Figure 9.1. “Don’t Attack [Here]!” Graffiti at the Locale of Baz Grand Black in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo by Chelsey Kivland, 2013.
Street Sovereignty
Power, Violence, and Respect among Haitian Baz
People in Haiti tend to think about sovereignty differently than people in the United States. Americans generally envision sovereignty as the freedom to act uninhibitedly or the right to do what they want with what is theirs. Don’t tread on me! This is a free country! Not in my backyard! Such claims center on the principle of liberty. At its core, liberty concerns the freedom of an individual, the right to not be governed or the right to be a power unto oneself.1
The notion of liberty is also significant in Haiti. But when Haitians conceptualize sovereignty, another principle takes center stage: respect (respè). Unlike liberty, respect is fundamentally social. It cannot even be imagined at the level of the individual. Respect involves at least two individuals, for one does not have respect, one gives or receives it. Customarily, Haitians envision respect as the social value shared between guests and hosts, gods and servitors, and (just) leaders and followers.2 In her conversations with grassroots organizers in rural Haiti during the 1990s democratic movement, anthropologist Jennie Smith (2001) noticed that her interlocutors often mobilized respè to define a proper democracy. This, she argued, was because respect as a social value reconciled authority and community, hierarchy and equality, and thus symbolized popular sovereignty. For her interlocutors, a democratic polity was one that had a solid leader whom followers respected as the ultimate authority but who, in turn, respected their common humanity, worth, and opinions. Further, a democracy was a society in which people not only had the right to speak and be heard but also the right to water, housing, nutrition, health care, education, security, and—daring to dream—economic and political parity with their neighbors. Judged by this standard, they did not see American liberalism to be a particularly good model of democracy. In fact, they deemed it demo-krache, a derisive term that played on the Haitian Creole word for spit (krache) (Smith 2001, 5).
The significance of respect within Haitian political life cannot be underestimated. When Haitian leaders protest their relatively minor role on the post-earthquake Interim Haiti Recovery Commission,3 when the Haitian government is forced to accept neoliberal policies favored abroad but unpopular at home,4 when the Haitian president makes diplomatic deals with foreign contractors that circumvent the Haitian Parliament,5 when local organizations are passed over in favor of foreign NGOs for development projects,6 and when a poor citizen is belittled as he or she attempts to claim a service from a state office,7 the issue is respect—or rather, its absence. The crux of the issue is not a demand to do what one wants unfettered from consideration of others but rather a desire to be recognized by others as a consequential participant in the dialogue over what should be done. As such, it is also a demand to possess the social status and political clout to be treated with dignity. As the Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote, “Dignity and sovereignty [are] the exact equivalents, and in fact, a free people living in dignity is a sovereign people” (Fanon [1965] 2004, 139).
My experience has echoed that of Smith’s, although I conduct research not in the countryside but in the poor, dense, and volatile district of Bel Air in central Port-au-Prince. Here, the value of respect also permeates discussions of power and authority. This often, as Smith suggests, reconciles an authoritarian ethos with public stewardship. But I also see here that respect aligns with a militant ideology that draws upon the figure of the revolutionary soldier who triumphed over the French colonists to end slavery and establish independent Haiti in 1804.8 Viewing the revolutionary solider as an icon of respect unveils how violence and welfare, the power to take and give life, intertwine in grounding sovereign authority and how respect, for all its advantages, necessitates a particularly militant identity. In fact, when Fanon wrote about sovereignty and dignity as equivalents he was referring to the power and status the colonized earned when they took up arms against colonial powers. Contemporary discourses of respect in urban Haiti also reflect recent efforts to fashion an oppositional masculinity in the context of transnational black politics and street culture (Kivland 2014). Young men in Bel Air greet each other by saying “respect” as they bump fists, an affirmation of a shared and equal manhood widely observed among urban black communities worldwide. Such exchanges certainly resonate with anticolonial struggles, but they are also tied to more local spheres of competition, where young men compete for the power to act as street leaders. Competition for street leadership often involves manifestations of violence, whether material, symbolic, or spiritual. However, earning respect as a local leader is not reducible to promulgating fear. The trick is to balance a reputation for violence with the provision of protection for oneself and one’s community. In other words, respect invokes an ideology of defense in which force and dignity are intertwined.
In this chapter, I draw on my ethnography of the Bel Air neighborhood to address the political significance of young men’s quests to earn respect and defend their zones. I focus on the informal street organizations that emerged from the local defense groups that militantly resisted political opponents in the early 1990s. These groups are known locally as baz (base), a moniker that invokes both their defensive orientation (military base) and their place at the center of a multiscale project of governance (political base). Today, these groups are still engaged in an effort to defend their zones (also called baz), but this effort now suggests not only defense against outside threats but also defense of the zone’s interests by brokering state or NGO jobs, services, and projects. Baz play a major role in Haitian sovereignty because they act as brokers of governance and as agents of governance in their own right.
In asserting that baz exercise sovereignty, I extend recent anthropological efforts to reframe sovereignty from its customary definition as a juridical property of states to a definition that includes an aspirational claim to power and respect exercised by any agent, state or baz leader. Several scholars have recently argued that the traditional Westphalia model of state sovereignty is unable to accommodate the new forms of power exercised by nonstate actors, such as NGOs, transnational corporations, and humanitarian organizations (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Das and Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2005). My definition also removes sovereignty from the domain of the state, but I specifically want to draw attention to how the collapse of traditional state authority has facilitated a localization of political power and forms of belonging. In particular, I argue that the reduction of the Haitian state coupled with development policies orchestrated by diverse governing agents, has created conditions in which the baz is able to perform economic and political control—or what I call street sovereignty—over an urban district. In what follows, I detail how young men have fashioned themselves as local political leaders, paying attention to an array of political modalities that includes armed actors, music groups, political associations, and development organizations. While I emphasize the local dimensions of baz sovereignty, I do not mean to suggest that baz formations are divorced from larger spheres of power. These micropolities represent the kind of relative autonomy that is crystallized in the social bond of respect. Because baz are recognized as local authorities by residents and other baz, national and international actors must also accord them a degree of respect.
