In Haiti, the Guns Speak the Language of Empire

By: Kapone | Weaponized Information

This article is based on and inspired by Danny Shaw’s original piece published on CounterPunch, titled “In Occupied Port-au-Prince, Over 1 Million Haitians Have Been Displaced by Paramilitary Gangs.”

Port-au-Prince is burning again. Not with the fire of revolution, but with the scorched-earth policy of empire in a new costume—cheaply stitched together from the scraps of old colonial uniforms and Silicon Valley’s latest spyware. Over one million Haitians have been displaced—torn from their homes not by a natural disaster, but by an unnatural one: paramilitary gangs acting as subcontractors for the global hyper-imperial order.

Let’s be clear: these aren’t just “gangs.” They’re the new face of counterinsurgency in the post-liberal age. These militias, like the notorious “Viv Ansanm” under Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, aren’t simply criminal outfits—they are mercenary armies operating in the vacuum left by the latest U.S.-backed regime change. They serve the same purpose as the Marines who landed in 1915, the Duvalier death squads of the Cold War, or the MINUSTAH troops who brought cholera with their bayonets. That purpose is to make sure Haiti never governs itself—not in practice, and certainly not in defiance of the imperial order.

The PetroCaribe Rebellion and the Need for Discipline

In 2018, when the Haitian masses rose up demanding to know what happened to $2 billion in Venezuelan aid—money meant for schools, hospitals, and clean water—it terrified the imperial managers. Here was a population that dared to believe in accountability, in sovereignty, in dignity. A people that remembered what Toussaint and Dessalines meant when they spoke of independence.

So the empire recalibrated. They dropped the pretense of peacekeeping. The NGOs packed up their neoliberal fairy tales. The technocrats shifted the script from “development” to “stabilization.” But what they really did was unleash the gangs. The paramilitaries were armed, trained, and set loose—not to fight each other, but to carry out a brutal campaign of displacement, intimidation, and terror against the working-class neighborhoods that formed the base of the PetroCaribe protests.

What we’re seeing is a new kind of imperial warfare: decentralized, privatized, and deniable. The imperialists don’t need boots on the ground when they can put rifles in the hands of hungry men with a green light and a shopping list. The message to the Haitian people is simple: never again will you be allowed to imagine freedom without consequences.

Technofascism in the Tropics

And behind the bullets and bloodshed is a data trail. Surveillance technology, biometric profiling, and facial recognition are being deployed in the name of “security”—but we all know whose security they mean. These tools are part of the broader technofascist regime emerging across the globe: a merger of digital technology, corporate capital, and state violence designed to pacify populations before they even think of resisting.

Technofascism doesn’t kick down your door—it makes sure your cell phone rats you out first. In Haiti, where organizing is often done on WhatsApp and Facebook, the empire watches the organizing committee before the tear gas canisters are even ordered. This is psychological warfare in its most intimate form—an algorithmic preemptive strike against solidarity.

Hyper-Imperialism: The Fire Next Time

Haiti is not just a test case. It is a laboratory of repression, a proving ground for hyper-imperialism in its rawest form. As global capitalism falters under the weight of its own contradictions, the U.S. and its allies are shifting from liberal pretense to open gangsterism. They’ve dropped the mask of humanitarianism and are now fine-tuning a model of domination that blends old-school colonial brutality with high-tech social control. Haiti, as always, is their crucible.

But remember: the fire they stoke may one day consume them. The Haitian people have toppled empires before. They were the first to do it, in fact. And every time the colonizer thinks they’ve buried Haiti, they forget that it is not dead—it is planted. It grows back. It resists. And it remembers.

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Weaponized Information is a revolutionary propaganda platform dedicated to analyzing global events through the lens of anti-colonial struggle, technofascism, and hyper-imperialism. We thank Danny Shaw for his on-the-ground reporting and unwavering commitment to truth.