Telicia Louis, a street vendor in Pétion-Ville, a community outside Haiti’s capital, was doing laundry at home one day last year when, she said, she was chased out of her house by a gang.
She fled to a shelter, she recounted, where her pregnant daughter gave birth to a baby on the cold cement floor. Ms. Louis does not have tuition money for her other children to attend school, her sales are bad, and she is the only one in her family with a job.
Yet, Ms. Louis, 53, like so many other Haitians attacked by gangs or suffocated by crushing poverty, has a single wish.
“We need a strong government — we need nothing else,” Ms. Louis said.
A strong government, even merely a functioning government, seems a tall order in what is the Western Hemisphere’s most dysfunctional nation.
Haiti has been without an elected president for nearly five years. A presidential council put in place nearly two years ago with the help of the United States to run the country was supposed to organize new elections and bring stability to a nation whose history has been marred by long stretches of misrule and violence.
And while Haiti was mired in crisis before and during the council’s oversight, running the country could become even more challenging when its tenure expires on Saturday. The United States, for its part, is eager to say goodbye to the council after accusing members of poor governance and using their positions to enrich themselves.
The country does have a prime minister appointed by the council. The United States and the United Nations are pushing him to stay on. But while the United States has spent millions of dollars strengthening an international security force in an effort to bring peace to Haiti, it’s not clear when the country will be safe enough to allow Haitians to elect their next president.
Elections are tentatively planned for August, but few experts believe they can take place.
Haiti has not held elections since 2016, and its last president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in 2021. The country also has no sitting Parliament.
The leadership crisis has only deepened in recent weeks. Four members of the presidential council tried to fire the prime minister, Alix Fils-Aimé, claiming he had not done enough to fight gangs.
The prime minister did not respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration responded by revoking their visas to enter the United States and said in a statement that it would target “corrupt actors seeking to interfere in Haiti’s path to elected governance for their own gains.”
But the council members who were punished said the Trump administration’s response was another instance of the United States interfering in Haiti’s internal affairs.
“Many leaders in Haiti have been pressured, manipulated, even punished when they attempt to pursue an independent national agenda,” said Fritz Alphonse Jean, a council member whose visa was yanked. “There is like a recurring pattern where foreign powers treat Haitian officials as expendable tools.”
After Mr. Moïse’s assassination, a different prime minister, Ariel Henry, ruled the nation for nearly three years until early 2024, when gangs formed a coalition to topple his government and wreak havoc on the capital, Port-au-Prince. The city and its surrounding communities have suffered an explosion of violence ever since.
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According to the United Nations, more than 16,000 people have been killed in Haiti because of gang-related violence since 2022. More than one million people have been forced from their homes in recent years and are living with relatives or in public buildings.
Malia Noel, 45, said she had been sleeping in a public square in Port-au-Prince since November. She had been living with a cousin, but violence forced her out, she said, and gang roadblocks prevented her from returning to her hometown, Jacmel, in southern Haiti.
“I think the fact that the country doesn’t have a president contributes to our decline,” she said “It’s why things are so bad.”
Some modest progress has been made to repel gangs.
Private military contractors working with a multinational police force have begun attacking gang strongholds, said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition his name not be published in order to discuss sensitive diplomatic and security matters.
The Haitian police and the multinational force, made up largely of Kenyan police officers who arrived in June 2024, have cleared some areas of the gangs but have struggled to keep the groups from retaking them.
The multinational force is expected to increase to 5,500 in the coming months. More than a dozen countries have offered troops who should deploy this spring, the official said.
After Mr. Henry’s ouster, the United States and a multinational body that represents Caribbean nations formed the nine-member transitional presidential council. But the council, known as the T.P.C., has been hampered by accusations of corruption and political feuds.
The justice ministry’s anticorruption unit accused three members of soliciting bribes, but they refused to resign.
Then came the dispute over Mr. Fils-Aimé, the current prime minister, and efforts to dismiss him over what some members said was his inability to combat armed groups.
But U.S. officials were concerned that firing Mr. Fils-Aimé would lead to chaos and said they believed that council members were really trying to extract government positions once their terms expired.
Mr. Jean released publicly text messages he said he had received from Henry Wooster, the top U.S. diplomat in Haiti, after he and other council members proposed firing the prime minister.
Mr. Wooster suggested to Mr. Jean that if he persisted in trying to fire the prime minister, he might bar Mr. Jean and his family from traveling to the United States, the messages showed. Within days, Mr. Jean said, he received a call from the U.S. Embassy letting him know he could no longer travel to the United States.
Leslie Voltaire, another presidential council member, also proposed firing the prime minister and said he, too, had received a blistering rebuke from Mr. Wooster.
The State Department did not deny the politicians’ account.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Mr. Fils-Aimé to tell him he had the Trump administration’s support. “Secretary Rubio emphasized the importance of his continued tenure as Haiti’s Prime Minister to combat terrorist gangs and stabilize the island,” Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Voltaire and Mr. Jean strongly rejected any suggestion that they had ties to gangs or were corrupt.
Robert Fatton Jr. a Haiti-born political scientist at the University of Virginia, said the country had never had a power vacuum this severe. If Mr. Fils-Aimé continues to serve in his post only because the Trump administration insisted on it, his legitimacy will be questioned, he said.
Under normal circumstances in Haiti, an elected president chooses a prime minister from among the members of the majority party of the Parliament. The person is then ratified by Parliament.
“We’ve had moments where we didn’t have a president, but there were other institutions that were there to fill the vacuum,” Mr. Fatton said. “We are in full crisis.”
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.
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