I begin my discussion by introducing the most prominent baz in Bel Air. I then trace this baz’s history in the context of the contemporary political configuration of democratic politics and international development policy. Next, I illustrate how baz have creatively and effectively responded to this political configuration to claim new sources of power and resources. However, in the final analysis, I show how their exercise of local sovereignty reinforces neighborhood conflicts and insecurity, ultimately giving rise to desires for state sovereignty and a robust public sector.
Defending the Block
From the first time I entered Bel Air, I was told that I should meet with a man named Ti Snap and let him know what I was doing in the neighborhood. Ti Snap was the leader of Baz Grand Black, the baz that has managed all political affairs in the area since 2005.9 He was variously described as chief (chèf), community leader (lidè kominotè), or street director (dirijan lari), but whatever the term, the message was that all neighborhood matters went through Ti Snap. Over and over again, people told me that as a blan (white foreigner) interested in development, I had to meet with Ti Snap.10 It was, people said, an important sign of respect, and if I disrespected Ti Snap, he could prove an obstacle to my work. My friend Marc, an employee at the Brazilian NGO Viva Rio, finally took me to meet Ti Snap. We met at the Popular Sector, the neighborhood’s local political office, which Grand Black managed. When we arrived, Ti Snap’s friend came to greet us and told us we would have to wait as their “development foundation” had to attend to some project business. I was led into a dark back room and the door was shut. In the corner of the room on a cinder block were two handguns, what I later learned were Beretta 92s, presumably kept there for safekeeping. Time passed—just, I should note, as it did when I scheduled meetings with NGO directors—and I became aware that Ti Snap was sending me multiple messages about his power and influence.
When he eventually invited me into the front room, Ti Snap asked why I was there. I told him that I wanted to do research on local politics and that I wanted to teach an English class. He said the class was a nice idea and then asked if there was any money involved. “Who is sponsoring that? What organization is sponsoring this? What NGO do you have? Who is giving the money? Is this with MINUSTAH, the peacekeepers?” I told him it was just something I wanted to do, that there was no sponsor. He let out a big laugh and called to his friend: “The blan comes to talk to me, and she has no money!” He turned to me and said, “Look, we do development, we fight to defend the interests of Bel Air in the area of development, so the zone can find projects and programs. If you don’t do development, what can I do?” Ti Snap then told me that we would talk later because he had a meeting with the national commission for disarmament. He got into a red Isuzu Tracker and was off. After that I spent some time talking with his friend who had greeted me. His name was Manno, and he was the mayor’s popular delegate (delege popilè), an informal post he had been given because, as he put it, “I can manage the baz in the ghettos.” He told me that the meeting had gone well—just that if anyone took an interest in my project (by which he meant gave money) that I should come back and see Ti Snap. In what I would learn was a common sentiment, Manno told me, “Here, everything is organizations and projects. It’s them who control everything. Look, we have so many organizations, you can’t even count them all. You have to defend your rights…. Everyone has rights. That’s democracy. But you can’t wait for someone to give them to you. You must organize to get respect. So everyone makes an organization. Now you have a problem. You’ve got to fight organizations with organizations. That can create disorder if you don’t have the force to keep a hard line.” The term “hard line” was a direct reference to the name of another baz called Ling Di (Hard Line) that acted as the armed branch of Grand Black.
This interaction illustrates how baz leaders’ visions of community leadership tied a localized brand of militant politics to the broader political goals of democracy and development. Far from seeing violent force as being in opposition to community organizing, the leaders located it at its center. In other words, for them, becoming a community leader entailed pairing a grassroots development organization with the force of a gang, or making a “grassroots gang.” Why was this the case? The answer lies with the geography of an urban polity attuned to contemporary democratic politics and development policy. In this regard, three trends are noteworthy: government retrenchment, the growth of a male underclass, and the rise of community-based development.
After the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, the United States and its allies instituted a host of neoliberal market and government reforms that included a reduction in protective tariffs, privatization of public enterprises, and the streamlining of state offices.11 These reforms yielded cuts in government jobs, services, and benefits, but they did not lead to the absence of governance. Instead, nonstate actors, such as NGOs and local organizations such as Grand Black, have taken up the work of governance. The shift from state-based to community-based development policy has increased this trend. Over the past decades, donor governments have limited their bilateral support to the Haitian state for centralized development plans. Citing corruption, political instability, and weak public infrastructure, they have channeled the bulk of aid money—over 90 percent since 2010—to non-Haitian NGOs or private contractors.12 At the same time that this aid flow has further weakened the state and accelerated government retrenchment, it has also supported international development plans that have favored small-scale projects in rural villages and urban ghettos.
Since the 1950s, major international development plans for Haiti have focused on shifting the economy away from domestic agricultural production and toward the revamping of an offshore garment industry.13 This plan, which was renewed in 2009, has prompted vast rural-to-urban migration and the growth of slum areas (Manigat 1997).14 In addition, the combination of the dismal performance of this industry and the fact that its work force is female dominated has yielded unemployment rates exceeding 80 percent among young men in slum areas. In these conditions, many men have entered the local political economy as a means of earning an income and as a source of power and respect. For example, Ti Snap established himself as chief of Bel Air after he lost his state office job and a prominent baz leader died. In a public spectacle, he shot and killed a former army soldier (and therefore a political enemy) and declared himself in charge of Grand Black. This leadership gave him control over the lucrative arenas of brokering politicians’ access to the neighborhood; overseeing informal water, electricity, and sanitation markets; and engaging in informal policing. It also meant exercising a protection racket over any community-based aid or development projects, including that of the resident anthropologist. In order to lay claim to these resources, baz throughout urban Haiti have fashioned themselves as neighborhood development organizations that administer a multitude of projects for state and NGO actors, from food aid distributions and infrastructure projects to school scholarships and welfare handouts.
