2025 was, by the numbers, another catastrophic year for Haiti: over 5,500 killed, 1.3 million displaced, six million needing humanitarian assistance, the economy contracting for the seventh year, 40 percent of health facilities closed, and the humanitarian response plan only 21.9 percent funded. The country remained trapped in a cycle of violence, governance failure, and international inadequacy that had been deepening for years.
Yet 2025 also contained elements that, carefully considered, offered a basis for qualified hope. The UN Security Council’s authorization of the Gang Suppression Force in September represented the most robust international security commitment to Haiti in the modern era, with authorization for up to 5,550 personnel and an offensive mandate to neutralize criminal groups. If deployed with adequate resources and genuine political commitment, the GSF had the potential to change the security trajectory in ways that its predecessors had not.
The drone operations conducted by the Haitian security Task Force, whatever their human rights concerns, demonstrated that the state retained some capacity for aggressive action against gang networks and that combined operations with the Kenya mission could produce localized security improvements. The accountability mechanisms the MSS had developed — a complaints hotline, human rights monitoring, no documented violations — provided a model for how international security assistance could operate with greater legitimacy than previous interventions.
The political arrangements of 2024-2025 — the TPC, the electoral calendar, the Gang Suppression Force authorization — provided more institutional structure for a path forward than Haiti had possessed in years. Whether those structures would be filled with sufficient political will, international resources, and security improvement to enable genuine democratic transition in 2026 was the central question on which Haiti’s near-term future depended. The country had been at crossroads before. This time, the consequences of taking the wrong turn were impossible to overstate.