The Second Age of Viv Ansanm

For several weeks now, the police offensive in the metropolitan area has been intensifying. Positions long held by Viv Ansanm (“living together” in Creole) have been retaken, university faculties recently freed, and strikes are multiplying. The fighting has not stopped, gunfire can still be heard in the distance, and no area has fully returned to normal, but the progress is real. Over the same period, however, the coalition’s metropolitan components have fallen silent. Jimmy Chérizier’s press conferences have grown rare, the propaganda videos have all but disappeared, and the spectacular attacks on the state’s core institutions have stopped. This silence, settling in at the very moment the pressure is mounting, is what is genuinely new. It calls for a reading, and that reading is not reassuring. Viv Ansanm is entering its second age, the one in which a criminal organization stops accumulating through spectacular violence and begins to take root in the economic circuits of the society it feeds on. It is the most dangerous moment, because the battle appears to be turning when it is merely shifting to new ground.

What to call it

The words used to describe Viv Ansanm are not interchangeable. Each one dictates a doctrine. “Gang” calls for the police, “insurgency” for counterinsurgency, “terrorist organization” for sanctions and targeted strikes, “mafia” for dismantling its finances. To get the label wrong is to get the strategy wrong.

The March 2026 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) offered the most precise characterization available to date. Viv Ansanm’s leaders are armed brokers. Violent intermediaries, embedded in the very circuits through which political and economic power is exercised in Haiti. Since its formation, the coalition has reportedly had the material capacity to take Port-au-Prince, and it has never done so. You do not replace a system you extract rent from. The complementary framework of criminal governance, developed by Enrique Desmond Arias (2017) and Benjamin Lessing (2020), sheds light on the logic: armed actors perform functions that are properly governmental (regulation, taxation, arbitration) in territories where the state is absent or in tacit negotiation with them. Lessing distinguishes three regimes, according to whether criminals coexist with the state, penetrate it, or replace it. Viv Ansanm does not belong to a single regime but to a hybrid configuration in which, depending on the territory, all three logics coexist: partial substitution in some urban neighborhoods, penetration at the political interfaces, coexistence in the rural areas into which it has recently expanded. This heterogeneity is itself a source of resilience, because it complicates any unified response strategy.

The brokerage thesis does not rule out a mafia outcome; it defers it. An armed broker that has durable rents, stable interfaces with the elite, and enough time, and that manages to discipline violence within its ranks, eventually slides toward the mafia configuration. The intermediary becomes a godfather. The international literature documents this trajectory with troubling regularity. The condition most often underestimated is precisely the last one: the ability to reduce the cost of internal violence. Until that ability is acquired, the structure remains an unstable cartel, Mexican-style, rather than a mafia, Sicilian-style. Nor is this transition inevitable. In some contexts (Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria), the inability to stabilize internal violence produces a lasting equilibrium of fragmentation rather than mafia consolidation. Haiti now stands at the hinge between these two outcomes, and in recent days the Cul-de-Sac plain has provided a raw illustration of it.

What a coalition learns to become

Peter Lupsha (1996) proposed the canonical sequence: a predatory phase of violent accumulation; a parasitic phase of lasting entrenchment in certain sectors, which are taxed in parallel with the state; and a symbiotic phase, in which the criminal structure and the legal economic and political structures become mutually dependent. Viv Ansanm went through predation in 2024, consolidated its parasitism in 2025, and in 2026 is reaching the symbiotic threshold.

What the approach to the symbiotic phase implies, Diego Gambetta (1993) had established for Sicily. A mafia is first and foremost an industry of private protection, one that thrives in the cracks of a state unable to secure contracts, property, and persons. Extortion is its visible face; the provision of an alternative order is its productive face, and it is this second face that makes it impossible to uproot once it is established. Federico Varese (2011) spelled out the conditions under which it takes root: a latent demand for protection, a local elite willing to come to terms, and a lasting weakness in the state’s coercive capacity. Haiti meets all three. Maurizio Catino (2019) added a decisive point about resilience: the structures hardest to dismantle are not pyramids, which offer a head to cut off, but horizontal federations of semi-autonomous units that share rules and symbols. That is exactly the architecture toward which Viv Ansanm is reconfiguring itself today.

