Now no one wants Ariel Henry. Not the United States. Not the gangs. And not the Haitian people.

Change can come to Haiti in a hurry, but only when the United States decides it will. Pope John Paul II famously said that “something must change” in Haiti in 1983, during the rule of Jean-Claude Duvalier. But not until 1986, when the State Department decided to abandon Duvalier, did he finally leave the country that he and his father had worked to impoverish.

Yesterday, the United States seemed to make a similar break with Ariel Henry, the de facto prime minister whom Washington has supported—doggedly and against all sane advice—throughout the two and a half years of his dismal administration.

Mass demonstrations last year did not move the United States to stop insisting on Henry’s legitimacy. Under his rule, criminal gangs have gone largely unchecked, and in the past week, their murderous and disruptive activity has produced an unignorable security crisis. Only now has Washington appeared to accede to demands that Henry step aside—at a moment when prospects could hardly be less promising for a respectable, responsible democrat to ascend into the Haitian presidency, and when many armed criminals are at the ready.

On Friday, just before the opening of a hellish weekend of violence and turmoil in Port-au-Prince (Haitians describe the weekend as “très mouvementé,” or “very hectic”), Jimmy Chérizier, a former policeman and the charismatic head of G9, one of Haiti’s biggest and most powerful gangs, gave a short, tough speech directed at the Haitian National Police, basically asking them to abandon Henry.

At that moment, a scant five days ago, the police force—somewhat bedraggled and very much outgunned and outnumbered—was more or less all that stood between the government and the gangs’ total domination of the capital. The police force and, of course, the United States, the unseen actor always present.

Dressed in full black body armor that included a pair of pretty impressive gauntlets, and wielding an automatic weapon, Chérizier, whose nickname is, ominously, “Barbecue,” pointed out how badly Henry and his minimal government have neglected the police force and claimed that he and his gang have always taken better care of the wives and kids of policemen who fell in the line of duty. He seemed to be asking the police to join forces with G9 to topple the government (such as it was).

In fact, scores of young police officers have died brutal and unconscionable deaths at the hands of the gangs, including G9, in the past two years. I have seen some of these killings on gangsters’ video streams and have not yet been able to unsee them. More than Chérizier’s cynical arguments and revolutionary posturing, those deaths have persuaded police officers to reconsider their political positions. Rather than being lured into the gangs, some 1,000 police officers, out of an original force of about 9,000, have simply left the country in the past 18 months, taking advantage recently of President Joe Biden’s special immigration plan for Haiti.

By way of comparison, consider that anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 gang members are estimated to be working in roughly 200 gangs throughout the country. The best armed and biggest gangs now control at least 80 percent of the capital. Unlike the cops, they’re not leaving Haiti. Gang membership has been a good job, and more lucrative for many than working for the police. Just like a cop, you get a gun—and a more impressive one than most cops have—plus some of the proceeds........

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