The Haitian government invoked martial law measures in parts of the country in 2023 as gang networks destroyed police stations and forced security forces to withdraw from positions they had maintained through previous periods of crisis. The destruction of police infrastructure — not just the defeat of police units in confrontations but the physical demolition of police stations and the planting of weapons to provoke responses — represented a new level of gang aggression against the institutions of state authority.
Gang networks that destroyed police stations were not just winning tactical confrontations but were physically eliminating the infrastructure of state presence in contested areas. A neighborhood without a police station was a neighborhood without even the symbolic presence of state authority, making the reassertion of control more difficult even if political conditions eventually changed. The destruction was deliberate and systematic, designed to make gang territorial gains hard to reverse.
The martial law declaration gave the Haitian military — reconstituted in 2017 after being disbanded in 1995 — expanded authorities to support police operations. The military’s involvement was welcomed by some as additional security capacity and viewed with concern by others who remembered the Haitian military’s history of human rights abuses during periods of military governance in the 1980s and 1990s.
In practice, neither the martial law declaration nor the military deployment significantly changed the security situation on the ground. The gangs that had been systematically defeating police units were not deterred by declarations of emergency powers or by the deployment of a military with limited operational capacity and no recent experience of counter-gang operations. The security crisis continued to deepen regardless of the government’s responses.