Taking root through the elite

The heart of the problem is not the firepower of the armed groups; it is the transformation of their relationship with the economic and political elites. Buonanno, Durante, Prarolo, and Vanin (2015) reconstructed the birth of the Sicilian mafia, which emerged not from a vacuum of state power but from the specific demand of large landowners deprived of feudal protection after Italian unification. The elites bought protection; the armed brokers became a mafia by selling it to them. Acemoglu, Robinson, and Santos (2013) documented the Colombian mechanism, in which paramilitaries delivered votes in exchange for political protection of cocaine routes and illegally seized land. The authors speak of a monopoly of violence, a phrase that describes less a conquest than a form of sharing: the state does not merely lose coercive control; it becomes an institution shared with the brokers.

The economic cost of this sharing is heavy. Pinotti (2015) estimated the loss of GDP per capita at sixteen percentage points over thirty years for the most exposed Italian regions. For Haiti, a recent Inter-American Development Bank working paper by Grazzi, Llamas, Lotti, and Peña (November 2025) produced the first equivalent causal estimate. Exploiting the geographic variation in violence across arrondissements and combining ACLED data, Meta’s Business Activity Trends, and NASA nighttime imagery, the authors document that one additional violent event in an arrondissement is associated with a drop of about 3.1 percent in economic activity over the following ten days. Over a five-month horizon, one additional political or civil event produces a persistent contraction of 1.5 to 2.5 percent, with effects of up to 6.2 percent on nighttime luminosity. After one year, the effect persists at around 1 percent. Household and professional services are the hardest hit, while the public sector shows relative resilience. These coefficients are measured locally, at the arrondissement level, and cannot be mechanically aggregated to the national scale, but their profile points to a persistent cumulative dynamic: in other words, violence that does not merely deliver a one-off shock but leaves lasting scars. It is precisely through the accumulation of these scars that the development ceiling of economies in the grip of mafias sets in.

This ceiling is not theoretical. It is paid for in discouraged investment, in the emigration of skills, in the adverse selection of politicians. Daniele and Geys (2015) showed that a mafia presence measurably degrades the quality of elected officials, favoring more compromised profiles that are less capable of producing effective public policy. Barone and Narciso (2015) documented the systematic capture of public contracts by mafia-linked firms. The institutional framework itself ends up being altered: investment choices, political choices, economic culture. In Haiti, this dynamic does not stem from an imported historical model. It is being built through contemporary interactions, in which certain economic and political circles find, at least in the short term, an interest in the local stabilization offered by armed actors, whatever its nature. This interest, even when it is never articulated in public, is the raw material of any lasting interface with the elite.

Mutation under pressure

Viv Ansanm emerged publicly in February 2024 with a dual-axis architecture. A horizontal axis formed by the territorial barons of the G9 and the G-Pèp. A vertical axis embodied by Chérizier, who carried its message in the media. This configuration offered two points of attack: the possible fragmentation of the barons and the possible decapitation of the leadership. The coercive pressure applied since late 2025 has produced neither. It has produced an internal reorganization. The vertical axis, exposed to strikes by its very nature, has become more of a liability than an asset, disciplined and sidelined not because it has been defeated but because it draws fire. The horizontal axis, by contrast, has consolidated. Each baron has an interest in becoming more autonomous, diversifying his rents, and embedding himself locally among the economic and political actors who can protect him. Fragility through heterogeneity becomes resilience through distribution.