Baz’s governing actions are often interpreted as evidence of Haiti’s status as a “failed state,” a state unable to properly democratize and meet the norms of governance. Such interpretations gain credibility when baz governance precipitates urban violence. However, rubrics of state success and failure are inadequate for explaining violence, since they do not account for how the violence is tied to contemporary forms of statehood.15 The challenge, in other words, is to explain how processes of democratization, economic liberalization, and international development policy foster the conditions for urban insecurity and disorder. Looked at from this perspective, the governance functions baz perform illustrate how the state structure in Haiti has responded to neoliberal demands that government be retrenched. The Haitian state, in other words, has streamlined its budgets and activities by outsourcing the work of government to NGOs and local organizations, not unlike how the United States has increasingly consigned public services to religious charities, nonprofits, and other elements of the private sector. While these relationships are similar to clientelist models documented throughout Haitian history, they also signal something new. In an environment where state hegemony has collapsed and sovereign space hosts a hodgepodge of governing actors, baz leaders do more than merely grant access to resources; they also work with multiple state and nonstate actors to control and manage the most marginalized and unruly spaces of the polity. On the one hand, the restructuring of the state and development in Haiti has produced new opportunities for the urban poor to acquire wealth and political clout. But on the other hand, these new political opportunities are located outside the legal economy or formal state sector and have not provided stable, sufficient income, let alone security. Located in an informal political racket, these opportunities have involved using violence and other methods to exercise sovereign control over the block. In order to better understand baz’s relationship to democracy and development, it is useful to trace the particular yet exemplary trajectory of Baz Grand Black.
A Street History of Baz
It is tempting to understand baz formations as an expression of a timeless urban netherworld or even as the frontier politics of early nation building. But they actually are a crystallization of contemporary history. Their development reflects the politically fraught history of the post-1986 democratic transition and, in particular, two contradictory facets of democratization.
The term baz was first associated with the popular organizations that mobilized around the Catholic priest and liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990s. This grassroots movement arose among many diverse sectors of the population, but it was particularly strong in the ghettos surrounding Father Aristide’s church, St. Jean Bosco, which borders Bel Air. Block committees and other local groups in Bel Air became particularly involved in what Aristide called Lavalas, the movement that promised a cleansing flood of popular power and redemption.16 The neighborhood overwhelmingly supported Aristide’s election in December 1990 and his short-lived presidency, securing Bel Air’s long-standing position as a staunch power base for the Lavalas movement.
Today, however, the term baz tends to indicate the notion of a gang (the word gang now serves as the translation in national and international media and policy discourse) rather than grassroots activism. This second usage emerged when a coup toppled Aristide’s regime just eight months after his inauguration. Popular organizations in Bel Air mobilized militant factions in order to assert their demands for Aristide’s return and to protect themselves against a de facto regime that systematically targeted pro-Aristide strongholds until the president returned in 1994.17 The association intensified during Aristide’s second term, which began in 2001. Several baz were organized into politicized militant groups supportive of the government, becoming the so-called chimè—a term that translates as both “ghost” and “tantrum” and invokes the figure of an elusive and enraged pro-Aristide militant. After the second coup against Aristide in 2004, militants in Bel Air and other ghettos organized a movement to restore Aristide’s leadership. On September 30, 2004, after a scheduled protest came under fire from the interim government’s police force, the neighborhood organized a militia force and waged a violent standoff with police and peacekeepers for several months in the hope of restoring Aristide to leadership. As the fighting continued, and especially after the movement’s leader was shot and killed, baz became increasingly involved in thievery and kidnapping. Despite this devyasyon (diversion) of the movement, as people in Bel Air say, many militants maintained political objectives and continued to organize demonstrations and other political activities. However, the political opposition and the international community constructed baz leaders and their affiliates and Bel Air residents as criminal gangs. Indeed, Justice Minister Bernard Gousse declared in May 2005 that “Bèlè pa gen enosan!” (No one in Bel Air is innocent!), accusing the whole zone of engaging in a brutal “terrorist” operation called Operation Baghdad, drawing on associations with the war in Iraq.18 Targeting the protesters as gangsters rather than as militants, police and UN forces killed or imprisoned several baz leaders, affiliates, and residents of Port-au-Prince.19 In light of this history, baz formations can be seen as illustrating a fundamental paradox of democracy: While they reflect the democratic hopes of the Haitian underclass, they are also tied to the novel forms of violence and insecurity that have arisen in the wake of the Duvalier dictatorship.
Grand Black’s ascendancy to Bel Air leadership reflects this history. At the height of the post-coup violence in late 2004, Ti Snap and Samba Boukman, another political delegate of Aristide, founded the baz as the organizational center of the civilian army that was fighting to restore Aristide’s rule.20 Samba Boukman, who took his name from the former slave who led the first battle of the Haitian revolution, became the movement’s press secretary, and Ti Snap was among the civilian army’s former chiefs. But importantly, Grand Black also points to more recent shifts in the organization of urban politics. In particular, after the 2004 coup, many baz formations began to reposition their politics away from a national Lavalas platform and toward a more localized project that was not defined by, but could still enable entry into, national power structures. In fact, after the coup violence subsided, the leaders of Grand Black expressed an interest in working with the new government President René Préval led, which took power in 2006.21 This desire was materialized when Samba Boukman became the head of the National Commission of Disarmament and Ti Snap was put in charge of the neighborhood’s Popular Sector (Sektè Popilè).
Figure 9.1. “Don’t Attack [Here]!” Graffiti at the Locale of Baz Grand Black in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo by Chelsey Kivland, 2013.
