Les États-Unis ont englouti 970 millions de dollars dans une mission qui a laissé Haïti dans une situation plus dégradée. Washington s’apprête pourtant à recommencer. PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When the U.S.-backed security force came to Haiti in 2024, Monique Methellus Paul was hopeful. Ken
Les États-Unis ont englouti 970 millions de dollars dans une mission qui a laissé Haïti dans une situation plus dégradée. Washington s’apprête pourtant à recommencer.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When the U.S.-backed security force came to Haiti in 2024, Monique Methellus Paul was hopeful.
Kenscoff, the farming town outside Port-au-Prince where Paul lived with her five children, had been spared the heavily armed criminal groups that occupied most of the capital. Now, the 52-year-old vegetable seller believed, the U.N.-approved, Kenyan-led police force “would help push back the gangs” and restore security in this beleaguered Caribbean nation.
But the town, which straddled the last open road out of Port-au-Prince, made an inviting target. In January 2025, armed groups attacked. Over the next two months, Mayor Massillon Jean said, they killed more than 260 people, sent tens of thousands fleeing and took control of 70 percent of the town.
During the assault, bandits set fire to Paul’s six-room home, destroyed her crops and stole her three oxen. “I spent over 12 years building that house,” she said. “I have nothing left. I am devastated.”
Local officials had warned the National Police that the attack was coming, Emmanuel Pierre, the administrator of the Kenscoff municipal office, told The Washington Post. But the Multinational Security Support Mission, or MSS, took hours to arrive.
Now a new international force promises to succeed where predecessors failed. The U.N. Security Council has endowed the Gang Suppression Force with more personnel, more aggressive rules of engagement and the authority to gather intelligence and operate independently of Haitian police.
The GSF will have five times as many troops as the MSS, a State Department spokesperson said. Member states of the United Nations have pledged more than $110 million to fund its operations since it was announced. The first troops — 400 Chadian soldiers led by a Mongolian army general — have arrived in Haiti. The force is expected to be fully deployed by September.
“As with any multinational force generation process, operational capability is being built in phases over time,” a GSF spokesman said. “The scale and tempo of operations will expand progressively as additional personnel and capabilities arrive.”
That force, backed by the United States and staffed primarily by Kenyan police officers, arrived in 2024 to stem the violence that had worsened in the political vacuum left in this nation of 12 million by the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Its mission was to help restore security so elections could be held.
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