Blinken Visits a Haiti Wracked by Corruption and Gangs

The United States has played a supporting role behind Kenya’s deployment of a security force tasked with helping Haitian police combat gangs.

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Residents of Port-au-Prince carry belongings past a barricade during a protest after gangs attacked neighborhoods and set houses on fire in the city last month.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to Haiti on Wednesday in a display of American support for international efforts to wrest the nation from the grip of tyrannical violent gangs.

Mr. Blinken planned to visit the capital, Port-au-Prince, and survey the work of a Kenyan-led security force, backed by the United Nations, that arrived in Haiti this summer. Its mandate is to support Haitian police as they combat the gangs, which have subjected large areas of the Caribbean nation to brutal rule, enforced by torture, rape and murder.

Overshadowed by crises in the Middle East and Europe, Haiti’s collapse into criminal anarchy is among the most intractable problems faced by the Biden administration and the international community.

Efforts to improve the lives of Haiti’s largely impoverished population of roughly 11 million people have been complicated by past interventions by the United States and the United Nations that only seemed to exacerbate the country’s problems.

Those failures, as well as a legacy of colonialism, help explain why the United States has played a supporting role behind Kenya’s deployment of police officers, now numbering about 400 in the country. That is well behind a stated goal of 2,500 personnel, to which at least six other nations have said they would contribute.

U.S. officials said that Mr. Blinken — paying the first visit to Haiti by a U.S. secretary of state in nearly a decade — would assess the state of the security mission, which has so far done little to dislodge the power of well-armed gangs that have marauded through the country, blocking roads, emptying prisons and attacking police stations.

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