In this way, Grand Black’s militant defense of the neighborhood shifted from a project whose goal was to defend Aristide’s rule to one whose aim was to defend the interests of baz residents by protecting the zone from potential dangers. Despite their formal participation in a local disarmament campaign, Grand Black maintained an arsenal. They also forged an affiliation with Ling Di, which was known to be involved in kidnapping, political assassination, and other crimes. Ling Di functioned as a more undercover, more criminal, and more violent wing of Grand Black. It was, in the words of Ti Snap, “the childish disorder that the grown-up political leaders control.” Grand Black controlled Ling Di by forbidding them to commit crimes locally and by using them to police the neighborhood against outside criminals. Adopting a lyric from their affiliate rara music band, they proclaimed, “Pa Fè Fòs!” (Don’t Attack [Here]!) (figure 9.1). The slogan’s meaning was reinforced when it was spray-painted on the local Catholic church, a bullet-ridden edifice where the group held press conferences, rallies, and concerts and launched major protests in the city.
Shape Shifting from Militant Politics to Development Policy
Over the past decades, baz formations have localized their political project in order to both reengage in national politics and relate to dominant global political trends and interventions, especially international development. In his role as head of the National Commission of Disarmament, Samba Boukman worked closely with the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) that began in 2004 and its Brazilian NGO affiliate, Viva Rio, which launched an extensive security and development program in Bel Air in 2006. Core members of Grand Black also held high-ranking local posts in the NGO. These roles acquainted the group with NGO culture and development policy, and in 2008, Samba Boukman oversaw the founding of the Grand Black Foundation for the Development of Bel Air. This foundation has enabled Grand Black to cultivate a degree of political neutrality and gain access to the financial and material resources of international development organizations. However, the reinvention of Grand Black did not reflect a linear progression away from militant politics toward neutral development; rather it constantly negotiates between these modes of organizing.
Partha Chatterjee (2004), writing of India, has identified a tension between two kinds of organizing in fragile states—what he calls civil society and political society. Whereas civil society represents elite, legal mobilizations, political society concerns how populations that are excluded from civil society make claims on those who govern. These marginal populations form organizations dedicated to claiming the right to government services and benefits, even though they acknowledge that their activities breach norms of good civic behavior. In fact, there is often a “dark side” to their mobilizations, whereby “criminality and violence are tied to the various ways deprived population groups must struggle to make their claims to governmental care” (75). While baz may appear to exemplify political society, they in fact defy categorization. They engage in interactions that fall between the categories of civil society and political society—or what in this context may be more aptly defined as between civil society and popular organizations.22 Grand Black, for example, attempts to engage in several modalities simultaneously: a militant modality as chiefs of a contested neighborhood, a black populist modality as representatives of the urban underclass, and a social modality that is situated beyond politics in a framework of civil society and development. Hence, rather than abandon militant racial politics entirely, baz find themselves shape shifting, transmuting into new beings while retaining vestiges of their original form, in order to address distinct political and development audiences at local, national, and international scales simultaneously. In other words, they adopt the language of development and affiliate themselves with NGO culture, but they do so within the rubric of their baz identity.
This, to be sure, is not an easy task, and Grand Black’s history reveals an artful manipulation of multiple forms of organization. Such organizational prowess was evident in the subtle yet potent imagery displayed on their neighborhood headquarters (figure 9.2). The two-story yellow concrete building served as the group’s meeting place, organizational center, and symbol of their local sovereignty. Located across the intersection from the “Don’t Attack” sign, it represented the group’s control of this major intersection and, in turn, the neighborhood. Most baz are situated at crossroads, and the most powerful baz command influential, neighborhood-defining intersections. In Haitian religious schemes, the crossroads (kalfou) is both a spirit (lwa) and a place of power and judgment, the site where magic is performed and fates are determined. The rara music groups with which baz are affiliated envision themselves as serving the Master of the Crossroads (mèt kalfou), and the baz’s sovereign domain radiates from their material, social, and mystical dominance of major crossroads. The inscription on the front of the building also contained potent symbols. Painted in yellow, red, green, and black was the organization’s logo, a stoplight, and its name, Fondation Grand Black pour le Developpement. The English name Grand Black—rather than the Creole gran nèg—was a conscious appeal to transnational black solidarity. It named a commitment to elevating the status and power of the black underclass—to make them grand blacks23—vis-à-vis the light-skinned national elites and the staff of the international development agents and organizations, the so-called blan. The stoplight icon likewise engaged black diasporic politics within a development frame. The stoplight invoked the social order of a modern, developed world and signaled the way Grand Black controlled traffic in and out of the neighborhood. It also incorporated both sets of pan-African tricolors, pointing to black power and the global struggle to attain racial equality.24 Together, these symbols drew on mystical and racial idioms poor black Caribbean youth have long used to claim a kind of popular power or respect that is distinct from the forms of power elite norms of respectability represent (Wilson 1973).25 At the same time, however, these symbols’ embeddedness in development language reflected an effort to position themselves as respectable members of civil society engaged in the neutral project of “developing” the neighborhood.
Figure 9.2. Development foundation of Baz Grand Black in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo by Chelsey Kivland, 2009.
Grand Black’s shape shifting between an oppositional political identity and an organization fulfilling a development mission was tested in 2011, when, after the devastating earthquake, Aristide returned to Haiti and President Michel Martelly was elected. Martelly, whose family was involved with the Duvalier dictatorship and who had supported the movement that ousted Aristide in 2004, was a clear political enemy of Grand Black. Following Martelly’s inauguration, Grand Black initiated an anti-government movement called Geto Ini (Ghettos United), and in March 2012, unknown gunmen assassinated Samba Boukman in what was widely considered a political act. Soon afterward, Grand Black refashioned their identity yet again. They registered as a new social (as opposed to political) organization. In an attempt to appease the light-skinned president and the development blan, they removed any reference to racial and militant idioms from their name, calling themselves GB Productions for the Development and Advancement of Bel Air. In other words, Grand Black members attempted to maintain local sovereignty by presenting themselves as neutral leaders capable of working with any interested party. However, even here they maintained the GB as a vestige of their more militant identity, and neighbors, attuned to these subtle name games, did not miss the dual meaning of the group’s new title. As more than one resident told me, “Grand Black focuses on local development to play two camps.”
