Selling Death, Buying a Life

In 2025, the United Nations verified the recruitment or use of 892 children by Haitian gangs, nearly three times the previous year’s figure. What the gun sells a teenager is also a place, a name, a promotion. And it sells them all the better because the honest paths to prosperity have become invisible.

On 20 February 2026, the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report titled “Children Trafficked by Gangs in Haiti: Rethinking the Responses.” It draws on quantitative data and on information gathered from victims’ families, former gang members, aid organizations, state authorities, and international agencies. Amid these accounts, one comes across an almost bureaucratic sentence that I cannot get out of my head: boys who come back “safe and sound” from a clash are “promoted.” They move up the gang’s hierarchy and can go on to head a sub-cell.

Promoted. The word comes from offices, from schools that move children up a grade, from banks that appoint a branch manager. The gang appropriated it and put it to work, while the institutions that should be its custodians let it rust.

What the gang runs is indeed a social elevator, in the strict sense of the term. By that I mean the set of mechanisms that allow children born at the bottom to rise higher than their parents: school, a first job, credit, the reputation one builds in one’s own neighborhood. It rests on a promise: that today’s effort will pay off tomorrow. And on a condition that is easily forgotten: you have to have seen it work. An elevator whose car no one has ever seen go up is nothing but a door painted on a wall.

This condition of visibility sheds light on what poverty alone does not explain. Destitution weighs heavily in recruitment; yet millions of Haitians live in want without ever touching a gun. The BINUH report, moreover, notes a decisive fact: the least wealthy gangs, such as those in Brooklyn, in Cité Soleil, attract fewer children, and where a gang has little to offer, parents often oppose their children’s enlistment. The appeal therefore depends as much on what the gang can afford to show as on what the child lacks.

It is this part of the appeal that I want to examine: recognition, that is, being seen, counted, called by name on one’s own street. I will begin with what we ourselves show of success, which is next to nothing, then turn to the showcase the gangs have set up in its place; next I will look at what remains of the promise of schooling and of trust in the rules, before proposing, neighborhood by neighborhood, ways to make the legal elevator visible again.

Prosperity in a whisper

If the legal elevator is so hard to see, it is first of all because we have learned to hide it. We want money. A house, the children’s schooling, an old age without having to hold out one’s hand: no one gives these up. But we talk about it badly, when we talk about it at all. In many families, displaying one’s success means exposing oneself to jealousy, to the evil eye, to the rumors that surround the sudden illness of someone who has just prospered. Whether or not one believes in such things, one guards against them. Houses are built over years, so that they surprise no one. No one lets on that the land is paid off.

Years of kidnappings have added other reasons: people now hide from the kidnapper, the extortionist, the relative whose requests never end. No one can hold this discretion against those who practice it.

Yet it has a cost that we have never counted. By hiding wealth, we have hidden how it is built. How a workshop becomes a business, why one shop survives when the one next door closes, what a loan really costs, what separates income from wealth: this knowledge circulates poorly in a country where honest success is lived behind closed doors. Not that knowledge alone would be enough. There is no saving without income, and no investing without access to credit.

Unable to see how success is built here, a teenager in a poor neighborhood sees it arrive mostly from elsewhere, by money transfer. Diaspora remittances reached a record $4.4 billion in fiscal year 2025 and remain the country’s largest source of foreign exchange, according to the World Bank report on the Haitian economy published on 14 September 2026. This money sustains entire families. It also teaches, without meaning to, that honest prosperity is made elsewhere and that the only way to reach it is to leave.

So there are precious few legal success stories left to look at up close in these neighborhoods. That is exactly the void the gang has moved in to fill.

A showcase open day and night

Where we whisper, the gang shows everything.

On TikTok, YouTube, and WhatsApp, the videos keep coming: parties, wads of cash, jewelry, expensive clothes, motorcycles, women. The BINUH report recalls that the leader of the Village de Dieu gang had received a “Creator Award” from YouTube in April 2023 for passing 100,000 subscribers. His channel was taken down; a new channel linked to the gang took over and had racked up more than 1.7 million views by December 2025. The honest entrepreneur, meanwhile, makes sure no one knows his address.

