The Eschatology of Gangrie

A breath for the Haitian people

“Hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that there is meaning, no matter what happens.”

— Václav Havel

There are peoples who hold their breath for a second, for the time of a gunshot. The Haitian people, however, have been holding it for years. We will call this way of life imposed by gangs “gangrie”: not just a sum of crimes, but a way of inhabiting time, space, and fear. And we will ask the question that theologians once reserved for the end of times: what will the end of this world look like, and what will remain to breathe once it has ceased?

Prologue: of last things

Eschatology — from the Greek eschatos, “last” — is the science of last things: death, judgment, the end of the world, and what comes after. To speak of an eschatology of gangrie is not to succumb to hyperbole. It is to recognize that a part of the Haitian people has been living, since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and the subsequent collapse, in a world that has all the appearances of an endless end: an apocalypse in slow motion, without revelation and without dawn.

Figures have the dryness of epitaphs. More than 5,700 people killed or injured between January and mid-September 2026, according to the United Nations. Nearly one and a half million displaced. A capital where gangs control most, and armed groups now overflow into the countryside, from Kenscoff to the Artibonite. But behind each figure lies a breath taken away: that of the mother who no longer knows which street to return on, of the student who learns to distinguish, by sound, a burst of gunfire from a firecracker, of the vendor who pays the “toll” to have the right to sell his mangoes.

We must also name the places, because gangrie has not confined itself to the capital. On March 31, 2025, gangs descended on Mirebalais, in the heart of the Central Plateau: the civil prison was emptied of about five hundred detainees, entire families hit the road under the gunfire, and the University Hospital, the pride of the country’s health system, had to suspend its activities. A few days later, Saut-d’Eau fell in turn. Saut-d’Eau, the town of sacred waterfalls, where every July 16 thousands of pilgrims came to bathe under the falls of the Virgin of Mount Carmel, whom Vodou tradition honors in the guise of Erzulie: a place where Catholics and servants of the lwa shared the same water, the same prayer, the same hope. In just a few weeks, the International Organization for Migration counted more than thirty-one thousand displaced in these two municipalities. A year and a half later, human rights organizations still describe a suffocation: paralyzed economy, closed schools, impossible returns. In Saut-d’Eau, it is the water itself — a universal symbol of purification — that has been taken hostage.

Mirebalais and Saut-d’Eau express better than any discourse the nature of gangrie: it does not only attack bodies and belongings, it strikes at places of care and places of the sacred, that is to say at what heals and connects within a society. The hospital and the sanctuary: one could not choose more symbolic targets to signify the end of a world.

However, since the end of October, something has changed in the air. The massive arrival of Salvadoran military, the deployment of over a thousand new police officers, the operations announced by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who speaks of a “decisive stage” and promises armed groups that their hours are numbered: for the first time in a long time, the end is no longer just feared, it is hoped for. Yet this end must be thought through, so that it is not a mere change of master.

1. Sociology of a kingdom without a sovereign

Max Weber defined the state as the human community that successfully claims, within a given territory, the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. Haiti has become the tragic laboratory of the inverse proposition: a territory where violence is no longer monopolized, but fragmented, privatized, put up for auction. Each gang is a little neighborhood sovereignty, with its borders (the “red zones”), its taxation (the tolls, the ransoms), its police (the “soldiers”), its summary justice, and even its diplomacy — as seen recently with a letter from a gang leader addressed to the Secretary-General of the UN.

Sociologist Charles Tilly showed, in a famous text, that the formation of European states strangely resembled organized crime: imposed protection, extraction, elimination of rivals. But he added that the state is born when this racket stabilizes through mutual exchange — taxes for protection, obedience for security. Haitian gangrie is precisely the halt of this process at its most primitive stage: a racket that never becomes a contract, a protection that only protects itself. The gang extracts but builds neither school nor road; it governs but promises no future.

Émile Durkheim would have spoken of anomie: this state where norms dissolve and where the individual, deprived of collective references, floats in a world without reliable rules. Gangrie is not just violence; it is the disintegration of the link. It fragments displaced families, empties the lakou, closes markets, turns neighbors into potential informants. It destroys what sociologists call social capital — that diffuse trust that allows a society to function without a gendarme on every street corner.

Yet one must face a disturbing truth: the gang recruits from the ruins that the state has left. International reports repeat, a significant portion of recruits are minors. The child who carries a weapon in Croix-des-Bouquets was not born an executioner; he was shaped by absence — absence of school, of work, sometimes of a father, always of the state. A serious eschatology of gangrie must therefore aim at the end of the system, and not merely the disappearance of those who are both its instruments and its primary victims.