The adoption of development discourse went beyond facilitating increased flexibility in national politics. It also provided access to the financial and material resources of international development organizations. Grand Black’s reinvention is an example of how its members seek to position themselves as the local brokers of development projects. This brokerage entails not only downplaying politics but also adopting the signs, practices, and logics of the organizational form that dominates community-based development: the NGO. Baz formations in urban Haiti are not invested in becoming NGOs (a term associated with foreign or elite organizations); they are interested in becoming the local, grassroots partners with NGOs that seek to implement projects in the area. Nonetheless, this entails constructing the local organization in the model of the NGO.
This is most apparent in their creative use of acronyms, a key linguistic trope of NGOs. Take, for example, MOG, another baz located an intersection away from Grand Black. Their acronym spells morgue in Creole—as in “If you don’t respect us, we’ll put you in the morgue!”—and they present an explicitly militant—even criminal—identity. When they founded a local organization in 2008, they redefined the acronym as Moral Optimists for the Grand Renaissance of Bel Air, dramatically shifting their identity. A year later, in 2009, they furthered their affiliation with NGO culture by founding a legal social organization with an eight-letter acronym: OJMOTEEB. Defined as Youth Organization of Moral Optimists for the Educational Enrichment of Bel Air, this new title incorporated the key development terms “youth” and “education” (figures 9.3 and 9.4). To concretize these new titles, baz formations formalize their organizations through a host of bureaucratic procedures and material accessories. They write charters and bylaws, acquire legal attestations, and furnish identity badges. The badges represent the ministries, organizations, foundations, associations, and even federations of organizations to which they belong. Successful baz leaders carry multiple badges, securing them in their wallets or hanging them from their cars’ rearview mirrors, and they are always ready to present them to political gatekeepers and aid workers. Like the acronym, the badge represents a key NGO practice in Haiti, and possessing several of them affirms a degree of organizational capacity, an expansive social network, and an aptitude at shape shifting, signaling that the leader is someone who can make things happen with various people and in various contexts.
Because legal and registered organizations have access to a potentially lucrative, powerful, and mysterious development domain, they are often viewed as magical entities. I use the term magical in the Haitian sense of sorcery—that is, to stress that shape shifting from militant baz to civil society organizations imputes power, prestige, and wealth to the group.26 The notion that becoming a legally registered organization warrants such moral and material benefits is apparent in the fact that the term for local leaders is “organized people” (moun òganize), meaning not only those who are organized but those who are associated with one or many organizations. It is under their organizational identity that baz register as legal entities with state agencies and relevant NGOs, enabling them to apply for and manage projects and associated resources. In Bel Air, baz have negotiated U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-sponsored projects to pave dirt corridors and sidewalks, install solar lamps, and build an art gallery; they have worked with Viva Rio on security, water distribution, trash collection, and tree planting; they organized “cash for work” programs after the earthquake; and they have arranged their own projects in the domains of human rights, health, education, and sanitation, such as MOG’s 2009 seminar, advertised in figure 9.4, on the uses and abuses of cell phones. These projects, whether initiated from beyond or within the neighborhood, were funded by an amalgamation of state ministries, aid agencies, and NGOs that directly or indirectly contracted with the local organizations.
Figure 9.4. Flyer advertising an OJMOTEEB development project in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo by Chelsey Kivland, 2009.
The channeling of funds to street leaders has increased alongside the model of community-based development and its increasingly localized geography. Baz organizations’ orientation around the neighborhood or even the block mimics the restricted target areas of small-scale, community-based projects. In claiming control of a delimited block, baz leaders have facilitated a point of entry, protection in an otherwise no-go zone, and, crucially, low-wage labor. The baz can recruit and manage workers and organize the payroll for the sponsoring organization. Through this work, state actors, NGOs, and baz have fortified a mutually beneficial relationship in which governance and sovereignty are shared. By working with the baz’s civil society branch, state and NGO sponsors can claim not only community participation but also a bona fide community partnership. In return, baz leaders manage the distribution of funds, resources, and labor in ways that benefit themselves and their social network, often excluding women, the elderly, or other residents unaffiliated with baz politics. Viva Rio’s access to Bel Air, for example, was brokered in a meeting that included Samba Boukman, the head of Viva Rio, and the captain of the MINUSTAH peacekeeping operation. This meeting, in turn, facilitated the employment of core baz members. Consequently, many residents in Bel Air expressed ambivalence about this meeting. While they acknowledged that it coincided with a decline in violence and insecurity, they also saw it as evidence that NGOs have favored those who are engaged in violence. As they often told me, “Being honest and staying out of the game of politics does not pay off in the system of development.” Despite such protestations, the high degree of local power that baz wield means that NGOs must respect them and work within the terms of their leadership. As a program organizer of Viva Rio elaborated in 2008:
People complain that we work with bandits. But we have to work with them. They are the leaders for the areas. You can’t say that because you don’t like the way the leader became a leader, you won’t work with him. You have to respect that he is the leader. Anyway, if you don’t work with them you’ll have problems. It’s simple. We need them to do the work.
Still, residents’ complaints highlight the ways these micropolities foster forms of gender and age exclusion and internecine conflicts that put the lives of baz leaders and neighborhood residents at risk. I now turn to sketching the entanglement of violence in baz politics in order to reveal the problems associated with outsourcing state duties to powerful groups at the margins of the polity.
