For several weeks, the police offensive has intensified in the metropolitan area. Positions long held by Viv Ansanm have been retaken, faculties liberated, and strikes are multiplying. While clashes continue and shots are still heard in the distance, no area has fully returned to normal, yet progress is real. During the same interval, however, the metropolitan components of the coalition have fallen silent. Jimmy Chérizier’s press conferences have become rare, propaganda videos have nearly vanished, and spectacular attacks against sovereign institutions have ceased. This silence, occurring just as pressure mounts, is the true novelty. It demands an interpretation, and that interpretation is not reassuring. Viv Ansanm is entering its “second age”—one where a criminal organization stops accumulating through spectacular violence and begins to root itself in the economic circuits of the society it parasites. It is the most dangerous moment, because it is when the battle seems to be tipping, while it is actually only changing terrain.
Naming the Object
The words used to designate Viv Ansanm are not interchangeable. Each dictates a doctrine. Gang calls for police; insurrection calls for counter-insurrection; terrorist organization calls for sanctions and targeted strikes; mafia calls for financial dismantling. To misidentify the group is to misidentify the strategy.
The March 2026 report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime proposed the most accurate qualification to date: the leaders of Viv Ansanm are “armed brokers.” They are violent intermediaries embedded in the very circuits through which political and economic power is exercised in Haiti. Since its formation, the coalition has had the material capacity to take Port-au-Prince but never did. One does not replace a system from which one draws rent. The framework of criminal governance (Arias 2017, Lessing 2020) illuminates this logic: armed actors perform governmental functions—regulation, taxation, arbitration—in territories where the State is absent or in tacit negotiation with them. Lessing distinguishes three regimes: coexistence, penetration, or replacement of the State. Viv Ansanm is a hybrid configuration where these three logics coexist depending on the territory. This heterogeneity is a factor of resilience, complicating any unified response strategy.
This “brokerage” thesis does not invalidate the possibility of a mafia; it defers it. An armed broker with durable rents and stabilized elite interfaces eventually slides into a mafia configuration. He ceases to be an intermediary and becomes a godfather. International literature documents this trajectory with disturbing regularity. The most underestimated condition is the capacity to reduce the cost of internal violence. Until that is achieved, the structure remains an unstable cartel, Mexican-style, rather than a mafia, Sicilian-style. Haiti currently stands at the hinge between these two outcomes.
What a Coalition Learns to Become
Peter Lupsha (1996) proposed the canonical sequence: predatory phase (violent accumulation), parasitic phase (long-term installation in taxed sectors), and symbiotic phase (where criminal and legal structures become mutually dependent). Viv Ansanm covered predation in 2024, consolidated parasitism in 2025, and is entering the symbiotic threshold in 2026.
As Diego Gambetta (1993) established for Sicily, a mafia is primarily a private protection industry that thrives where the State fails to secure contracts and people. Extortion is its visible face; providing an alternative order is its productive face—and it is this second face that makes it ineradicable. Haiti currently meets all the conditions for rooting: a latent demand for protection, a local elite willing to compromise, and a lasting coercive weakness of the State.
Rooting Through the Elite
The core of the problem is not the firepower of armed groups, but the transformation of their relationship with economic and political elites. Elites buy protection; armed brokers become a mafia by selling it. Acemoglu, Robinson, and Santos (2013) documented the Colombian mechanism where paramilitaries produced votes in exchange for political protection of cocaine routes and usurped land. The State becomes an institution shared with brokers.
The economic cost is heavy. A recent IDB working paper (November 2025) established that an additional violent event in a district is associated with a 3.1% drop in economic activity within ten days. Over five months, these events produce a persistent contraction of 1.5% to 2.5%. These are lasting scars that set a “development ceiling” for mafia-controlled economies.
Mutation Under Pressure
The pressure since late 2025 has led to internal reorganization. The vertical axis (Chérizier), exposed to strikes, has become a liability and has been marginalized. The horizontal axis, however, has consolidated. Barons are becoming more autonomous and diversifying their rents. The franchise model identified by GI-TOC (Canaan, 5 Segond, 400 Mawozo) is the spatial translation of this mechanism.
In the metropolitan area, there are signs of advanced embedding. Merchants purchasing goods from established wholesalers benefit from de facto exemptions at gang checkpoints. The fee is no longer collected at the checkpoint; it is integrated into the purchase price upstream. This dilution of coercion into commercial routine is a threshold of maturation: the organization no longer needs to threaten because the market has reorganized around it.
The Informal Economy Trap
Classical tools for dismantling criminal economies assume a formal substrate that is largely absent in Haiti. Illicit capital can circulate without crossing formal bank channels. The response must be repolished based on Haiti’s real economy via four levers: 1. Target formal “bottlenecks” (ports, money transfer operators); 2. Use financial extraterritoriality (U.S. Treasury and FinCEN cooperation); 3. Pursue “heavy assets” (hotels, real estate, major businesses); 4. Establish a hybrid investigation body with international support.
The Window is Narrow
Viv Ansanm is not yet a mafia, but it is maturing into one. To fight a broker is to dismantle circuits; to fight a mafia is to uproot an adverse economic institution. The Gang Repression Force (FRG) will not suffice if the State does not simultaneously attack rents and interfaces. The coalition’s current silence does not announce its defeat; it indicates that the hinge is turning. It can still be held, but as of today, no one has built the tools to do so.
