How Haiti’s Unelected Leader Lost America’s Blessing

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief, coming to you early due to fast-moving news.

The highlights this week: The United States appears to withdraw its support for Haiti’s interim leader amid an escalating security crisis, Venezuelan authorities set a long-anticipated election date, and Brazil deepens its ties to Saudi Arabia.

Haiti’s Henry Is in the Hot Seat

Haiti’s political and security crisis reached a dramatic new stage on Tuesday. After a week of travel abroad, acting Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry attempted to head back home but was forced to change his itinerary because gangs blocked access to the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.

Henry initially planned to instead land in the Dominican Republic and cross the border into Haiti. But for reasons that were not immediately clear, Dominican authorities denied him permission to land, and Henry detoured to Puerto Rico. The same day, Haitian gang leader Jimmy Chérizier—whose gangs control much of Port-au-Prince—warned of “a civil war that will lead to genocide” if Henry did not resign.

Henry is an unelected and unpopular leader who took office in 2021 following the assassination of then-President Jovenel Moïse and has remained in power ever since, thanks in part to U.S. support. But while airborne on Tuesday, Henry communicated with officials in Washington and received a surprising message, the Miami Herald reports: The United States wanted him to resign.

Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, a U.S. State Department spokesperson pushed back against the Herald’s account, saying the United States was simply “urging him [Henry] to expedite the transition to an empowered and an inclusive governance structure” in Haiti. But a Caribbean diplomat told the Washington Post that the U.S. message to Henry included a suggested resignation statement.

U.S. officials did confirm that they were not providing logistical support for Henry to return to Haiti, an admission “akin to publicly pulling the rug from under him,” the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown posted on X.

In 2023, multiple international and domestic mediation efforts aimed to coax Henry toward a power-sharing arrangement that would lead to elections in Haiti, an outcome that civil society groups in the country have sought since Moïse’s death in 2021. But Henry resisted making tangible concessions, and his international backers—including the United States—appeared to acquiesce to Haiti’s tumultuous status quo.

“They rode this horse to their doom,” former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti James Foley said of U.S. officials’ support for Henry in an interview with The Associated Press. Now, Haiti’s spiraling crisis is “the fruit of the choices we made,” Foley said.

Caribbean governments’—particularly that of Barbados—continued insistence on laying the groundwork for a political transition in Haiti may have shaped the about-face from the United States. These efforts were on display at a Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit last week in Guyana, where countries pushed for Henry to agree to an August 2025 election date and urged him to resign soon.

Although CARICOM lacks a unified foreign policy, Caribbean countries “generally promote democratic governance” in their public discourse, Rasheed Griffith, a Barbadian analyst and the executive director of the Caribbean Progress Studies Institute, told Foreign Policy. He added that “it’s a very strong core tenet of CARICOM” and helps explain bloc members’ stance on Henry, who “can’t be seen on the international stage to be a credible representative of Haiti.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Henry remained abroad and had not resigned, but he appeared significantly weakened by the recent events.

Meanwhile, public order in Haiti is breaking down. Port-au-Prince’s main public hospital was forced to close due to violence, and other medical facilities are overwhelmed by the number of wounded people arriving. Thousands of inmates escaped from Haiti’s two largest prisons, and gangs have blockaded roads and a seaport in addition to the airport.

The new depths of insecurity have accelerated a debate about foreign intervention in the country. After last week’s CARICOM summit, Henry traveled to Nairobi to sign a deal that will deploy a Kenyan-led multinational security force to Haiti to help police fight gangs. Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica have also pledged to be part of the mission.

For months, Haitian civil society groups, Caribbean countries, and security experts have argued that Henry’s lack of legitimacy as a leader would hamper the effectiveness of foreign intervention (not to mention that past interventions in Haiti have yielded disastrous consequences). But conditions in the country have gotten so bad that even former skeptics are changing their tune.

Daniel Foote, a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2021 to protest U.S. policy toward Haiti, told The Associated Press this week that a U.S.-led military intervention was now an “absolute necessity.” Still, an unnamed U.S. National Security Council official told the Miami Herald that the United States would not send troops in Haiti; Washington has instead said it aims to fund the Kenyan-led mission.