When I asked residents about the causes of insecurity in the area, at first casually and then as part of a sixty-three–household survey, I regularly heard responses that blamed not only baz formations but also their entanglement with democracy and development. In citing reasons for the violence, people often referenced “elections,” “NGOs,” and “projects.” At the root of these responses was a complaint about social divisions. One respondent, a married man and father of two, told me, “[NGOs] come to do development but they just divide people. The only real development that happens is when people in a community come together to solve a problem without stirring up money. One thing NGOs don’t understand is that we need jobs but project money causes divisions.” During my time in Bel Air, such divisions appeared more a normal part of doing development than cases of development gone wrong. In order to explain why this is so, it is useful to unpack the example of the post-earthquake wave of violence and insecurity that engulfed Bel Air and surrounding areas.
Immediately after the 7.0-magnitude tremors rocked Haiti, several international news reports readily predicted that criminal gangs would take over the city. These fears were unfounded. Amid the initial chaos and uncertainty of the earthquake, when Haiti appeared most vulnerable, criminal gangs did not take over the city. In fact, the rate of kidnapping and murder declined.27 It wasn’t until several months later, as aid money flowed into the capital, that the story began to change. In Bel Air, the homicide rate skyrocketed, going from 40 per 100,000 in 2010 (the year of the earthquake) to 138 in 2011 and 164 in 2012.28 Such rates of violence had not been seen since the post-coup period of the mid-2000s, and ensekerite (insecurity) reemerged as Bel Air residents’ dominant concern. Why was this the case? As I have suggested, the answer involved the entanglement of baz politics and development economies. More specifically, it involved a series of conflicts over postdisaster cash-for-work programs.
These conflicts reveal a complex story, but the general sequence of events reflects a common pattern. Basically, there were four major developments. First, in 2011, a group of youth in a nearby community broke from a more prominent baz there and formed a rubble removal team. The youth then established themselves as Baz 117 Aslè. Though the group had only a few members, they boasted of their network of 117 malicious (aslè) bandits. The group used the $300 they earned from the rubble removal project to purchase a few handguns and began a spree of muggings and robberies in the zone. People referred to 117 as a gang rather than a baz because instead of making a claim to local authority by protecting against outside threats, they engaged in predatory crimes in their home community.
The second major event was that a rival of Grand Black in Bel Air—a baz called Pale Cho (Talk Tough)—acquired control of most of the area’s rubble removal brigades and a reconstruction project to pave area sidewalks. As a result, a few members of Baz Grand Black joined Baz Pale Cho in search of its newfound power and resources. In response, Ti Snap began a campaign to reclaim Grand Black’s standing. The third development was that Ti Snap and Grand Black formed an alliance with Baz 117, and together they declared war against Baz Pale Cho. This war precipitated more robbery and theft as the groups struggled to acquire weapons and artillery. In effect, Baz Grand Black transformed into a gang, and residents in Bel Air protested by spray-painting all over the neighborhood “Ti Snap is chief of the 117 thieves!”
Ti Snap fled the neighborhood in early 2012, but instead of resolving the problem, the vacuum in leadership created an environment in which small armed groups, such as MOG and others called Al Qaeda and Kolon Blan, began to stake violent claims to authority.29 Ultimately, the situation deteriorated until June 2013, when the government and Viva Rio helped restore Ti Snap and Grand Black as chiefs of Bel Air. Together, the government and the NGO channeled development funds to Grand Black for an annual street festival, a community food distribution, a major street-sweeping program, and a peace concert. Though he was relieved, Ti Snap was not exactly pleased to return to his post. He told me that he wished the state would establish a police station in the area and make him a bona fide policeman so that he could better control the disorder. As he said, “Without the state in charge, there will just be more insecurity!”
This story reveals much about street politics in urban Haiti. The moral of the story might appear to be that neighborhoods function best when strong baz leaders lead them. After all, the homicide rate declined to 2010 levels when Ti Snap’s leadership was restored. But we should keep in mind that Ti Snap is not an elected representative of his block and that although neighborhood residents claimed that he had respect, they often qualified this as “respect by the gun.” Instead, what we see here are the contradictory outcomes of outsourcing the work of development, aid, and governance to baz leaders. In this example, the political economy of development was mobilized in order to remedy the very violence it had helped precipitate. This illustrates that while such political economies provided young men in Bel Air with increased opportunity, it also rendered them vulnerable to attacks from rivals and reinforced the long-standing insecurities that have perpetuated the economic and political marginalization of the neighborhood.
The anthropologist James Ferguson (1994) has argued that the political economy of development resembles an “anti-politics machine,” constantly whisking political realities out of sight and all the while strengthening, almost unnoticed, the state presence in the local region. Contemporary Haiti presents a related yet unique scenario. By following neoliberal dictates and outsourcing government functions to local communities, the state has become increasingly absent and defunct. Furthermore, outsourcing government functions has not eliminated but has rather relegated politics (and thus political conflict) to street sovereigns who compete to claim a piece of the dwindling public sector, often with devastating consequences. Despite baz attempts to craft civil society identities, they ultimately ruled locally by retaining militant identities. Put differently, although they refashioned their local orders of rule as grassroots organizations, they still recognized the politics—the competing players and interests—at stake in governance and development and, in turn, their need to enforce respect through appeals to militant forms of power. As Manno said, “You must organize to get respect. So everyone makes an organization. Now you have a problem. You’ve got to fight organizations with organizations.” In this sense, their entanglement of militant and civil and political and development agendas points to a fundamental tension in all statecraft: that control of force is a constitutive part of political community.30 After all, how different is baz’s embrace of civil society from an NGO’s ties to the UN peacekeeping mission or, for that matter, a state’s ties to the military? The chronic conflicts baz engaged in point to the fact that baz leaders have only ever been marginally able to fulfill the role and work of the state. Knowing this, they paradoxically long for the state to take on its sovereign duties and provide the security, income, and authority to support their work.