The showcase does not stop at the screen; it comes down into the street. According to the same report, the Grand Ravine and Village de Dieu gangs periodically hand out motorcycles, phones, and brand-name shoes, often taken from hijacked trucks; for many children, this is their first contact with the gang. Grand Ravine, Ti Bois, and Village de Dieu also run canteens parallel to the schools’ own; some gangs lodge street children in abandoned houses, clothe them, and push them to keep up a “neat and clean appearance.” The tasks themselves are paid, twice a month according to local sources cited by BINUH: between $100 and $300 to act as a lookout, guard a hostage, or ransack a house, and up to $700 for the biggest operations. At the reference rate set by the central bank, the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH), for 21 September 2026, a single payment of $300 comes to just over 39,000 gourdes, or thirty-nine days’ pay at the daily minimum wage of 1,000 gourdes in force since 6 May 2026 in banking or subcontracting.

The BINUH report shows what this showcase does to a child through the testimony of a sixteen-year-old former gang member, collected by an aid organization and published under the first name Joseph. Joseph remembers the neighborhood he grew up in: the well-dressed armed men, the fine cars, the women around them, and they were the ones who laid down the law. Around the end of August 2024, a friend told him about the money and the “feeling of being important.” Soon after he arrived, he was handed a radio to keep watch on the police, then a gun. When he said he wanted to go home, the leader beat him with his gun until his hand was broken and threatened to kill him if he left. He fled anyway.

That is the elevator as it really works. The prestige that gets filmed belongs to a few. At the bottom, there is the toutè keeping watch on the police, the radio, the stray bullet. The gang does not produce social mobility; it acts it out, and well enough for the audience to believe in it. It also shuts the door behind those who get in: according to aid organizations interviewed by BINUH, initiation rites sometimes force a wavering child to kill, including a member of his own family, so that there can be no way back. An elevator with no fire escape.

And the much-vaunted promotion rarely leads any higher than the roof of an abandoned house. The BINUH report also publishes the story, told by an aid organization, of a boy it calls André, killed at twelve. He was said to be daring. He slipped into a police armored vehicle to throw a Molotov cocktail inside, then demanded a more powerful weapon, which was taken away from him after he shot himself in the foot. “Frustrated and humiliated,” the report says, he went over to a rival gang. In late May 2025, on the roof of the house he was guarding, a bullet struck him in the neck. The next day, another gang member burned his body. Humiliated: the word says more than many an analysis.

André had come of his own accord, if one can say that of a twelve-year-old. Many others did not have even this semblance of choice. BINUH has documented cases of gangs destroying the homes of families that refused to hand over their children, and observes that recruitment seems more frequent right after clashes, when gangs need to replace their dead. Against girls, the threat serves above all to force them into sexual relations. International law, for that matter, settles the question of consent: under the 2000 Palermo Protocol on trafficking in persons, a child cannot consent to being exploited. The 892 children recruited or used in 2025, up from 302 a year earlier according to the annual reports of the UN Secretary-General on children and armed conflict, are victims before they are suspects.

Class in the morning, checkpoint in the evening

If the gang’s showcase has such appeal, it is also because the legal paths have stopped being visible. In a society where mobility more or less works, a young person can map out several routes: school, a trade, a job, a small business that grows. None is guaranteed. Each is visible.

Here, they have collapsed one by one, starting with household income. According to the World Bank’s 2026 Macro Poverty Outlook, the economy contracted by 2.7% in fiscal year 2025, for the seventh year in a row; the share of the population below the $3-a-day line rose from 42.2% in 2021 to 49% in 2025, and social assistance programs reached fewer than one Haitian in ten.

Schools went next. More than 1,600 of them were closed during the 2024–2025 school year, keeping more than 240,000 students out of class, according to UNICEF. Where schools remain open, they are expensive: according to World Bank data cited by BINUH, the private sector accounts for about 80% of primary schools, and private schooling costs a family an average of $140 per child per year. The BINUH report adds that in neighborhoods already held by gangs, in Cité Soleil, Croix-des-Bouquets, or Martissant, schools can operate only by paying a “tax.” Some children even have their school fees paid by gang members, in exchange for their afternoons: class in the morning, checkpoint in the evening. The gang no longer merely competes with the school. It funds it.

That leaves employment, the last rung on the ladder, where the findings are damning for all of us. According to specialists consulted by BINUH, apprenticeship programs run in gang-controlled neighborhoods have often failed, partly because businesses refused to hire young people from those areas, whom they saw as a threat to their operations. So the boy who said no to the gang carries his address like a criminal record. He resisted, and we treat him as if he had given in. The graduate is hardly better off: when school leads to no job, it loses its authority over those who still attend.

