The United States’ chargé d’affaires in Haiti, Henry Wooster, said the new security mission proposed by the Trump administration would be “much more lethal” than the current operation led by Kenya.
As reported by The Latin Times, Wooster explained that the plan would mark a major shift in Washington’s approach to Haiti’s crisis, moving from a primarily police-focused strategy to one that is explicitly military. “To be clear, the mission is colored overwhelmingly as military due to the urban combat nature of it,” he said, though he added that police participation remained possible.
Wooster outlined the mission’s first objectives: securing key infrastructure such as the airport, seaports, road junctions, and power plants. “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,” he stressed.
To underline the urgency, the U.S. diplomat used a medical analogy: “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 continued.
According to Wooster, the new mission would also have greater “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.
Meanwhile, Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council (CPT) has been stepping up its calls for help. Speaking before the UN General Assembly, CPT coordinator Laurent Saint-Cyr declared: “Every minute lost means human lives sacrificed and an erosion of democracy.”
He described the situation as a “human tragedy at the doors of America… experiencing a war, a war between criminals that want to impose violence as their social order, and a population, an unarmed population, that is fighting for human dignity and freedom. Haiti wants peace. Haiti expects peace. Haiti has the right to peace.”
The Trump administration has warned that its financial support for the UN-backed mission cannot be guaranteed without Security Council approval of the new resolution. In August, the United States and Panama introduced a proposal to create a 5,500-member “gang-suppression force” with arrest and detention powers, as well as military-grade equipment.
The initiative reflects growing frustration with the Kenya-led mission, which has so far failed to retake strategic areas of Port-au-Prince still largely controlled by gangs.
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