Description
Weeks before the de facto Haitian President was assassinated in July 2021, his ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, defended Moise’s grasp on power and contended that the country was “quite safe” in spite of spiraling violence. Edmond claimed that the solution to Haiti’s ongoing political crisis was increased funding, training, and international support for the police. Since Moise became the latest victim of the violence he fomented, increased police training, equipment, and force has been a through line of the limited forms of international intervention that have occurred. Set within a global conversation about police abolition, this paper considers the continuum of violence linking military power to police power in Haiti. I begin with the US Marines’ decimation of Haiti’s army of independence in the 1920s, examining how the Marine occupation replaced Haiti’s original army with one whose main enemy was its own people. I trace how this turning point shaped the military-police continuum in Haiti through the Duvalier period, and into the recent and ongoing moments of continued US occupation and intervention. I argue that the contradiction of an army designed to suppress dissent among its own people has not been disentangled, and is consequential to understanding the current and ongoing political crisis unfolding in Haiti today.
