From Port Royal to Por au Prince: the same drama in different times

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 03/04/2024

Apparently from the United States to the Seychelles Islands they have come to the conclusion that the solution to the Haitian drama begins by negotiating with the gangs that today control that country. Indeed, all scenario analyzes lead to the conclusion that another military invasion is impossible without incurring carnage that could rival that of Gaza. And, of course, with Yevgeny Prigozhin dead, no military leader is willing to assume a role that could lead him to the International Criminal Court.

When negotiations begin between the UN or a group of countries and Jimmy Barbecue Cherizer, without knowing it, the protagonists will be repeating a little-known agreement whose setting was Port Royal, “the most perfidious city in the Caribbean” throughout the 27th century and much of the XVII century.

Those negotiations whose parties were five European powers and about twenty representatives of the transnational organized crime of the time known as privateers, pirates and privateers. The results of these negotiations were the treaties of Utrecht (1700 and Madrid (1726) in which the European powers recognized that piracy is a crime that must be prosecuted through cooperation between them.

Previously, England, France, Flanders and the Netherlands had agreed with the leaders of the pirates, privateers and privateers that they had to abandon the illegal practice and join the legal trade. Those who rejected the negotiation ended up being persecuted and exterminated.

Because, like what is happening today in Haiti, the elites of the European powers not included in the territorial distribution of the Americas decided to set up maritime gangs to first attack Spanish and Portuguese ships and then establish bases in the Caribbean to exploit spices and sugar.

Thus England, France, Flanders and the Netherlands began to issue roe deer patents that protected criminals released from prisons from being prosecuted in their countries as long as they joined “foreign trade” and defined the terms of the relationship of each privateer. with the specific kingdom. Thus Jimmy Barbecue Cherizer's ancestors proliferated.

In Haiti, the rule of law was tied to criminal gangs since the rise of Jean Francois Duvalier, who created the Tonton Macoutes to carry out investigative and police functions. Once the Duvalier era was over and with the advent of what seemed to be a democracy, the Haitian elites decided to create private protection brigades. When political instability set in and poverty deepened thanks to the disastrous government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, institutions collapsed and protection gangs began to grow outward, starting criminal groups in the neighborhoods. Little by little, just as Kidd, Morgan, Lafitte and Read took island by island in the Caribbean, the gangs began to occupy the territory of Haiti.

Like his pirate predecessors, Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier is the leader of a coalition of criminal gangs, the G9 Family Revolutionary Forces and Allies, a self-styled federation of rebel groups. The organization was originally made up of nine groups, but has since grown to include more than a dozen.

And just as the European powers came to the conclusion that the optimal thing was to negotiate with the mischief of the time to guarantee the necessary access to the American raw materials that the pre-industrialization of Europe demanded today, the powers of the world understand that it is not possible. successfully invade Haiti militarily while the territory is controlled by the evildoers of our time. Therefore: we must negotiate.

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