Conclusion
State sovereignty worldwide and especially in fragile states such as Haiti appears to be in flux today. Many in this volume have argued that the sovereignty of the Haitian state is increasingly challenged by the infiltration of a host of external actors and forces claiming to “develop” Haiti—from global capital, liberalization policies, and free-trade zones to NGOs, religious charities, and multinational governing boards such as the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. What I have attempted to illustrate here is how this globalization of Haiti’s sovereign space has occurred alongside and in relation to an inverse dynamic: the localization of sovereign power. Put differently, the collapse of Haitian state sovereignty has yielded a new form of rule and order in which local collectivities operate at the nexus of national and global power structures. In urban Haiti, baz formations have emerged as key players not only on the block but also in Haiti’s multiscale political space; they have both assumed state functions and become key mediators for a diverse set of power brokers.
These emergent micropolities demand new ways of conceptualizing sovereignty and statehood and the relationship between them. On one level, baz formations suggest a need to reorient our understanding of sovereignty as the domain of the nation-state and expand our definition to include the way a community fashions itself for the execution of power and governance locally. On another level, they suggest a need to recast sovereignty as being less about an ideal state of total liberty and more about an ideal relationship of recognition and respect. Baz leaders did not engage in efforts to rule their territory in a way that was unconnected to external actors; they engaged with external actors. They did not wish to wield the same authority—in terms of power, resources, and responsibilities—as state or NGO actors do. Rather, they aspired to a kind of relative autonomy by which they handled the local administration of the governing resources state or NGO actors had. Indeed, their claims to power locally rested on the fact that they could command the respect by those in power as much as by local residents.
However, as I have illustrated, this system of rule ultimately failed to furnish harmonious relations of mutual respect and, in fact, promulgated insecurity. This was because those who governed—whether they were in the fragile state sector or the project-based NGO sector—could not fulfill demands for a robust public sector and because this environment of scarce resources entailed ever-more-intense competitions between local groups. In these conditions, many baz leaders have embraced calls for a stronger, more robust state apparatus that would be capable of furnishing state services, jobs, and benefits for them. For example, on the occasion of the truce that reestablished Grand Black as in charge of Bel Air, a leading baz member offered a solution to neighborhood insecurity that directly appealed to the state. With Ti Snap standing behind him, he told me, “We don’t need violence anymore but peace, for all of Bel Air to become one. It’s my role to speak with the youth so they don’t take a bad path. This peace accord is one part. We need the Ministry of Justice, the police, everyone in the world to accompany us.… I want the state to accompany our work. Viva Rio does its part. Now the state must also help. For the youth to find security, pleasure, work, food, drink. That’s what can bring a solution.” Another leader proclaimed, “What I ask of the Haitian government, as a youth leader, what they can give the community. What we ask of the Haitian state is to offer us a police station in Bel Air, so they can have more control of the zone and the population can live better…. We feel we can’t live. We, as leaders, ask the press and the Haitian state, let’s take responsibility.”
These sentiments emphasize two key points that continue to resound in urban Haiti and with which I would like to conclude this chapter. They highlight the multiple conditions that would provide a holistic restitution in residents’ lives—security, work, education, nutrition—and they emphasize the need for the state to work with community leaders in furnishing this life. If we take such claims seriously, as I think we should, our task is to ask new questions and, most significantly, to attune our conceptual and critical vocabulary to how people are both empowered and exploited by contemporary localizations of governance and development. As baz leaders in Bel Air often defiantly but also frustratingly told me, “Here, we make the state!”
Notes
1. The core philosophers of liberalism—from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke to John Stuart Mills—have used a rubric of individualism (of natural rights or law) to define the principle of liberty. For them, liberty is a constitutive part of political community, but, as Alasdair MacIntyre ([1981] 2007, 195) has argued, “for liberal individualism a community is simply an arena in which individuals each pursue their own self-chosen conception of the good life, and political institutions exist to provide that degree of order which makes self-determined activity possible.”
2. In a traditional Haitian greeting, a guest calls out “onè” (honor) when approaching a house or courtyard and the host responds with “respè” (respect) to welcome the guest.
3. For reporting on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission and the minor role of Haitian leaders on it, see Sontag (2012).
4. For an analysis of how the Haitian government reluctantly accepted unpopular neoliberal reforms in the mid-1990s in order to obtain crucial aid funds, see Dupuy (2005).
5. A recent example concerns Haiti’s minimum wage policy. In 2009, after Parliament passed a law raising the minimum wage by 60 percent (from 125 to 200 gourdes), President René Préval, facing pressure from the U.S. State Department and foreign apparel industry executives, vetoed the law and instituted a two-tier wage structure that maintained the low wage for export assembly workers. For more information, see Bell (2013).
6. The United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti (2012) has reported that of the $6.43 billion in aid money disbursed by donors in the period 2010–2012, over 90 percent went to foreign NGOs and private contractors and less than 1 percent to Haitian NGOs.
7. Several scholars have documented how state agents and representatives treat the rural and urban poor with a lack of respect during daily bureaucratic encounters (e.g., Smith 2001; Smucker 1982) and the predatory structure of the state apparatus. The Haitian state, as Trouillot (1990, 64) asserted, has “chosen to live at the expense of the people” See also Dupuy (1989) and Fatton (2002).
8. Several have argued that Haiti’s revolution engendered a nationalist ideology centered on the army and its male soldiers (Laguerre 1993; Sheller 2012). In the 1805 Constitution of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, revolutionary army general and first ruler of Haiti, went so far as to conceive of the nation as a fraternal army and the citizen as “a good father, a good son, a good husband, and above all, a good soldier.”