The franchise model identified by the GI-TOC, in which Canaan branches out toward Montrouis, 5 Segond toward Kenscoff and Cabaret, and 400 Mawozo toward Mirebalais and Lascahobas, is simply the spatial expression of this mechanism. The coalition is becoming a loose cartel, a coordination of sovereign operators, with an implicit division of zones and a unifying symbolism. This horizontalization has a downside, however, which regional experience teaches: the multiplication of rent conflicts among barons who are now more autonomous, and the temptation to absorb by force the pockets of territory that still resist alignment. The open fighting in the Cul-de-Sac plain between 15 and 20 April 2026, in which Chen Mechan, Jeff Gwo Lwa’s Taliban in Canaan, and Lanmò Sanjou’s 400 Mawozo mounted a joint offensive against the gangs of Pierre 6 and Terre Noire, with dozens of civilian victims caught in the vise, illustrates this dynamic. The coalition speaks less to the outside world and expends more violence at its margins, as much to discipline non-aligned gangs as to extend its grip. It is the sign of a structure that has not yet solved the problem of internal stabilization, without which no mafia worthy of the name takes hold for the long term.

The federation is not following a uniform trajectory. While its metropolitan components are learning the discipline of silence, some rapidly expanding rural franchises remain squarely in the predatory phase. The Jean-Denis massacre on the night of 28 to 29 March 2026, claimed by Gran Grif, with nearly seventy victims documented by the National Human Rights Defense Network; the redeployment to Pont-Benoit and the capture of Marchand-Dessalines on 1 April; the public distribution of money to the local population by the men of Kokorat San Ras, a close ally of Gran Grif: all of this points to an entirely different timeline. These cells are not falling silent. They are consolidating by force and, through selective redistribution, beginning the shift from pure predation toward an embryonic form of local criminal governance. Viv Ansanm is thus living through several phases of Lupsha’s sequence at once, depending on the territory: active predation in the Artibonite, stabilization through the expanding franchise, and the beginnings of symbiosis in the metropolitan area. This internal asymmetry is the hallmark of franchise architectures, and it makes any attempt at a unified response more complex still.

At the other end of the spectrum, in parts of the plain and in the metropolitan area, evidence on the ground points to an even more advanced form of embedding. Market women who buy imported goods from certain wholesalers already established along these routes enjoy a de facto exemption at the toll posts held by the gangs. The levy is no longer collected directly on the goods as they pass; it is built in upstream, into the purchase price, through a partly captive supply chain. These wholesalers are not new players. They have long been rooted in their communities, socially respected, central to the local economy, which makes the arrangement particularly opaque: the market woman is not dealing with a gang; she is buying where she has always bought. It is precisely this dilution of coercion into commercial routine that the literature on mafias identifies as a threshold of maturity, the moment when a criminal organization stops threatening because the market has reorganized itself around it. No direct evidence currently documents the use of these channels to launder illicit funds, and we must go no further than that observation. But the very structure of the arrangement creates the possibility of such use as it consolidates, and it is precisely this kind of shift that working back up the chain to the unavoidable formal chokepoints (the import ports and the wholesalers upstream) must make it possible to attack before it becomes irreversible.

In this context, the coalition’s public silence admits more than one reading. It may be strategic discipline; that is our central hypothesis. It may also be operational saturation imposed by military pressure, or else an implicit negotiation with certain segments of the elite that are preparing an amnesty. The three hypotheses are not mutually exclusive; they probably coexist, depending on the actors and the territories. What they share is the strategic conclusion: a retreat from view is not a retreat of the structure.

The informal economy trap

Here a difficulty specific to Haiti comes into play, one that the classic literature underestimates. The canonical tools for dismantling criminal economies were designed for settings in which the formal economy dominates. Land registries, know-your-customer checks by banks, beneficial ownership disclosure, audits of public procurement: all presuppose a dense formal substrate through which illicit capital must pass in order to be turned into usable wealth. In Haiti, where the informal share of activity far exceeds the formal share according to estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Haitian Institute of Statistics and Informatics (IHSI), this substrate exists only as an archipelago. Illicit capital can circulate, accumulate, and be passed on without ever crossing the few formal chokepoints. A strategy modeled on European precedents would be largely ineffective.