1. Psychology of the held breath

Psychologist Martin Seligman described, in the 1960s, the phenomenon of learned helplessness: subjected to shocks that one cannot anticipate or avoid, the organism eventually ceases to struggle, even when the cage door opens. Part of the Haitian people has been placed in this experiment on a national scale. Promises of international missions, announcements of security plans, successive political transitions: through the weight of disappointed hopes, one learns not to hope anymore, out of caution, like one learns not to touch an electric wire.

The collective trauma has its symptoms: hyper-vigilance, this permanent state of alert that exhausts the body; avoidance, which shrinks the city to a few “safe” routes; emotional numbness, which allows one to walk past a body without stopping, not out of indifference, but out of a necessity to survive. Kierkegaard distinguished between fear, which has an object, and anxiety, which does not. Gangrie has the perverse quality of transforming fear into anxiety: it is no longer a particular armed man that one fears, it is uncertainty itself, the diffuse possibility that everything, at any moment, will tip over.

But psychology also recognizes the other side. Boris Cyrulnik popularized the notion of resilience: this ability to resume development after trauma, provided one encounters what he calls “resilience tutors” — a person, a place, a story that gives meaning back. The Haitian people have proven this for centuries: the revolution of 1804 was itself an act of foundational resilience, the most radical exit from the cage that modern history has known. The women who reopen a stall in the market as soon as the shooting stops, the teachers who hold classes in makeshift shelters, the churches and neighborhood associations that hold firm: these are the invisible tutors of a nation.

Relief, when it comes, will therefore not be a mere return to calm. Clinicians know that the end of a threat often paradoxically triggers the collapse of those who have held fast: the body, finally allowed to let down its guard, presents the bill. This moment must be anticipated. A nation emerging from gangrie will need psychologists as much as police, spaces for speech as much as checkpoints.

1. Philosophy of the end: termination or fulfillment?

The word “end” is double in French, and that is the entire question. The end can be a termination — the stop, the cessation, the curtain that falls. It can also be a finality — the goal, the telos of Aristotle, what a thing aims for to accomplish itself. The end of gangs as a termination is a necessity. But it will not suffice if it is not supported by an end as finality: an idea of what Haitian society wants to become once liberated.

Walter Benjamin, in his theses on the concept of history, wrote that the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule. This is what gangrie has produced: the normalization of the exceptional. Kidnapping has become a mere news item, displacement a condition, fear a climate. The true eschatology consists in breaking this normalization, in restoring the unacceptable its name of unacceptable. Ernst Bloch, the philosopher of The Principle of Hope, would have added that hope is not a daydream, but a category of the real: what is “not yet” already works on the present.

We must also beware of the messianic temptation. Any eschatology carries the figure of a savior from elsewhere, a deus ex machina who descends onto the scene to untie the drama. The arrival of Salvadoran forces, the support of the international force, aid from partners: all this can be a decisive lever. But the Prime Minister himself reminded us: the international force is there to support the state, not to replace it. A deliverance that is merely imported would remain a borrowed deliverance — and what is lent can be reclaimed.

Hannah Arendt established, in From Lying to Violence, a distinction that should guide every Haitian official: violence can destroy power, it is incapable of creating it. Force can dismantle a gang; it cannot, on its own, found a city. Power, in Arendt's sense, arises from the concerted action of citizens. The end of gangrie will be military in its means; it must be political in its completion.

1. What the end must not be

A poorly thought-out end can become the beginning of something worse. Three pitfalls threaten the exit from gangrie.

The first is vengeance. Since 2023, movements of popular self-defence have sometimes succumbed to lynching suspects, without trial. One understands the anger of a people too long humiliated; one cannot make it a policy. René Girard showed how societies in crisis seek a scapegoat to discharge their accumulated violence, and how this mechanism, far from soothing, establishes endless cycles. A society that would emerge from gang terror only to enter mob terror would have changed only its executioner.

The second pitfall is permanent exception. The methods that dramatically reduced crime in El Salvador rely on a prolonged state of exception and mass incarceration that many human rights organizations have documented and criticized. Haiti can draw inspiration from determination; it must ensure that security is not confused with the suspension of rights. Several analysts are already concerned, in Port-au-Prince, about an “orchestra without a conductor”: police, military, international force, Salvadoran contingent, private security companies — all actors whose command and accountability must be clarified. Law is not the enemy of security; it is its enduring condition.

The third pitfall is the forgetting of children. If a large part of the fighters are minors, the end of gangs will pose a vertiginous moral question: what to do with those who have been both victims and executioners? Experiences of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, from Sierra Leone to Colombia, teach that one does not sustainably pacify a society by eliminating its lost youth, but by offering it a path back. This is the demanding price of peace.

1. The day after: breathe, remember, rebuild

What will relief be? One must imagine it concretely, for hope feeds on images. It will first be the reopened road: Martissant crossed without prayer, National Road 1 and National Road 2 returned to commerce, trucks from the Cul-de-Sac plain once again loaded with bananas and children coming home from school. It will be the return of the displaced, the silent sorting of looted houses, cemeteries finally visited. It will be, for many, the first sleep without startle.