When the rules look rigged

Yet scarcity of opportunity does not tell the whole story. More corrosive still: the sense that the game has been decided in advance. In the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, published by Transparency International in February 2026, Haiti scores 16 out of 100 and ranks 169th out of 182. The BINUH report also observes that in some neighborhoods, gangs operate through structures known as “foundations,” often linked to political actors.

A teenager does not need to read these documents to draw the lesson. He sees that some people rise through connections, through proximity to power, through favors. If cheating is the rule, the gang stops resembling a betrayal and starts to look like a more honest shortcut. Violence then becomes the capital of whoever has neither an inheritance nor an address book.

Entrepreneurs who create value in spite of everything deserve no suspicion. The trouble begins when the concentration of wealth comes with a concentration of opportunity: for anyone starting from nothing, competition is competition in name only.

The day after the operation

It is in this landscape, deprived of opportunity and trust, that the armed reconquest is now being waged. On 29 September, the Security Council extended the mandate of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) until 31 March 2027. Planned to number 5,500 uniformed personnel, it still fields only about 1,500 troops, the US ambassador to the UN acknowledged the same day, according to AFP. Without open roads, there will be no schools, no markets, no jobs: security comes first.

It is not enough, however, because the recruitment of children, as we have seen, seems to intensify right after the fighting. Any clash that is not accompanied by an immediate offer to the neighborhood’s children therefore opens a recruitment window. As of 31 January 2026, again according to BINUH, the operations had slowed the gangs’ expansion in the capital without retaking their territories or dismantling their governance. To retake a neighborhood while leaving the same deprivation in place is to prepare the next round of promotions.

Building the other elevator, and showing it

So everything is decided in the weeks that follow the operation, and each of the breaches described above calls for its own response.

School first, since it was through school that the gang slipped into family life. Every retaken territory should receive a neighborhood contract, prepared before the operation, not after: reopened schools, a canteen, a youth center, school fees covered for children identified as at risk. Where the gang paid the school fees, the state must pay them before the gang does. The tool exists: according to the BINUH report, more than 5,000 families each received 10,000 gourdes, through UNICEF-supported cash transfers, to send their children back to school during the 2025 school year. What remains is to tie it systematically to security operations.

Next comes employment, and with it the stigma of the address. Every public reconstruction contract in a retaken neighborhood should require the contractor to hire and train young people from the neighborhood as paid apprentices, working by day and training in the evening, a formula BINUH recommends on the basis of a guide from the International Labour Organization. The demand exists, since the construction site exists: at last, people are trained for a trade that someone pays for.

Money, for its part, must be able to come in and circulate in broad daylight. The BINUH report finds that in gang-controlled areas no bank offers cash withdrawals, that social transfers paid by mobile phone can be turned into cash only at great expense, and that the gang often knows who the beneficiaries are and forces them to hand over a share of the aid. The same report suggests town halls and religious centers as safe places to register beneficiaries; banks and microfinance institutions could open cash-withdrawal points there. They can also build on what the neighborhoods already practice: the sòl, the rotating savings club our mothers have always run, remains the country’s foremost school of saving. An institution that accepted a track record of regular sòl payments as proof of financial discipline, and used it to back a first loan with mentoring, would open a door that no classroom course ever will.

Yet these measures will not convince a teenager who has learned to distrust the rules if the way they are allocated remains opaque. The criteria for each neighborhood contract, the names of the companies selected for the construction work, and the amounts committed should be posted at the town hall and published, neighborhood by neighborhood.

That leaves one last task: to set a showcase against the showcase, since that is where it all began. In April 2025, the Community Education Police (EDUPOL), a unit created in 2015 within the Haitian National Police (PNH), launched a pilot project in Tabarre that takes in up to fifty at-risk children a day, with workshops, music, and outings to meet success stories from their own community. The BINUH report notes marked improvements in behavior, but points out that the project now faces serious financial and logistical difficulties. Fund it, and replicate it. Newspapers and radio stations, this newspaper included, can regularly chronicle legitimate careers, those of the teacher, the craftsman, or the businesswoman, recounting the method rather than the amounts: the first loan, the first failure, the way the capital was built up. The how can be passed on without exposing the how much. The state, for its part, must require platforms to remove gang videos systematically, some of which, BINUH notes, were still online on TikTok in December 2025.

