The Kenyan government has said it will appeal.

The question now, Da Rin said, is whether Philippe’s call for a “revolution” will catch on beyond his traditional support. In the past, elites have taken advantage of rising social unrest to finance destabilizing demonstrations, but many of them are now under sanctions.

A business leader in northern Haiti said Philippe had approached several people in the private sector for funding. The leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said those whom Philippe approached see in him for the first time “a real challenger to Ariel Henry.”

Roberto Álvarez, the foreign minister of the neighboring Dominican Republic, warned the U.N. Security Council last month of “new political movers [in Haiti] who are putting themselves forward as messiahs.”

These people, he said, “are acting opportunistically, and are as damaging and destabilizing as the gangs.” These sectors have gone so far as to call for an insurrection and for civil disobedience, further aggravating the political dimension of the Haitian crisis.

Particularly concerning, analysts said, has been the rise of the BSAP and the alliance of some agents with Philippe.

He was sentenced to a year in prison. He had been held more than nine.

The brigade, part of the National Agency for Protected Areas, was created to protect environmentally sensitive places such as sand quarries and forests. But its heavily armed agents have been accused of acting beyond their mandate and abusing human rights.

In 2022, the Environment Ministry canceled the badges of BSAP agents after Haitian news outlets reported on repeated instances of “indelicate behavior” by agents.

Moïse had put loyalist Jeantel  Joseph in charge of the brigade and sought to turn it into his private armed force. There is a history here of leaders having their own paramilitary forces.

The BSAP, Espérance said, is “practically a gang.”

Henry last month fired Joseph and barred BSAP agents from bearing arms in public.

BSAP leaders say only an elected president can issue such decrees. At least five agents died in clashes with police at demonstrations last week.

Myslain Fageasse, the head of the BSAP in the south, dismissed discussion of disarming the BSAP as a “rumor.”

Joseph told The Post he was challenging his dismissal in court. He said the Haitian people were on his side in a fight to “liberate the country.”

“If Ariel Henry does not leave power, this population will get in [his residence] and take him the same way it happened during the presidency of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam,” Joseph said. A mob assassinated Sam in 1915 and paraded his butchered body through the streets.

That event prompted U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to send in the Marines.

The United States invaded Haiti, imposed martial law, installed a friendly president, took control of key institutions and occupied the country for 19 years, safeguarding American interests and killing thousands of Haitians but overseeing little development.

An earlier version of this article misidentified a former U.S. diplomat in Haiti. His name is Luis G. Moreno. The article has been corrected.

2016 Haitian Young Journalist of the Year, the International Organization of La Francophonie  

Master’s degree in media management, University of Lille in France

Undergraduate degree in legal sciences, Université Publique du Sud aux Cayes 

Widlore Mérancourt is editor-in-chief of the independent Haitian Creole-French-English news organization AyiboPost. Based in Port-au-Prince, he contributes regularly to The Washington Post.

Widlore Mérancourt

European Union-Canada Young Journalist Award, 2015

University of Toronto: BA, History and Italian Studies; Master of Global Affairs; Fellowship in Global Journalism 

Amanda Coletta is a Toronto-based correspondent who covers Canada and the Caribbean for The Washington Post. She previously worked in London, first at the Economist and then the Wall Street Journal.

Amanda Coletta

washpost

Guy Philippe, former rebel, calls for ‘revolution’ to oust Haiti’s Henry

the-washington-post

Haiti's Guy Philippe pleads guilty to accepting millions from cocaine smugglers

Contributor

Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

War In Ukraine

Africa

Americas

Asia

Europe

Middle East

World

prism://prism.query/site,/world/americas&limit=20

The Washington Post provides the latest information and analysis of breaking news stories from the South America and Canada. Includes news coverage from Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela.

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/world/&limit=20

The Washington Post World section provides information and analysis of breaking world news stories. In addition to our world news and video, Post World News offers discussions and blogs on major international news and economic issues.