Haiti was once the honeymoon destination for Hollywood’s elite. What happened?

There was a time when Haiti was a favoured destination of the rich and famous. Richard and Elizabeth Taylor had one of their honeymoons there. Other visitors included Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Paulette Goddard and Irving Berlin. Mick Jagger and the broadcaster Barbara Walters were among a later generation of celebrities to visit.

The names of the glitterati can be seen in the visitors’ book of the grand Hotel Oloffson in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Graham Greene stayed there while writing The Comedians, which brought the Haiti of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier – with his murderous secret police force, the Tonton Macoute – to a wider English-speaking readership.

The slide, which began with the repressive rule of Duvalier – who sought to strike terror into his subjects by identifying with Baron Samedi, the Haitian Vodou god of the dead – was never reversed. Papa Doc died in 1971, to be succeeded by his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The descent into chaos continued.

Haiti is now essentially a failed state, with criminal gangs controlling more than 80 per cent of Port-au-Prince. According to the United Nations, around 4,450 people were killed there in the last year – 1,500 of them in the last three months. Another 1,700 were injured. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, warned that the “outrageous” levels of violence have brought Haiti to “the brink of collapse”.

Many of Haiti’s wealthy citizens who have not already left the country have been holed up in recent weeks in their homes in Petion-Ville, on a hill above the capital, listening to the echoes of gunfire and watching the flames spread as violence has consumed the capital.

The gangs turned their baleful gaze up the hill to the affluent suburb, with its mansions, embassies and hotels, which had so far managed to avoid the worst of the strife. Groups of young men arrived driving stolen motorcycles and cars, waving automatic rifles and machetes, intent on pillage and killing.

A bank, shops, cafes, petrol stations and a number of houses were looted in Petion-Ville and the adjoining districts of Laboule and Thomassin. But many of the residents had armed themselves and the security guards they employ in preparation for an attack. A vigilante group known as Bwa Kale, which had been increasingly active against the gangs, arrived to join in the fight.

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Around 20 people were killed in the clashes that followed. Enraged locals burned and mutilated bodies, chopping off the hands of some of those who had been looting. Two gang leaders were killed on consecutive days – Makandal, and then Ernst Julme, aka Ti Greg, the head of Delmas 95, part of a gang coalition headed by Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the most well-known of the Haitian mobsters.

The police announced that they had shot dead Julme. The vigilantes of Bwa Kale are believed to have killed Makandal. The gangs vowed retribution, but their attempt to take over the areas they already control has been thwarted for now.

Jean-Philippe Louissant and his family had barricaded their home in Petion-Ville. “We knew what was coming, we have been seeing what has been happening, and we had to be ready. These gang leaders are very bad men – they don’t just want to rob, they want to take over this city,” he says.

“There are dead bodies lying in the streets now. There is a war going on here, I don’t think people in the outside world understand that. It is getting impossible to exist like this. We will have to leave if things don’t improve. We don’t want to leave, but we may have to.”

Jean-Philippe, his wife Celeste and their three children are discussing plans to move to Cap-Haitien on the north coast, which is still relatively calm, and then probably to Florida, where they have relations living. But the road journey to the coast is perilous, with armed gangs ambushing cars to rob and take hostages.

There is an overwhelming feeling, say Haitians, that they are being abandoned to a grim fate. It has been six months since the United Nations, with Washington’s support, approved a military support mission to the country. For the last three months, warnings have come from neighbouring Caribbean and Latin American states that Haiti was close to collapse.

A transitional council will be established in the next few days to form an administration until elections are held later in the year. Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, welcomed the news, saying that he hoped this would pave the way for a more stable future.

But there is a widespread perception that there is little that the transitional council will be able to do. People are continuing to vote with their feet. The US is evacuating its citizens by helicopter from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic, which, with Haiti, forms the island of Hispaniola. The airport in Port-au-Prince has suspended operations after repeatedly coming under attack from gunmen.

The French government announced earlier this month that it intended to evacuate 170 of its citizens, along with 70 others from European Union states, in response to the continuing deterioration in security. Like the US operation, the evacuation – which took place this week – was carried out by helicopter.

The reason the airport was targeted, according to Barbecue and other gang leaders, was to prevent the acting president, Ariel Henry, from returning to Haiti. Henry, who had been asking for international security assistance for more than a year, had gone to Nairobi to negotiate the arrival of a Kenyan force. He is now in exile in Puerto Rico.

The last president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated in 2021. The acting president who followed him, Claude Joseph, was subsequently indicted over Moise’s killing. Haiti, meanwhile, degenerated into an ungoverned, chaotic space.

Haiti’s army was dissolved by a previous president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The only security presence now is a beleaguered police force, which is struggling to protect what is left of the national institutions. Its officers only just managed to repulse an attempt to raid the country’s central bank two weeks ago. An armed mob has successfully stormed the two main prisons, allowing 4,400 inmates serving sentences for violent crimes – including murders, rapes and robberies – to stream out onto the streets. Julme, who died on 21 March, was one of those freed.

The growing anarchy has been described by Unicef’s chief in Haiti, Catherine Russell, as resembling a “scene out of Mad Max”.  The Catholic bishops’ convocation in Port-au-Prince lamented that the country was being “reduced to rubble and ashes” with “moral codes breaking down”.

Rival criminal groups are carving out territories. There are no fewer than 200 gangs in the country, a hundred of them in Port-au-Prince alone. Many of them have historic ties with politicians and successive ruling regimes, which have allowed them to recruit and build up arsenals with impunity.