9. All names are pseudonyms, except for the names of those deceased.
10. I prefer to translate blan as “white foreigner” rather than simply “foreigner” in order to stress that the idiom is embedded in a particular racial order wherein class, status, and citizenship are tied to racial parameters. This racial order was codified in the 1804 Declaration of Independence, where Jean-Jacques Dessalines referred to citizens as nèg (black) and foreigners as blan (white).
11. For more information on neoliberal reforms, see Dupuy (2005), Farmer (2003), Schuller (2012), and Fatton (this volume).
12. See note 6.
13. Haitian assembly of U.S. apparel has been promoted by both Haiti and the United States as development aid to Haiti since the last years of François Duvalier’s rule. During Jean-Claude Duvalier’s rule (1971–1986) and his “liberalization” of the economy, the offshore assembly industry expanded rapidly as investors took advantage of cheap labor, tax exemptions, few foreign exchange controls, and limited government intervention. However, with no mechanisms for domestic investment, the assembly industry provided no long-term benefits for the country (Perito and Hsu 2006; Trouillot 1990). By the mid-1980s, it had not substantially affected income distribution or the growth of other industries. In addition, the political instability of the 1990s precipitated factory closings and massive layoffs (Farmer 2003).
14. In 2009, the economist Paul Collier issued a report to the secretary-general of the United Nations that touted the garment industry as Haiti’s main development possibility. U.S. president Bill Clinton subsequently used the Collier report to promote the financing of the Caracol Industrial Park, a garment assembly plant located in northern Haiti funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Clinton Foundation, and the governments of Haiti and the United States.
15. Among others (e.g., Bogues 2006; Burr 2005), Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel Goldstein (2010) have argued that in Latin America, urban violence is integral to the founding of democratic states, a key component in the maintenance of economic inequality, a feature of the administration of governance, and an instrument for making popular challenges to the political system.
16. Bel Air was central to Lavalas despite (or perhaps because of) the Duvalier family dictatorship’s ties to the neighborhood, which once was home to over 500 of the regime’s tonton makout militiamen (Laguerre 1976).
17. Eyewitness reports estimated that 1,500 people were killed during the first days of the coup (Farmer 2003). An estimated 300,000 went into hiding in Haiti or abroad (Siebentritt 1994), and 37,000 took to the high seas in a desperate attempt to reach Florida in 1991 and 1992 (Mitchell 1994). The urban and rural poor were also particularly affected by the international aid embargo enforced on the de facto regime and thousands died of hunger (Berggren et al. 1993).
18. The origin of the term Operation Baghdad is highly contested. My research suggests that it was developed by a Bel Air baz to connote the illegitimacy of the foreign invasion into the neighborhood and then appropriated by the leaders of the post-coup interim regime to suggest a terrorist campaign.
19. Using random surveys of 1,260 households, Kolbe and Hutson (2006) found that twenty-three households had had a member killed in the ten months following the coup d’état. The researchers then calibrated this figure with the population of Port-au-Prince to estimate that 8,000 people were killed, about half by criminal perpetrators and the other half by political perpetrators (see also Mendonça 2008).
20. Samba spelled his name this way in an intentional departure from the standard Haitian Creole spelling “Sanba.”
21. A June 12, 2006, U.S. Embassy cable reported on the willingness of Samba Boukman and other militants to “give Préval a chance to deliver, rather than fight for Aristide’s return.” This cable was made publicly available by WikiLeaks: Ambassador Janet Sanderson, “Lavalas Reunification Meeting Fails,” telegram, June 12, 2006, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06PORTAUPRINCE1028_a.html, accessed July 1, 2014.
22. The binary between civil society and popular organizations was established in Haiti as a formal political division in 2000, after Aristide’s second election to the presidency. This divide was between the Civil Society Initiative, a collection of private and nonprofit groups opposed to Aristide, and the popular organizations affiliated with urban baz formations that supported Aristide.
23. The phrase grand blacks was a conscious inversion of the colonial term for white planters, the so-called grand blancs.
24. The pan-African tricolors can be traced to two flags, the red, yellow, and green flag Ethiopia has used since 1897 and the red, black, and green flag the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League adopted in 1920.
25. My understanding of the relationship between respect, violence, and masculinity in Haiti is indebted to Peter Wilson’s (1973) seminal framework of respectability and reputation in Providencia and to countless subsequent reworkings of it (e.g., Sutton 1974; Thomas 2013). For a more detailed analysis of how urban discourses in Haiti elaborate this framework, see Kivland (2014).
26. In using the term magical, I am drawing on discourse surrounding maji, or sorcery, in Haiti. Accusations of sorcery in Haiti follow lines of inequality and disturbances in the moral order (Farmer 1992; Larose 1977; Richman 2005). I also use the term magical to stress that baz’s shape shifting should be approached in terms of a fluid understanding of identity. Put differently, the baz should not be viewed as shielding a presumed “real” identity with fanciful development language but rather as showcasing how they can, and indeed must be, capable of manipulating perceptions to perform multiple identities in diverse contexts.
27. It is difficult to find reliable reporting on crime statistics in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, but eyewitness reports confirm that kidnapping and armed robbery declined immediately after the earthquake (Wilentz 2013). However, it should be noted the some kinds of violence, such as rape and other forms of sexual assault, escalated in the months after the earthquake when over a million people were housed in encampments (MADRE et al. 2011).
28. These figures were compiled by cross-referencing data gathered by Viva Rio’s Biwo Analyiz Kominotè and the Justice and Peace Commission of Haiti, both located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
29. The names of baz formations consciously draw on a militant vocabulary, and they often make reference to larger political struggles. The names Al Qaeda and Kolon Blan invoke the “war on terror” and colonial idioms of power, respectively.
30. Max Weber famously defined the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” ([1946] 1998, 78). More recently, several anthropologists have revitalized a conception of postcolonial sovereignty and statehood based on violence (see Das and Poole 2004; Hansen and Stepputat 2005; Mbembe 2003).
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