In May, a Florida judge convicted four people of an extraordinary crime: helping recruit and finance a squad of two two dozen former Colombian mercenaries for the 2021 murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in his own home.
The assassination and political vacuum that followed fed gang violence that has since swallowed Haiti. While the creation of a United Nations security force marks progress, the way out of Haiti’s crisis will require more than guns. Long-standing peace can only be built on truth, justice, reintegration, and state-building.
Ironically, despite its connection to Haiti’s spiral into violence, Colombia offers such a model. To fix Haiti, look to Colombia—not because its peace is perfect, but because it knows the futility of trying to punish a country back into order.
Haiti is in a fragile moment between intensifying violence and a renewed international security push. Chad has begun deploying troops to the new U.N.-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), with around 400 personnel already in Haiti out of a planned 1,500-member Chadian contingent. The force, intended to grow to roughly 5,500 personnel, is designed to restore basic security and help reestablish state authority. Meanwhile, Washington’s support for Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé after the dissolution of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council has helped the country avoid an outright leadership vacuum.
Yet recent attempts to address Haiti’s crisis through force alone have shown the limits of security-first responses.
Meanwhile the social and security crises continue to spiral. Over half the population is facing food insecurity, and around 1.4 million people have been displaced by the conflict. At least 1,642 Haitians have been killed and 745 injured between January and March. Gang members—who control key roads, sea routes, and large parts of Port-au-Prince—are responsible for 27 percent of those killed and injured. Women and girls are paying an especially brutal price as sexual violence rises. The test of recovery is whether the state can protect those most vulnerable and replace criminal governance with services, trust, and public authority.
Voting alone cannot rebuild political trust. Since the creation of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council in 2024, international actors have pressed interim authorities to restore elected government. The first round of general elections—originally scheduled for Aug. 30—have been shelved indefinitely because of security concerns. Holding them before the U.N. forces have rousted the gangs and reestablished a government presence throughout the country would indeed be foolhardy. A premature vote risks repeating a past tendency by the international community to use imperfect elections as an exit strategy rather than as a means to increase citizen confidence and representation in the government. That said, consistently setting unrealistic dates for elections only to postpone them has its costs, too, on both citizen confidence and a collective sense of inclusiveness in the democratic process.
Holding elections is made still more difficult because the problem is not only violence but coercive political control. Viv Ansanm—a gang coalition formed in 2023 through an alliance between Port-au-Prince’s two main gang factions, G9 and G-Pep—has given armed groups a more unified platform to destabilize the state, block efforts to restore public authority, and influence the terms of political transition.
The GSF, the U.N.-backed successor to the Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, is necessary but not sufficient. Even with U.N. logistics and operational oversight, the GSF will not be able to dismantle the marketplace of insecurity that gangs have built. Roads, ports, markets, fuel, food, basic services, and physical safety have become commodities which are priced, brokered, and weaponized by armed actors. Families, businesses, and public institutions are forced to negotiate protection with the very groups that produce the violence.
An international strategy that only targets gunmen will leave untouched the financiers, patrons, corrupt officials, and business interests that allow gang rule to regenerate.
Haiti’s justice system is too broken to absorb this burden on its own. In 2025, 82 percent of detainees in Haitian prisons were still awaiting trial, and the 2024 prison attacks that freed thousands of inmates showed how easily insecurity can collapse the state’s own instruments of accountability.
Haiti needs a transitional justice strategy to fill the void left by a dysfunctional judiciary and weakened state. This should consist of interim investigative panels, truth-telling forums, community reparations, anti-corruption capacity, and specialized judicial units capable of rebuilding trust while reaching the networks behind armed rule.
Colombia’s peace process offers an example, albeit an imperfect one of reform for Haiti. To be sure, Colombia’s conflict—a constellation of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and narcotraffickers—differs structurally from Haiti’s gang-driven collapse. Both cases, though, show the importance of unraveling a criminal and violent grip over local economies, politics, and society.
It took Colombia more than five decades to learn that battlefield victories and demobilizations could weaken armed organizations but not dismantle the territorial control, illicit economies, and coercive authority that those groups had embedded in local communities. Across successive waves of demobilization and military pressure, armed actors were weakened or disbanded, only for violence to reconstitute itself through successor groups, dissidents, and criminal networks.
More than 31,000 paramilitaries from the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) demobilized between 2003 and 2006, and close to 14,000 members from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) laid down arms after a 2016 peace accord. Still, Colombia recorded its worst civilian impact from conflict in a decade in 2025: Individual displacement rose by 100 percent, mass displacement by 111 percent, and confinement by armed groups by 99 percent compared with 2024. That spike was driven in large part by the remnants of those former armed groups simply shifting their “skills” and access to weapons to illicit activities, including narcotics trafficking and illegal mining, and the incomplete implementation of many of the original peace plan’s more socially focused objectives.
The question is whether Haiti can build comprehensive programs to deliver justice, economic growth, job creation, and long-term public security—or, perhaps more importantly, whether international donors are willing to support it over the long term. Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC offers a partial model, linking demobilization to truth, justice, reparation, rural reform, and political participation. Through the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, accountability was tied to victim participation and restorative sanctions, including work on schools, roads, health centers, demining, environmental recovery, and community infrastructure. Peace was imagined as the reconstruction of territory.
But this process did not begin with the 2016 peace accord. The Colombian city of Medellín offered an earlier urban example of how to do this. Scholars acknowledge that Medellín transformed from a “theater of war” to a “security laboratory” when the national force was followed by a targeted, local reconstruction. The sharpest drops in homicide followed national decisions: the 1990 peace agreements, the dismantling of the Medellín Cartel after Pablo Escobar died in 1993, Operation Orion in 2002, and the demobilization of the Cacique Nutibara Bloc in 2003. Security gains only became durable when the city invested in neighborhoods where armed actors had governed daily life.
This process hinges on addressing the violence committed against women during these conflicts.
Colombia understood that security could not simply mean sending police into contested areas; it had to redefine police protection. The Police Unit for Peacebuilding (UNIPEP) developed programs to prevent and respond to sexual and gender-based violence in former FARC reintegration zones. In 2020, UNIPEP led a gender self-assessment of the National Police across 16 gender dimensions, which was later turned into a gender action plan. It also trained officers in conflict resolution and community dialogue. In Mitú, for example, UNIPEP officers used those tools to support a maloca, an Indigenous communal house for resolving disputes through customary rules.
Colombia’s transitional justice system was shaped by its broader understanding of security beyond armed force. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace became an international reference point for victim-centered accountability, charging former FARC leaders with systematic kidnapping and investigating army crimes, including at least 6,402 executions of innocent civilians. Still, Colombia also warns against romanticizing transitional justice. Accountability remains politically contested, especially when it implicates the armed forces; some military units murdered civilians and presented them as combatants, turning body counts into a currency of promotion and reward. Justice can redefine security only with political will and local reconstruction.
What comes after gangs are weakened and foreign forces eventually leave? Colombia’s experience shows that security operations may reopen the road to the state, but only justice, public services, and legitimate institutions can keep it open. Oftentimes, before and after the peace processes, local armed groups used their coercive capacity to build political alliances and even representation via elections.
Rather than merely holding elections—and potentially holding them too early in areas still dominated by gangs—what is required, as Colombia demonstrates, is a comprehensive understanding of the violence created by state collapse and corruption. The GSF, while an essential step, starts that process. But without something like the U.S. Agency for International Development or other donors willing to commit to Haiti’s long-term institutional and economic development, those essential steps will remain unfulfilled, and Haiti’s return to political dysfunction and violence will be inevitable.