The police complain that they are outgunned by the gangs. Garry John Baptiste, an official with the National Police Union, maintains that there have been some successful operations despite the lack of help from home and abroad.

“We are eliminating some important criminals now – the leaders; that is a good message to the gangs. But they have lots of weapons. We haven’t got enough rifles or equipment – 60 per cent of the police don’t even have bullet-proof vests. We have had so many of our members killed, and these are officers who are risking their lives for just $200 (£158) a month.”

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There are growing calls in the US for intervention. James Foley, a former American ambassador to Haiti, points out that unless urgent steps are taken, the United States will face a failed state run by criminals and narco-traffickers about 700 miles from Florida. Setting up a transitional council “is a race against time – and, in my view, it is unlikely to succeed, or even get international security forces into the country, without providing US military cover”, he says.

For Jean-Philippe, living in Haiti is “like it was in Mogadishu”.  The gang leaders, he holds, are “like warlords – they want money and power”. The forming of the transitional council was a step in the right direction. But, he says, “people ask ‘Where’s their army?’”.

I met the Louissant family in 2010 while covering the devastating earthquake that had hit Haiti. A neighbour of his in Petion-Ville very kindly let me and my colleagues from The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian stay at their home – their hospitality was much appreciated at a time when the few hotels and guest houses still standing were full.

The earthquake, the “day of catastrophe”, claimed more than 220,000 lives, and destroyed more than a quarter of a million homes and 30,000 commercial and industrial buildings. The poorest country in the western hemisphere, with a history of natural and man-made disasters, brutal repression and endemic corruption, was reeling from what had befallen it.

The Louissants, however, refused to leave – determined, says Jean-Philippe, to reopen the family’s factory and shops supplying electrical appliances. “We don’t want to abandon our workers. They depend on us, our customers depend on us,” he said at the time. “Haiti will get economic help, there’ll be aid coming in; things will pick up and get much better.”

He was not the only one showing resilience. We saw the Brasserie Nationale d’Haiti, one of the country’s biggest beverage manufacturers, reopen and start rolling out its most popular product, Prestige beer. In Petion-Ville, the Rivoli boutique repaired its showcases, displaying once again its Hermes scarves and Lacoste T-shirts, Tag Heuer watches and Chanel perfume.

Elections later that year seemed to offer a firm path forward. Justice for human rights abuses of the past was to be pursued with the trial of Jean-Claude Duvalier, who had returned to Haiti – but he died before it could happen.

Michel Martelly was voted into power. A musician by profession, who split his time between Miami and Haiti, he entertained us journalists during the campaign with renditions of Creole konpa music, and promised to root out corruption and integrate Haiti into the international community.

But hopes of a rebirth for the nation after the earthquake soon faded away. Most of the billions of dollars promised in aid from abroad did not materialise. A lot of what did arrive was misappropriated.

The old politics of Haiti were soon to resurface. Martelly had to step down in 2016, following allegations of electoral fraud, without a successor in place. He was subsequently sanctioned by the Canadian government for human rights abuses and involvement with criminal gangs. Elections held late that year awarded Moise the presidency.

The justice system was breaking down. Kidnappings had jumped 72 per cent from the year before. It was not just the wealthy who were being abducted and held ransom, but doctors, lawyers, academics. Victims were routinely murdered if the payment was not made.

Noel Hypolite, a surgeon we saw working tirelessly treating patients after the earthquake, who later helped set up a clinic for impoverished families, was among those who died. There had been a “misunderstanding”, his kidnappers acknowledged, about the location of the ransom drop. Hypolite’s wife, a paediatrician, left with their family for Canada. Up to 25 per cent of medical staff are estimated to have left Haiti by the end of 2023.

Many Haitians feel now that the country’s salvation lies in international – preferably Western – intervention.

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But foreign powers have left scars during the country’s 200-year history. Haiti won its independence through a slave revolt that began in 1804 in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, fighting off not just French forces but those of Britain and Spain.

The French isolated Haiti from the international community, demanding 150 million francs (roughly £17bn today) in reparation to lift the blockade. The penalty was reduced to 90 million francs after negotiations, but by 1914, no less than 80 per cent of Haiti’s budget was still going towards repaying the debt.

That year, US marines landed in Port-au-Prince and removed $500,000 in gold (around £12m now) from Haiti’s national bank to protect investment by Wall Street financiers. American forces returned a year later, beginning two decades of occupation. “I helped make Haiti a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” said the US commander Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.

Even the more benevolent deployment of a United Nations force after the 2010 earthquake brought misery. Infected sewage from its base led to the deaths of 10,000 people in Haiti from cholera – a disease that had not been present in the country before the disaster.

But in the current dire straits, many feel that Haiti needs to look to the future, not the past. Jean Daniel Delone, an excellent journalist I worked with in Haiti, was once full of hope that the country would recover and stride forward from the calamities it had experienced. Now, he says, it is time to face reality.

“We are in a precarious situation. There is a shortage of water and food, and there is a desperate need for humanitarian aid,” he says. “We live close to places that suffer from gangs all the time. We can clearly hear the shooting. We’ll be in real trouble if they move in – already supplies can’t come in from the areas they’ve taken over.

“My son can’t go to school; the schools are shut. Markets, offices and factories are shut. All this leads to stress – there are bad psychological effects. With what is happening now, yes, we are praying for international troops to come and help the police, who are really stretched.”

Jean-Philippe agrees: “No country likes having foreign soldiers present. But we are in a desperate situation. For so many young men, there are no jobs, no hope – but they have guns. What we need more than anything is security. If there is an explosion, it will not stay just in Haiti, it will spread through the region.”