That is what started happening in Haiti on Tuesday: three different American airliners were hit by bullets in rapid succession, and the United States Federal Aviation Administration halted all US flights to Haiti for at least the next month.
It’s not the first time that Port-au-Prince’s airport has been forced to close by criminal gangs. That’s how the same gangs forced interim prime minister Ariel Henry to quit early this year. Henry had been serving in that role since the assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moise, in 2021, but Jimmy Cherizier wanted him out.
The opportunity arose when Henry travelled to Guyana for a summit meeting of Caribbean countries in February. Cherizier’s gunmen just seized control of the airport and refused to let him come home.
About the same time a prisoner uprising in Port-au-Prince’s main jail freed 4000 inmates. Many of them joined Cherizier’s street "army", which now controls 80%-85% of the capital, and 3600 civilians have been killed by the rival gangs this year.
But alongside the random murder and robbery there is real political purpose.
The rival factions in Haiti managed to create a nine-person transitional presidential council (TPC) in April. Henry officially resigned without ever setting foot back in the country, the airport reopened, and in June the TPC appointed a new interim prime minister, Garry Conille.
US ambassador Dennis Hankins said "each day is a new day, and this is a new day for Haiti".
Barbecue just told the caretaker government "brace yourselves", and the war in the streets carried on as usual.
Into all this, also in June, tiptoed an African peace-keeping force that mainly consisted of Kenyan police officers.
Kenyan President William Ruto means well, but the Kenyan police are far too few (only 400) to make a difference. Another 600 are due to arrive any day now — if they can find the money for them — but that’s still only a drop in the bucket.
Predictably, the transitional council is now falling apart. At war with Conille almost from the day he was appointed, it has now dismissed him and appointed a new interim president, Alix Didier Fils-Aime.
He is the son of a well-known activist, but he has no following of his own.
Conille insists the TPC had no power to dismiss him, and "Barbecue" has warned he will escalate the gang violence against the interim government.
As for the US, which has been trying to build the TPC into something more coherent — despite three of its members now facing corruption charges — you can practically hear the despair between the lines.
"The US views it as vital that [the interim government] clearly delineates the roles and responsibilities of the TPC vis-a-vis the prime minister and includes measures to hold one another accountable as appropriate while preventing further gridlock."
In other words, shape up or ship out.
But the US has not been willing to invest much faith or money into rebuilding the shattered Haitian state even under President Joe Biden, and it certainly won’t do so under President Trump 2.0. The Haitians are almost entirely on their own, and their past does not inspire confidence.
The country has been independent almost as long as the US, but it has never known domestic peace for very long. Out of its past 12 presidents, four were killed in office and six others were driven from power by violence in the streets.
It isn’t the fault of anybody now alive, but they are all trapped in a low-level civil war that has been going on, sometimes open but usually submerged, since the earliest days of Haitian independence. It’s between the mixed-race "mulatto" people who had the education and the money and the black nine-tenths of the population who had neither.
When "Barbecue" talks about leading a revolution, as he does, he is appealing for the support and loyalty of the nine-tenths. He may not mean it — he is primarily a gangster — but it is an appeal that still resonates with many people.
After 200 years you mostly can’t see the difference in people’s faces, but you can certainly see it in people’s lives.
■ Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
