The UN's Security Council has approved a resolution that significantly expands and transforms a security mission aimed at fighting gangs in Haiti, which control most of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The unit can now have up to 5,500 uniformed personnel and can have both police officers and soldiers. This stands in contrast with the current mission, which only contemplates police.
Laurent Saint-Cyr, who heads the Haitian Transitional Presidential Council, had called for such an expansion last week at the United Nations' General Assembly. ""Entire neighborhoods are disappearing, forcing more than a million people into internal exile and reducing to nothing memories, investments and infrastructure," he said.
This is the face of Haiti today, a country at war, a contemporary Guernica, a human tragedy on America's doorstep," he added.
The proposal was pitched by the U.S. and Panama. Before the vote, the U.S.'s s chargé d'affaires in Haiti said the force would be much more lethal than the current one.
o be clear, the mission is colored overwhelmingly as military due to the urban combat nature of it," said Henry Wooster. "But also happy to take police."
Wooster went on to say that the force would initially seek to secure "places such as the airport, the seaports, key road junctures, power plants, etc, and so forth, all the things where a state, any state needs to assert its authority to establish the fact that it is, in fact, a sovereign enterprise."
The official said the approach resembles the need to save a dying patient: "I liken it to an emergency room that gets a patient who comes in, who's been very severely injured, and while you know they've got contusions, maybe a concussion, and they've got a broken leg and lacerations, you've got to stop the bleeding immediately. You can't let them bleed out."
"It's impossible to attend to the other aspects of the problem if you have not achieved security. So that is our objective. That's why getting the UN Security Council resolution passed now is so crucial, and that's why the focus in that resolution is stability and security," he added.
Wooster then said the force would have more "freedom of maneuver" than the current one. "Exactly what is at stake here is a fight for the survival of a sovereign entity, the Haitian state," he warned.
© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