The response must be rethought in light of the actual structure of the Haitian economy. Four levers deserve examination.

First, the unavoidable formal chokepoints. Even in a largely informal economy, certain transactions necessarily pass through formal infrastructure: the ports of Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haïtien, and Saint-Marc for containers; the regulated operators MonCash, NatCash, Caribe Express, and Unitransfer for transfers above a certain threshold; notaries for significant real estate transactions; public procurement and concessions. These chokepoints account for a minority share of the economy but a majority share of the illicit flows that matter, because rent, to become wealth, must eventually pour through them. Concentrating traceability on these points, rather than chasing the illusion of across-the-board formalization, is the first methodological decision.

Next, financial extraterritoriality. In the dollarized economy of the Caribbean, illicit assets end up passing through the US banking system, via correspondent banks, the Visa and Mastercard networks, and international wire transfers. This dependence is a lever. The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, OFAC, and Global Magnitsky-type mechanisms allow a degree of traceability and coercion beyond anything the Haitian state could achieve on its own. Organizing systematic cooperation with these mechanisms is more effective than multiplying national instruments with few teeth.

Third lever: the pursuit of hard assets. An informal economy dilutes flows but concentrates wealth. Criminal rent, to be of any use, takes material form in real estate, hotels, shopping complexes, currency exchange houses, and stakes in export companies. These assets can be located, and their ownership traced through forensic investigation. Italy’s Rognoni-La Torre law and Colombia’s Extinción de Dominio have produced decisive results along this route. Haitian legislation inspired by these models, adapted to local constraints of evidence and enforcement, would change the cost-benefit balance of criminal integration into the legal economy.

Finally, a hybrid investigative body on the model of Guatemala’s CICIG or Honduras’s MACCIH, with international magistrates, procedural autonomy, and an explicit mandate over cases involving interfaces with the elite. These structures are politically fragile, and they end up dismantled as soon as they become effective, but for as long as they function, they produce results that no national judiciary exposed to corruption can achieve. The point is not to circumvent Haitian sovereignty but to enable the Haitian justice system to handle cases it cannot investigate on its own.

These four levers are not equally feasible in the near term. Over a twelve-month horizon, and given the state’s current capacity, financial extraterritoriality and the pursuit of hard assets appear the most readily deployable and the most likely to produce tangible effects in the short term. The other two levers remain strategic, but activating them depends on longer-term political choices.

The window is narrow

Viv Ansanm is not yet a mafia. It is an armed brokerage system in the process of maturing, sliding toward the mafia configuration. The distinction is not academic. Fighting a broker means dismantling circuits of intermediation. Fighting a mafia means uprooting a hostile economic institution. The first task is difficult, the second more so, and societies that fail at it pay the price over several generations.

The Gang Suppression Force (GSF) has only just become operational, and it would be premature to prejudge its results. It is not premature to say that it will not be enough unless the Haitian state and its partners build, in parallel, the second tier of the response, the one that goes after the rent and the interfaces rather than the gunmen alone. Recent causal estimates based on Haitian data indicate that each additional violent event corresponds to a measurable and lasting contraction in activity. To let the typological transition run its course is to accept writing into Haiti’s structure, for a generation at least, the development ceiling that the international literature associates with economies in the grip of mafias.

The broker does not want to take the state’s place; he wants the state to exist just enough for there to be something to skim. The godfather no longer even wants to skim; he wants to be part of the state, in its appointments, its contracts, its rulings. In 2026, Haiti stands at the hinge between the two figures. The coalition’s present silence, far from heralding its defeat, shows that the hinge is turning. It can still be held. But no one, as yet, has built the tools that would make that possible.

Réginald Surin

Economist