After the Gangs, Who Will We Be?

A video seen by the whole country in two days raises a question that maps of lost territory never raise: what six years of violence have made of us, and what of it will remain once the gangs are gone.

There is probably a threshold beyond which a society must stop counting only its dead and begin counting what the dead have destroyed in the living.

Haiti may be crossing that threshold.

For two days now, a video has been circulating. It shows a young woman being mutilated, then beheaded with a machete. The man holding the blade is a gang leader. The woman who wanted this death and directs it, at his side, is his partner: a young woman followed by thousands of people on TikTok. Around them, men watch, comment, film.

We need to linger here. Not on the blood. On the act, and on the woman who orders it. On this woman who, the day before, was posting videos like any girl her age, and who can move from phone to machete, from TikTok to torture, without anything, apparently, breaking in between.

For our problem may no longer be only that armed men have become capable of killing. Every war produces killers. Something more disturbing happens when the executioner’s world spills beyond its territory, when its codes contaminate those of ordinary life, when a young woman with an audience can have another young woman mutilated, and that audience, as recently as the day before yesterday, was still defending her.

The question is then no longer only: how do we defeat the gangs?

After the gangs, who will we be?

The map no one draws

We talk a great deal about lost territory. We draw maps, we color in neighborhoods, we count the roads held, the abandoned police stations, the municipalities retaken. This mapping is necessary. But there is another map, one that no one draws because it cannot be drawn: the map of the territory lost within ourselves.

How many things that were unimaginable ten years ago are today simply commented on? A burned body. A severed head. A child holding an automatic weapon. A filmed execution. We watch. Sometimes we forward it. We write “my God.” Then we go on with our day.

This is not callousness, or not only that. No human being can live for years in constant terror; the brain ends up turning down the volume of horror so that ordinary life can go on. This mechanism has saved us. It also has a price, and that price is collective: the exceptional becomes familiar, and the familiar no longer wounds.

The figures give the measure of what our vocabulary ends up concealing. The April 2026 report of the United Nations Secretary-General records 9,063 homicides in 2025, or 76 per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the highest rates in the world. Between December and February, the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) counted another 2,444. But what does 9,063 still mean? That is precisely the problem. By dint of counting the dead in the thousands, we lose the fundamental unit of tragedy: one. One man. One woman. A life that had memories, a voice, people waiting for it in the evening. Statistics are indispensable for understanding the catastrophe, and dangerous when they keep us from feeling it. A society begins to die morally on the day the dead person stops being someone and becomes a line in Monday’s toll.

It is on that map, the map of our worn-out gaze, that this week’s video finds its place. It could not have existed ten years ago. Not because no one would have been capable of it, but because no one would have watched it to the end.

The territory truly conquered

We may be mistaken about the gangs’ greatest victory. It is not Village-de-Dieu, or Canaan, or Martissant. It is not even the ability to cut a national highway or besiege a town. The most precious territory they have conquered is our idea of what is normal.

When a generation grows up regarding a heavily armed man as an ordinary authority; when a child learns that the head of the neighborhood is neither the teacher, nor the judge, nor the police officer, but whoever has the most guns; when people adapt their schedules, their clothes, their routes, and their language to the demands of armed groups, domination is no longer merely territorial. It is cultural. And a girl can then become a gang leader’s partner the way one becomes the partner of a local notable, with an audience to applaud her.

This is where the video stops being just another crime story. Hannah Arendt spoke of the banality of evil, and the phrase is often misused. She did not say that evil was insignificant. She observed that monstrous acts can be committed not by monsters but by human beings who have stopped questioning what they do. The absolute danger begins when we need to imagine executioners as a species apart. Them, the barbarians; us, society. Them, the gangs; us, the decent people. This fiction is reassuring. Haitian reality becomes disturbing when the line blurs, when the young woman who orders the torture has the same phone, the same filters, and the same followers as our daughters.

But that line did not blur by itself. For years, there were people blurring it.

Those who hired barbarism

The gangs did not fall on Haiti out of the sky. They needed weapons, ammunition, money, vehicles, intelligence, protection, markets, accomplices. A bandit carrying a gun in a working-class neighborhood is a striking sight. The one who puts the gun in his hands is far less so. Yet that is where part of our failure begins.

The international sanctions regimes adopted in recent years do not target only gang leaders. They also name political figures, members of the economic elites, and intermediaries accused of financing criminal structures, facilitating arms trafficking, or laundering their proceeds. The point is not to condemn all entrepreneurs, all politicians, or all wealthy families indiscriminately; such a generalization would be as lazy as it is unjust. But self-proclaimed collective innocence no longer holds.

For too long, some regarded violence as a usable tool. To intimidate an opponent. To control a neighborhood. To secure an election. To block a road. To protect a business. It is one of the oldest political stories in the world: the powerful believe they can hire barbarism by the hour and send it away when they no longer need it. But barbarism learns. It accumulates, it arms itself, it realizes that it no longer needs its sponsor. And on the day the monster has its own territory, its own revenue, its own alliances, everyone suddenly becomes a defender of the Republic. A little late.

You cannot exploit the weakness of the state for years and then discover, in astonishment, that the state is weak. You cannot build a society in which the law is negotiable for the powerful and sacred for the poor, and then be surprised that the poor, too, have understood that the law is negotiable. The rot comes down from the top as much as it rises from the street.

It has even ended up becoming an economy. Illegal road taxes, extortion of businesses, ransoms, checkpoints that turn access to territory into a commodity. Killing is no longer just an act of rage; in some places, violence is a business model, with its suppliers, its intermediaries, and its beneficiaries, in other words, interests that depend on its continuation. That is why the way out of the crisis will be infinitely more complicated than a military victory. You can arrest the foot soldiers and leave intact the machine that produces them.

