By mid-2022 UN and independent security analysts estimated that criminal gangs controlled approximately 60 percent of Port-au-Prince and its metropolitan area, a dramatic expansion from already alarming levels of the previous year. The geographic spread of gang control had progressed from the traditionally vulnerable popular neighborhoods into middle-class areas, business districts, and communities that had previously maintained relative security through a combination of local social organization and geographic distance from the worst hotspots.
The expansion of gang territory was systematic rather than random. Criminal networks targeted specific locations for their strategic value: transportation corridors that generated extortion revenue, neighborhoods adjacent to existing controlled territory that could be absorbed with manageable military effort, and areas near ports, markets, and warehouses that offered economic opportunities. The territorial logic of gang expansion reflected sophisticated criminal governance rather than chaotic violence.
Communities that fell under gang control experienced a predictable pattern of transition: first extortion demands on businesses and households, then direct control of street activity, then the physical presence of armed men as the visible face of authority. The state — police, courts, civil administration — ceased to function in these areas. The gang replaced the state, providing a form of violent governance that maintained some order while extracting maximum revenue.
Urban planners and security analysts studying the gang governance phenomenon in Haiti argued that the territorial consolidation of 2022 was creating facts on the ground that would be extremely difficult to reverse. The longer gang control persisted in specific areas, the more entrenched the criminal governance structures became, the more community members adapted their lives and livelihoods to gang-controlled reality, and the more difficult it became to imagine what restoration of state authority would actually look like.