In several Port-au-Prince neighborhoods where criminal gangs were attempting to extend their territorial control in 2020, community members organized determined resistance that demonstrated both the courage of ordinary Haitians and the limits of what communities could do without state support against armed and organized criminal networks. These instances of community resistance received limited international attention but were significant markers of civic life persisting under extreme pressure.
In some neighborhoods, community organizations and religious groups built coalitions that successfully kept gang recruiters from targeting their young people, maintained some presence of legitimate community authority in contested spaces, and organized community-level security arrangements that provided a degree of protection without resorting to the vigilante violence that characterized some other community responses.
The success of these resistance efforts was partial and fragile. Communities that lacked armed backing ultimately could not prevent gang takeover through moral authority and community organization alone when criminal networks had weapons and were willing to use them. Several successful community resistance efforts eventually succumbed when gangs escalated their tactics or when key community leaders were killed, threatened, or forced to flee.
Human rights and development organizations documented these cases of community resistance as evidence that there was genuine civic will to resist gang control and that a more effective state response — if it ever materialized — would find ready community partners. They argued that supporting and empowering community resistance to gang control, rather than accepting gang territorial control as inevitable, should be a central element of any security strategy.