None of this will hold, however, for a family under threat of death, like those whose homes the gang destroyed. According to BINUH, the families of children who have left a gang are watched, sometimes threatened, and rarely report it, for fear of reprisals and because they have no way of relocating outside the areas the gangs control. There must be confidential reporting channels, help with relocation, particular attention to girls. Programs must remain open to all the young people in the neighborhood, so that no one ever has to go through the gang to get a chance. The Program for the Prevention and Rehabilitation of Children and Youth (PREJEUNES), launched in 2025 by the Haitian authorities with United Nations support, provided specialized protection services to 573 children that year, according to BINUH and UNICEF; its results must be evaluated and published. Finally, the justice system must prosecute the adult recruiters and treat the children as victims, as the law requires.

What a child must be able to see

The gangs understood before the state, before the schools, and before the banks that an elevator has to be seen if anyone is to step into it. They filmed theirs, they broadcast it, they paid for it in cash.

So the war against the armed groups will not be won on the day they lose their territories. It will be won when a twelve-year-old boy can name, on his own street, people who have made it without a gun, and explain how they went about it. On that day, the word “promoted” will have regained the meaning it has in a school: you move up because you have learned, not because you have survived.

The tragedy of a society begins when its children know perfectly well what they want to become, but can no longer see how to get there without owning a gun. The reconquest of Haiti will be complete only on the day the gun has lost its power to make people believe in success.

Sources

BINUH and OHCHR, “Enfants victimes de la traite par les gangs en Haïti: repenser les réponses,” 20 February 2026. Recruitment of 302 children in 2024 (section 2.2, p. 14); threats against families, recruitment after clashes, Joseph’s testimony (section 3.1, pp. 16–17); Brooklyn, canteens, handouts, and pay (section 3.2, pp. 17–18); social media and the YouTube channel (section 3.3, pp. 18–19); initiation rites (section 4.2.1, p. 20); promotions and André’s story (section 4.2.2, p. 21); social transfers and financial services (sections 5.1 and 5.2, p. 25); school costs and “taxes,” 5,000 families assisted (section 5.3, pp. 26–28); EDUPOL (section 5.3.2, p. 29); “foundations” (section 5.4.1, p. 30); training and hiring (section 5.6, p. 32); assessment of operations as of 31 January 2026 (executive summary, pillar V). https://binuh.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/2026-02/FR_CHILDREN%20TRAFFICKED%20BY%20GANGS%20RETHINKING%20THE%20RESPONSES.pdf

BINUH and UNICEF, joint statement of 13 July 2026 on the Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict: 892 children recruited or used in 2025, 573 children cared for under PREJEUNES. https://www.unicef.org/haiti/en/press-releases/binuh-unicef-joint-statement

World Bank, Haiti Macro Poverty Outlook, 2026: GDP contraction, poverty rate, social assistance coverage. https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/e408a7e21ba62d843bdd90dc37e61b57-0500032021/related/mpo-hti.pdf

World Bank, report on Haiti’s economic situation published on 14 September 2026, as reported by HaitiLibre: diaspora remittances. https://www.haitilibre.com/article-48451-haiti-economie-selon-la-banque-mondiale-haiti-conserve-des-atouts-reels-pour-batir-un-relevement-durable-rapport.html

UNICEF, “Crisis in Haiti”: schools closed in 2024–2025. https://www.unicef.org/emergencies/crisis-haiti

Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, Haiti country profile. https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/haiti

ONU Info, “Haïti: le Conseil de sécurité prolonge le mandat de la force antigangs,” 29 September 2026. https://news.un.org/fr/story/2026/09/1159573

AFP, “ONU: le Conseil de sécurité prolonge de six mois la force contre les gangs en Haïti,” 29 September 2026, republished by Boursorama. https://www.boursorama.com/actualite-economique/actualites/onu-le-conseil-de-securite-prolonge-de-six-mois-la-force-contre-les-gangs-en-haiti-3feff25f34b01e28baa7f9c509478542

Decree setting the minimum wages applicable as of 6 May 2026, as reported by HaitiLibre. https://www.haitilibre.com/article-47534-flash-nouveaux-salaires-minimums-en-haiti-pour-tous-les-secteurs-d-activites-officiel-2026.html

Bank of the Republic of Haiti, reference rate for 21 September 2026 (130.5192 gourdes to the dollar), as recorded by Vant Bèf Info. https://vantbefinfo.com/taux-de-reference-de-la-brh-pour-le-21-septembre-2026/

United Nations, Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol), 2000.