As Haiti was still reeling from the assassination and the earthquake, the G9 gang alliance led by Jimmy Chérizier imposed a blockade on Varreux, the country’s main fuel terminal in Port-au-Prince, in October 2021, in a move that escalated the gang’s political confrontation with the new government and created a humanitarian emergency by cutting off fuel supplies to the entire country.
The Varreux terminal was responsible for distributing the vast majority of Haiti’s petroleum products — gasoline, diesel, kerosene — to the capital and through a supply chain that reached across the country. Without fuel, generators at hospitals stopped, water treatment plants shut down, vehicles could not move, and the entire economy ground to a halt. The blockade was an exercise of enormous economic and social power by a criminal network that the state was unable to dislodge.
Hospitals that depended on diesel generators for electricity — including for the operation of life-saving medical equipment — issued emergency appeals for fuel. The combination of earthquake recovery demands and the fuel blockade pushed medical facilities to the absolute limit of what they could manage. Reports of patients dying because generators had stopped were deeply disturbing.
Chérizier demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry as the condition for ending the blockade. Henry refused. The standoff lasted for weeks, demonstrating with brutal clarity who actually controlled significant dimensions of Haitian daily life. The eventual end of the blockade through a secret agreement rather than a security operation was further evidence of the state’s weakness relative to the criminal networks operating in its territory.