U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested on Tuesday that the Organization of American States play a greater role in Haiti, where he acknowledged the country is being overtaken by criminal gangs and a U.S.-backed mission led by Kenya is struggling to restore peace and stability.
“If ever there was a regional crisis that you would think an organization like this could step forward and provide a force or a group of countries that, working together, could help solve, it would be the OAS,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday about the hemispheric entity. The OAS is supposed to be a forum for governance issues, but has long had a credibility problem in Haiti over what Haitians have viewed as its overreach in elections at
Rubio said the Trump administration is “prepared to play a leading role,” in the OAS’ stepping up on Haiti, “but we do need buy-in from other partners in the region who are as affected, if not more so, by what’s happening there.”
He suggested the OAS could lead a military intervention in Haiti similar to what it did in 1965, when it deployed a Brazilian-led peacekeeping mission to respond to a civil war in the Dominican Republic.
For weeks, sources in Washington had been denying the OAS idea was on the table, but Rubio publicly put it out Tuesday during his first testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations as secretary of state.
Since his confirmation as the country’s top diplomat, Rubio has been trying to figure out how to approach the crisis in Haiti. The job has been made more difficult by the Trump administration’s desire to cut foreign aid and its own lack of strategy on Haiti.
“We have a catastrophe in our own hemisphere right now in Haiti that we are seeking to come up with an alternative strategy, because the one in place right now isn’t working and Haiti is headed in a very bad direction very quickly,” Rubio said.
Democrats criticized Rubio, accusing their former Senate colleague of ceding ground to China with his 83% cut to the foreign aid budget. Rubio defended the administration’s new $28.5 billion foreign affairs budget after the cuts.
“I’m not saying it’s one of the ones we’re going to walk away from,” Rubio said about the OAS, whose membership includes the United States and countries in the hemisphere. “I’m not claiming that right now.”
Rubio recently met in Washington with Kenya’s national security minister and the head of the Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti, where armed gangs have been aggressively expanding their control outside of the Port-au-Prince in recent months. The Kenyans spoke about their need for additional equipment and other resources.
They are also seeking a commitment as a June 1 deadline approaches for the U.S. to decide if it will provide a $200 million payment for the continued operation of the mission’s base in Port-au-Prince, which would allow operations to extend until March 2026.
“We are grateful to the Kenyans and to the mission and we remain committed to it because they’ve done it at a great sacrifice and risk,” Rubio said. “But that mission alone will not solve this problem. And so that is one example of something that I want to see us be able to lead on, and that is to get organizations like the OAS, which we contribute to quite a bit, step forward.”
Rubio noted that he would like to see the OAS “provide a mission with countries, member countries, to deal with the issue of Haiti.”
Unlike the United Nations, which has the ability to deploy a peacekeeping mission, the OAS does not. In 1965 its members did establish the Inter-American Peace Force and deployed over 1,700 troops, headed by a Brazilian general and a. U.S. Army General as deputy, to confront rebels in the Dominican Republic. But since there has been no interest on the part of the OAS’ members to repeat this.
At the same time, member countries have not shown any interest in coming to Haiti’s financial aid. Of the countries that have contributed $110 million to a U.N. trust fund to support the Kenya mission, none are from Latin America and the Caribbean, and only four countries— Jamaica, The Bahamas, Guatemala and Salvador— have a small contingent on the ground in Port-au-Prince.
The unwillingness of Haiti’s neighbors to deploy troops led the Biden administration to support Kenya’s leadership role in the formation of the multinational mission, and later a U.S. push to get a U.N. peacekeeping operation. The Trump administration has not said if it would support a formal U.N. mission.
“Our traditional peacekeeping missions are designed to keep ideological groups from fighting each other, or tribal groups from fighting each other, in many cases, nations, nation states from fighting each other,” Rubio said. “But that traditional approach is not going to solve this very unique challenge.”
Haiti, he said, has been taken over by 25,000 to 30,000 “members of criminal gangs who simply want to control territory so they can hijack trucks, steal and or charge exorbitant fees for fuel to move across the country, kidnap people and traffic in humans, traffic in drugs across the border into the Dominican Republic.”
The State Department has been working with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to try to cut the illegal flow of weapons to the Haiti.
Rubio’s comment showed the quandary the Trump administration is in as it seeks to redirect where it spends it money abroad, and how to deal with foreign conflicts. Recently, the U.S. told the U.N. Security Council it cannot continue carrying a significant financial burden in Haiti.
The OAS, which organized a Haiti task force meeting in Miami on Monday and Tuesday, has been trying to play some role in the Haitian crisis. Its new secretary general, Albert Ramdin, has told administration officials he plans to resurrect an informal “Friends of Haiti Group.” Regional observers are watching to see who the U.S. sends to the OAS general assembly meeting next month in Antigua and Barbuda for hints of the organization’s future. “
Why do we have an Organization of American States if it is unable to collectively respond to what is a severe catastrophe in our own hemisphere?” Rubio said. “We need to challenge some of our existing memberships to step up. Because you would think that one of the reasons why the OAS exists is to deal with a crisis like the one we have in Haiti.”
By JACQUELINE CHARLES/Miami Herald
Jacqueline Charles has reported on Haiti and the English-speaking Caribbean for the Miami Herald for over a decade. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, she was awarded a 2018 Maria Moors Cabot Prize — the most prestigious award for coverage of the Americas.
