Haiti and the neighbours

A question we are asked in the Caribbean, in various forms, is what Haiti means for everyone else. It is a reasonable question and it is usually asked with the wrong map in hand.

First, a correction we have to make often

Aruba and Curaçao are frequently grouped with the eastern Caribbean as states under Haitian pressure. They are not. Their migration pressure is Venezuelan, and it arrives across roughly twenty-seven kilometres of water from a different country with a different driver. Published estimates put displaced Venezuelans at somewhere near seventeen thousand in Aruba and fourteen thousand in Curaçao, against resident populations of about a hundred and eight thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand respectively. Those are among the highest per-capita figures anywhere in the hemisphere, and they have nothing to do with Port-au-Prince.

The distinction matters beyond pedantry. A Venezuelan flow is a proximity-and-economy problem with a land-adjacent origin state that still functions in some administrative sense. A Haitian flow is a governance-collapse problem. The interception may look identical at sea and the response upstream is entirely different. Any adviser who blurs the two is describing boats rather than causes, and will recommend accordingly.

Getting the driver wrong is not a detail. It determines whether the answer is a diplomatic one, a policing one, or neither.

What a collapse actually exports

Haiti exports three distinct things, and they travel at three different speeds. Conflating them is the most common analytical error in this subject.

• People, fastest and most visible. The International Organization for Migration has reported internal displacement of roughly one and a half million people, the highest figure ever recorded in the country. The overwhelming majority remain inside Haiti. That is the important point and it is usually missed: the regional caseload is the overflow from a far larger internal one, which means it responds to conditions in Haiti rather than to interdiction offshore.
• Weapons and criminal networks, slower and far more damaging. This is the export that changes a neighbour permanently, and it is the one least addressed by maritime patrol.
• Institutional and economic strain, slowest of all. Detention capacity, court time, consular workload, cancelled port calls and insurance ratings. It arrives late, it is hard to attribute, and it is what senior officials actually spend their time on.

A response designed around the first will be judged on arrival numbers and may succeed on that measure while the second continues untouched.

The trade runs both ways

The Jamaica case is the clearest published illustration, because it is not a one-directional flow of victims. Reporting and official statements describe a barter: cannabis moving north from Jamaica to Haiti, firearms moving south from Haiti to Jamaica, in figures cited in the region of one hundred and fifty to two hundred weapons a month. We would treat that monthly figure as indicative rather than audited and recommend verifying it against current Jamaican constabulary or regional task force reporting before quoting it.

The origin point is further away still. The United States Government Accountability Office reported in November 2024 that around seventy-three per cent of firearms recovered and traced in the Caribbean originated in the United States. So a Jamaican homicide committed with a weapon that entered through Haiti is, at root, a North American supply problem laundered through a collapsed state.

This is why interdiction alone cannot resolve it. A boat carrying people and a boat carrying weapons are not the same target, do not follow the same routes, do not respond to the same deterrent, and are not counted in the same statistic. Most regional maritime effort is optimised for the first.

What the neighbours have actually done

The record of the past two years is instructive, and not flattering to the standard prescriptions.

• The Dominican Republic chose enforcement at scale and declined to contribute force. Its authorities reported deporting on the order of two hundred and twenty-six thousand Haitians in the first seven months of 2026, roughly a thousand a day, while stating explicitly that it would not contribute troops to the international mission. A country that shares the island has concluded that removal is affordable and stabilisation is not.
• Several eastern Caribbean states accepted third-country deportees while excluding Haitians. St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, and Dominica each signed arrangements with the United States in January 2026 on terms reported to exclude Haitian nationals specifically. Whatever one thinks of that, it is a clear statement of assessed absorptive capacity.
• The Regional Security System has had no role. The RSS is the eastern Caribbean’s standing collective security mechanism and it has been essentially absent from the largest security crisis in its own region. That is not a failure of the people in it. It is a design gap: it was built for disaster response and internal security assistance among its member states, not for expeditionary stabilisation.
• Commercial actors moved first and fastest. Royal Caribbean cancelled its 2026 calls at Labadee. Private risk assessment does not wait for a communiqué, and for tourism-dependent economies the commercial signal is often the first material consequence.