It will also be the time of memory. Paul Ricœur spoke of a “just memory,” between the excess of memory that traps in resentment and the excess of forgetting that insults the victims. Haiti will need a transitional justice: naming the crimes, judging the masterminds — including those who, far from the neighborhoods, armed, financed, or protected the gangs — compensating those who can be, honoring the dead. Without this justice, the end of the gangs would be nothing more than a truce; with it, it can become a refoundation.

Finally, it will be the time for rebuilding the link. Haitian culture possesses, for this, a treasure that gangrie could not destroy: the konbit, this collective work where neighbors gather to clear a field or build a house, to the rhythm of song. Jacques Roumain made it, in Governors of the Dew, the metaphor of a nation reconciled around recovered water. The exit from gangrie must be a vast konbit: the state for security and justice, the diaspora for investment and skills, churches and associations for care, youth for the energy to restart.

In the sociological sense, it will be a matter of moving from survival to life, from the mechanical solidarity of urgency — tightening to avoid dying — to an organic solidarity, made up of functioning institutions, welcoming schools, and judging courts. In the psychological sense, it will be about transforming trauma into narrative, fear into democratic vigilance. In the philosophical sense, it will be to make the end a beginning: Arendt recalled that every birth is the promise of a restart, and that a political community lives from its capacity to begin anew.

Epílogue: the breath

In Hebrew, ruah; in Greek, pneuma; in Latin, spiritus: in the ancient languages of humanity, breath and spirit share the same name. What has been taken from the Haitian people is not only their belongings, their roads, and their dead. It is their breath — that is to say, in the oldest sense, their spirit, their capacity for momentum, initiative, and projects.

The eschatology of gangrie is therefore not the passive expectation of a last judgment. It is the patient work through which a people regains its breath. The gangs wanted to be the end of Haiti; they must only be an end in the history of Haiti — a painful and bloody parenthesis closed by the determination of the state, the loyal support of its allies, and above all, the quiet strength of those who have never stopped getting up in the morning.

That day will have addresses. It will have the address of Mirebalais, when the white coats will return to the path of the University Hospital, when the market women will come back to display their baskets, when the families refugeed in Lascahobas, Boucan-Carré, or Hinche will resume the road home — no longer in panic, but at the slow pace of those returning home. It will have the address of Saut-d’Eau, especially. For there is a sign to which the Haitian people will know that gangrie is truly over: the day when, on a July 16, pilgrims will once again ascend the path of the waterfalls, candles in hand, and will let themselves be bathed once more by the water falling from the cliff. On that day, the old liturgy of purification will regain all its meaning. The water of Saut-d’Eau will wash away what the weapons have contaminated, and the sacred, returned to those who venerate it, will become what it has always been in this country: not an escape from the world, but a way to stand firm within it.

The day will come when, in the Cul-de-Sac plain, the sound of hoes will once again be heard instead of that of rifles. On that day, the Haitian people will finally exhale the breath they have been holding for so long. And in this long exhalation, there will be relief, mourning, and promise all at once.

References and sources

1. UN, via AP: more than 5,700 people killed or injured in Haiti between January and mid-September 2026; statements from Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé (AP/ClickOrlando, November 3, 2026).
2. Small Wars Journal, “Can Bukele Beat Haiti’s Gangs?”, October 27, 2026 (approximately 1.4 million displaced).
3. Al Jazeera, Noovo/AP and Reuters, on the Salvadoran deployment in Haiti, October 2026.
4. Max Weber, *The Scientist and the Politician*; Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” (1985); Émile Durkheim, *On the Division of Labor in Society*.
5. Martin Seligman, works on learned helplessness; Søren Kierkegaard, *The Concept of Anxiety*; Boris Cyrulnik, *A Wonderful Misfortune*.
6. Walter Benjamin, *On the Concept of History*; Ernst Bloch, *The Principle of Hope*; Hannah Arendt, *From Lying to Violence* and *The Human Condition*; René Girard, *Violence and the Sacred*; Paul Ricœur, *Memory, History, Forgetting*.
7. Wikipedia, “2025 in Haiti” (escape of about 530 detainees from Mirebalais prison, March 31, 2025); Vant Bèf Info, “Over 31,000 displaced in Mirebalais and Saut-d’Eau, IOM sounds the alarm”, April 8, 2025; Vant Bèf Info, “One year after Mirebalais and Saut-d’Eau”, 2026; Le Nouvelliste, “Mirebalais and Saut-d’Eau: six months of asphyxiation”, October 1, 2025; RNDDH, on the fall of the two municipalities in the Center.
8. Jacques Roumain, *Governors of the Dew* (1944).