That leaves an uncomfortable reality on the ground. Haitian gangs number more than 200 and often work in alliance, controlling much of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. Given their power and territorial dominance, “no police force from Kenya is going to make a difference,” Griffith said, even if supplemented by personnel from other Caribbean countries. Resolving the security crisis, he said, would require “quite a substantial military activity.”

Upcoming Events

Tuesday, March 19: The U.N. Human Rights Council discusses Venezuela.

Saturday, March 23: Bolivia carries out a census.

What We’re Following

Venezuela’s vote. Venezuelan election officials announced this week that the country’s presidential election will take place on July 28, the birthday of former President Hugo Chávez. That leaves until March 25 for candidates to register—a very narrow window. It did not immediately appear that the government would lift its ban on leading opposition figure María Corina Machado to allow her to compete against incumbent President Nicolás Maduro.

Election officials said they invited international monitors to organize observation missions. Maduro agreed to allow observers into the country as part of a deal made last October that prompted the United States to lift some sanctions on Venezuela. In January, Washington said candidate bans and the detention of opposition members were inconsistent with Caracas’s commitments, reimposing some sanctions and threatening to add others back as well.

Migrants walk through the rainforest near the village of Bajo Chiquito, the site of the first border control that migrants entering from the south encounter in Panama’s Darién Province, on Sept. 22, 2023.Luis Acosta/AFP via Getty Images

Border closure. Colombian authorities shut down a passage in the Colombia-Panama border region known as the Darién Gap last week after Colombian police arrested two boat captains accused of illegally transporting migrants through the dangerous jungle area. The closure caused a bottleneck in which thousands of migrants crowded into two Colombian towns that lacked enough food and infrastructure to support them. The passage was reopened after around five days.

Although Washington has pressured Latin American governments to impose new restrictions on northward migration, the episode underscored that abruptly shutting down migrant transit routes has logistical and humanitarian consequences.

Mexico’s public spaces. A Mexican government program is partnering with star architects to design public community facilities such as libraries and athletic courts across the country. The program installs new projects in cities large and small, the New York Times reports. Architect Fernanda Canales created buildings in Naco and Agua Prieta, poor towns that lie along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Some municipalities that are part of the government program face basic infrastructure problems, including a lack of electricity as well as a history of vandalism. Those realities are reflected in Canales’s designs: She aims to build “things that are not easy to break or steal or be torn apart.” Her creations include a monumental new library, recreation center, and senior center.

The rec center in Agua Prieta has become “the center of our social life” and “a place for people and families to come and have a good time together,” a teacher in the town told the Times.

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In Focus: Brazil-Saudi Business Ties

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pose for a family photo with delegates of the six nations invited to join the BRICS grouping—Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—during the closing day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg on Aug. 24, 2023.Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

Saudi Arabia plans to open an investment office in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, Saudi officials announced this week, marking the latest step in a string of efforts to intensify commercial ties between the two countries.

Last November, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Riyadh and signed cooperation deals in the civil and military aviation sectors. Lula and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said they aim for bilateral trade between the countries to more than double by 2030. (Less than 1 percent of Brazilian exports were destined for Saudi Arabia in 2022.)

Brazilian plane manufacturer Embraer is studying the possibility of producing one of its military jet models in Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials, for their part, aim to increase soy and sugar purchases from Brazil to help guarantee Saudi food security. Saudi Arabia can be the “front door” to the Middle East for Brazilian products, Foreign Trade Secretary Tatiana Prazeres told CNN Brasil last October.

Last year, Saudi Arabia also sought to join the BRICS grouping (originally comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and successfully lobbied Brazil to support its candidacy, journalist Jamil Chade wrote in Brazilian outlet UOL this week. But the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war has changed Riyadh’s level of interest in BRICS, which it still has not officially joined, Chade wrote.

Saudi Arabia, which eventually seeks to normalize ties with Israel, might even turn down the invitation since Iran, which backs Hamas, is another new member. Regardless of whether Saudi Arabia moves forward with BRICS, its trade with Brazil looks set to increase in coming years.