The fact remains that when the state finally takes on this machine, it does so through men in uniform. And that is where the most dangerous line of all comes into play.

When the uniform is no longer enough

The line where the one who is supposed to protect begins to reproduce the one he is fighting.

Accusations and images regularly circulate about predatory behavior attributed to some members of the security forces. Each case must be documented before it is presented as fact. But the general problem is not an invention of social media: BINUH reports attribute a share of the deaths not only to gangs but also to security operations, to self-defense groups, and to mobs carrying out vigilante justice, and they report summary executions that the police Inspectorate General has been called upon to investigate.

This obviously does not put the Haitian National Police (PNH) and criminal organizations on the same footing. The PNH includes women and men who risk their lives every day to keep the country from collapsing. Precisely for that reason, any predation committed in uniform is particularly destructive. The bandit who steals confirms that he is a bandit. The police officer who steals destroys something more precious than what he takes: the difference between the bandit and the law.

A republic does not hold together because the state has more weapons than the criminals. It holds because the state is supposed to possess what criminals will never have: legitimacy. If that difference disappears, all that remains are competing armed groups, and the citizen chooses the one he fears least. He slows down at every uniform with the same unease he feels before any armed man.

But it would still be too easy to close the case with the gangs, the elites, and the police. That leaves us.

What we have learned to negotiate

We have learned to keep living. It was necessary. We go to work, we hold weddings, we send the children to school, we talk about the dollar, we laugh. And thank goodness: refusing to live would hand one more victory to those who are destroying the country.

But this extraordinary Haitian capacity for adaptation has a dark side. We can adapt to almost anything, even the unacceptable. A road becomes dangerous; we take another road. A neighborhood falls; we avoid it. A family leaves the country; we call them on WhatsApp. A massacre happens; we share the news. Then the next day comes. This resilience we are so proud of becomes a trap when it relieves the system of the need to change. A people capable of surviving anything risks ending up tolerating everything.

And while we tolerate, someone is watching. A society always passes something on to its children, even when it has not chosen to. The child who sees an armed man obtaining what his father, for all his diplomas, never obtains learns something. The child who sees a gang leader’s partner become an online celebrity learns something. The child who sees a severed head circulating as entertainment on his mother’s phone learns something. We can teach him civics the next morning. The lesson of the night before was more convincing.

This child is not a figure of speech. In May 2026, the United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict left Haiti with two figures: the recruitment of children by gangs nearly tripled in 2025, and children now make up between 30 and 50% of their members. These children will not disappear with the next police operation. They will grow up. Some will have learned at twelve that a gun brings income, status, protection, sometimes an identity. Some will have seen people killed before ever sitting an exam. We talk about disarmament as if it were enough to take away the gun. The hardest gun to take away is the one that has lodged itself in the imagination.

That is why Haiti’s crisis is no longer only a security crisis. It is institutional, economic, educational, and, yes, civilizational. The word may seem excessive. It no longer is. A civilization is neither its buildings, nor its GDP, nor its Constitution. It begins with a few simple prohibitions. You do not torture the one you capture. You do not rob the one you are supposed to protect. You do not sell justice. You do not turn a child into a soldier. When these self-evident truths have to be demonstrated all over again, the crisis already runs much deeper than a crisis of public order.

Two wars

Haiti must win the war against the gangs. There is no ambiguity about that: retake the territory, disarm, reopen the roads, restore the monopoly of legitimate force.

But that victory, if it comes, will not be enough. A second war will then have to be won, against what the gangs will have left inside us. A city can be retaken in a few weeks. A collective conscience takes a generation. And it would be tragic to wait for military victory before starting, because it is today that the child is learning.

This second war has specific fronts. The judicial units specializing in mass crimes and economic crimes exist on paper; they must start handing down judgments, and the first case tried must be one the whole country has seen. The integrity vetting of police officers that BINUH has been demanding for months must take place. The financiers designated under the sanctions must be prosecuted here, their flows traced, their assets confiscated, with the same determination shown toward the man holding the machete. The PREJEUNES program and its transit centers for children who have left the gangs have only one site so far, in Les Cayes; it is there, and not in speeches, that the response to the 30 to 50% will be decided. And schools must once again be able to compete with the prestige of the armed leader, which requires that work pay more than serving a network.

Above all, we will have to restore what no international budget can buy: the moral price of human life. Make a murder a scandal again. A mutilation an unbearable event. An armed child a national disgrace and not an online curiosity. A predatory police officer a betrayal of the uniform. A gang financier a pariah, whatever his house, his family name, and his bank account. And the woman who orders torture in front of a camera, a woman whose videos no one watches anymore.

For every day, somewhere in Haiti, a child is watching. He watches what pays, who gives the orders, who dies, who is punished. And above all, who is not. That is how a society teaches its true values. Not in its speeches. In the consequences it attaches to acts.

We may retake Port-au-Prince. Perhaps even the whole territory. Walls can be rebuilt, police stations reoccupied, weapons seized. But how do you rebuild a taboo? How do you explain to a child who has become a man that what he saw throughout his childhood was not normal? How do you give back to a woman the certainty that her body is not a war zone? How do you teach shame again to those who have discovered that impunity could be a trade, and cruelty an audience?

The most important question of this war may not be how many gangs will have disappeared. It is what will remain of us once they have. We may discover, too late, that while we were fighting to take the country back from the gangs, the gangs had conquered something far harder to liberate: a part of ourselves.