“Haiti could face total collapse,” Maria Isabel Salvador, the United Nations special representative to Haiti, said last week. She also said the country was nearing the “point of no return” and close to “total chaos.”
Officials and analysts struggle with the language to describe the dire situation that Haiti now faces. The country has been in such bad shape for so long that warnings about Haiti’s plight can easily be ignored as just more of the same. However, as Salvador warned, the reports from the capital and elsewhere signal that the country is experiencing a new level of conflict in which the degree of state failure and gang control could be far worse than seen previously.
Violent gangs control about 85 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and are engaged in an offensive to take over the remaining areas that have avoided the worst of the violence up to now. The transitional government is already shutting down operations in the capital and will likely be forced to flee the city. Outside the capital, a coalition of gangs is taking over cities, towns, and rural areas at an increasing pace.