Blackwater founder Erik Prince to send hundreds of fighters to strife-torn Haiti

2 comments

1. > you think you can just march into these countries – based on some fundamentalist, religious principles – drop a few bombs, topple a dictator and start a democracy? Huh. Give me a break. People don’t want freedom. They want boundaries and rules… Protection… From invaders, and from themselves. People need a leader who can give them both the support and constraints to keep chaos at bay. You give them that, and they’ll follow. And that’s where I come in.

   – Jonathan Irons, CEO, Atlas Private Military Corporation

2. And what does he think he will achieve?

   Even in the best case scenario where you can kill the leadership of these militias/gangs and scatter its members- that isn’t a substitute for a developed economy or institutions that are not corrupt. 

   It’ll only be a matter of time until a new strongman from within the government’s security apparatus sees an opportunity to make himself king- it’s worth remembering that the current leader of Haiti’s largest gang used to be a police officer, and the reason that Haiti has no military is because it kept being used as a tool of launching coups. 

   Prince doesn’t have an army of bureaucrats and clerks to run Haiti’s government for a generation or more to break the cycle of corruption and incompetence, and he doesn’t have a viable business model for Haiti’s economy that can develop the country. 

   Haiti’s problems all interconnect and reinforce each other- you can’t have security forces that don’t turn to crime without honest government, honest government is hard to have if the economy is such a mess that everyone steals, and it’s hard to have a functioning economy when a country is in a state of violent anarchy. 

   It’s worth acknowledging that Prince’s troops have been in Haiti for months, and they’re finding the gangs (which are more accurately described as militias- but the media doesn’t want to acknowledge their political aspirations) are still holding control over many strategic areas of the Capital and increasingly working together and coordinating against the Haitian police, Kenyan Peacekeepers, and other security forces. 

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