Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture International Airport was temporarily forced to close in early 2023 as gang violence in surrounding areas made aircraft approaches and departures unsafe. The closure of the country’s main international airport — already one of the clearest indicators of the security crisis’s impact on daily life and international connectivity — demonstrated how far gang territorial control had extended and how directly it was affecting critical national infrastructure.
Gangs that had established positions near the airport perimeter were capable of threatening aircraft during approach and takeoff, creating an unacceptable safety risk that airlines could not manage. The closure, though temporary, disrupted international travel, the movement of humanitarian cargo, and the connections to the diaspora and international community on which Haiti depended for remittances, aid, and diplomatic engagement.
The airport closure was emblematic of a broader pattern in which gang control of territory around critical infrastructure — ports, fuel terminals, road networks, institutional buildings — gave criminal networks leverage over the entire national economy and the country’s connections to the outside world. Each piece of infrastructure that fell under gang threat or control added to the gangs’ capacity to extract payments and impose conditions on the broader population.
Airlines that had already reduced their service to Haiti due to security concerns used the closure as a data point in their assessments of whether to maintain Haitian routes at all. The progressive reduction in air service — which limited options for humanitarian organizations, diplomatic missions, and Haitian travelers — was a concrete cost of the security crisis that received relatively little attention compared to the direct human toll of gang violence.