The force that was never generated

The international response deserves a paragraph because it is the clearest available lesson in what not to promise.

The Multinational Security Support mission was authorised at two and a half thousand personnel and reached around seven hundred and forty. It was replaced under Security Council resolution 2793 of 30 September 2025 by a Gang Suppression Force authorised at five and a half thousand. As of early July 2026, reporting put actual deployment at a little over a thousand. One informed commentary described the change as a rebrand rather than a rethink, and on the deployment figures that is difficult to argue with.

The conclusion for a small neighbouring state is uncomfortable but freeing. If two successive authorised international missions could not generate the force, no Caribbean state is going to generate it either, and planning that assumes otherwise is planning for a capability that will not arrive. We would note that these figures move, and anyone acting on them should check current UN reporting rather than this article.

The one thing that visibly worked

It was diplomatic, it was regional, and it cost almost nothing in equipment terms. CARICOM’s Eminent Persons Group brokered the transfer of power in February 2026 after the transitional council’s mandate expired. Whatever follows from it, that was a small-state intervention that changed an outcome, delivered by three former heads of government and a secretariat rather than by a battalion.

We would not overclaim it. A brokered transition is not a solved country. But it is the single clearest example in this crisis of leverage that small states actually possess, applied in the one domain where their standing exceeds their size.

What a neighbouring state can realistically do

Set aside force generation, which is not available. Six things remain, and all of them are affordable.

• Separate the three exports in your own planning and your own statistics. People, weapons and networks, institutional strain. If your reporting counts only arrivals, you are measuring the least consequential of the three.
• Build the weapons picture, not just the vessel picture. Systematic tracing of every recovered firearm, submitted regionally and internationally, is inexpensive and it is the only thing that turns individual seizures into a supply chain you can act against. This is a records and analysis task, not a procurement.
• Use the shared regional services that already exist. CARICOM IMPACS operates joint regional screening at a scale no single member could build. Subscription to a functioning shared service beats sovereign construction of a weaker one, every time.
• Fix the back end before the front end. Detention capacity, status determination, consular routes and court time are what actually constrain a small jurisdiction receiving irregular arrivals. Interception without disposal capacity converts a maritime problem into a custody problem, and custody problems become legal and reputational ones.
• Write the surge plan while it is quiet. Who has legal authority to do what, under which instrument, with what triggers, funded from which line. A mass-arrival contingency written under pressure is written badly, and the deficiency will be in the authorisation rather than in the boats.
• Invest in the diplomatic channel, because it is the one with proven return. On the evidence of the past two years it has outperformed every other regional instrument available to small states.

A caution about the numbers

One figure dominates coverage of this subject: that gangs control around ninety per cent of Port-au-Prince. It is repeated almost universally. We have not been able to trace it to a primary source that states it in those terms, and United Nations human rights reporting on the city, while unambiguous about the severity, does not give that percentage. It may well be broadly right. It is not, so far as we can establish, a measured figure, and briefing a minister on an untraceable statistic is a habit worth breaking.

The same caution applies to several other numbers in this piece. We have said where we would verify before relying.

Our interest

We advise governments on security capability and we would be glad to do that work in the Caribbean. An article arguing that the answer is analysis, records, contingency planning and diplomacy rather than equipment is an article arguing for the kind of work we sell. Read it with that in mind.

The honest qualifier is that the largest variables here sit entirely outside the reach of any adviser or any neighbouring state. Conditions inside Haiti, United States firearms regulation and United States immigration policy will determine more than the whole regional security apparatus combined. What is within reach is being ready, knowing which of the three exports is actually arriving, and not spending against the wrong one.

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