Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen fights for land rights and national sovereignty as insecurity increasingly restricts its activities.

In September, the “Heads Together Small Producers” movement (Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen) commemorates 40 years of resistance in Haiti, highlighting ongoing struggles for land rights and rural empowerment amid severe national instability.

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“With the country’s roads blocked by gangs and an especially tense climate in the capital region, the current situation in the country does not allow for the commemorative events that the date deserved. However, the milestone will not go unnoticed. Instead of a celebration, dozens of local assemblies will be held over the coming months, fostering spaces for reflection, criticism and self-criticism with the grassroots,” Brasil de Fato explained.

Since its creation in 1986, Tèt Kole has established itself as a movement that promotes grassroots popular organization and defends the rights of Haiti’s rural population, in a country impoverished by the greed of local elites and the indifference of the international community.

“Today we have the capacity to mobilize people in all 10 departments of the country… We have managed to encourage peasants to sit together, work together, eat together and support one another in confronting illness, death or exploitation by the state,” said Jean-Jacques Henrilus, one of the organization’s founders and a member of the national coordination body.

“Our concrete goal is to reach a society without favors. A society in which people can live as people. A society in which those who work are the ones who eat. We have not reached that yet. But precisely for that reason, we cannot become discouraged or give up,” he added.

Pierre-Mary Louis, a member of the Directorate, states: “If today peasants have rights, can express themselves freely, mobilize, say what they want and what they do not want, Tèt Kole has contributed greatly to that through the training we provide and the continuous support we offer in every corner of the country.”

US Marine occupation dismembered Haiti’s soul for 19 years, suppressing peasant rebellions with racial segregation. The legacy included environmental deforestation and the seeds of institutional racism that later empowered the Duvalier dictatorship. pic.twitter.com/6WVxkdjsTw

— Association Sovereignty (@ASovereign30930) September 16, 2026

A Response to Systemic Violence

Long before its official founding, Tèt Kole began taking shape amid peasants’ resistance to abuses by the dictatorship of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier (1956-1986).

At that time, peasants were the first victims of repression carried out by local authorities, along with militias and paramilitary forces known as Tonton Makoute.

“They would arrest peasants for any reason. They beat them, imprisoned them, and forced them to sell their land and animals in order to be released,” Henrilus recalls.

Since the 1970s, defenders of peasants’ rights held their first meetings in the context of Caritas’ grassroots communities. Tèt Kole thus began to take shape clandestinely, as the Haitian dictatorship restricted forms of collective association and expression.

“We had to use the farms themselves as spaces to build the movement. We did community work, cleared land, planted and, afterward, at lunchtime, under the shade of a tree, we held the meeting. Because it was impossible to hold it anywhere else,” Henrilus said.

As the movement grew, its strategies multiplied, with gatherings lasting several days and participants camping in forests, sugarcane fields and even in Port-au-Prince. Meetings were held quietly, without singing or commotion, and each participant had a specific time to arrive and leave in order to avoid crowds in the streets.

After the fall of the Duvalier regime, Tèt Kole was finally able to organize its first national gathering on Sept. 6, 1986, and choose its name. But even with the return of democracy, marginalization and systemic violence against the peasant population remained the norm.

Haiti, which freed itself from colonization through a revolution that ended slavery, never managed to carry out a real agrarian reform. To this day, the largest parcels are in the hands of large landowners, churches, or the state, leaving peasants in situations of tenancy or precarious labor.

Moreover, when people organize, repression is not long in coming, as occurred in the Jean Rabel massacre on July 23, 1987, when 139 peasants were killed for demanding a piece of land.

The Tèt Kole movement had not even been in formal existence for a year. But far from allowing itself to be defeated, it continued to stand alongside families in the struggle against the state. Today the Jean Rabel massacre region is an example of achievements in the fight for land and popular organization.

Currently, Tèt Kole’s areas of action include the pursuit of fundamental rights, such as access to identity documents and basic services, which are often denied in practice to populations living in more remote areas.

It also fights for the promotion of agroecology, food sovereignty, education, environmental protection, solidarity economy, and gender equality. This is joined by Tèt Kole’s unconditional defense of the country’s sovereignty against all forms of imperialist interference.

For this reason, the Haitian movement maintains relations with organizations with which it shares strategic objectives, such as the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC-Via Campesina), Alba Movements, the International Peoples’ Assembly (AIP), and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), a Brazilian organization that has maintained a permanent brigade of activists in Haiti since 2009.

“Our relationship is not based on projects or financial support. It is a relationship of brotherhood. A relationship of struggle, exchange, and solidarity. In this dynamic of globalizing our struggle, any organization from any country can bring to another country its essence, its ideas and its solidarity, as the MST does,” Pierre-Mary Louis said.

Islanda Aduel, member of #Haiti peasant group Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen discusses significant challenges faced by rural women in Haiti, reflects on the resistance and struggle amid the violence & chaos in the country https://t.co/mLiRnPECJ9 @via_campesina @HammerandHope pic.twitter.com/Z73hIL6gpa

— GRAIN (@GRAIN_org) August 1, 2024

The Deterioration of The Situation for Farmers

In Haiti, the current security crisis has resulted in widespread impoverishment among small farmers, who face increasing difficulties traveling across the national territory.

“They need to take their production to the local or national market, where they exchange or sell their products to buy what they lack at home. However, that relationship has been practically cut off for five years,” Louis lamented.

Tèt Kole’s organizational activities have been directly affected by gang-related insecurity, which prevents activists from holding general assemblies, carrying out large mobilizations and maintaining stable planning.

The organizational difficulties are illustrated by a clear case. For 15 years, Tèt Kole had been building an agroecology training center in Montrouis, on a 14-hectare area that armed gangs invaded and looted. Currently, the Montrouis center is completely inaccessible to members of the peasant organization.

The violence prevailing in Haiti, however, is not the work of a few local criminals who can be defeated through foreign intervention, U.S. mercenaries or supposed changes of government.

For Tèt Kole, the security situation is part of a geopolitical project for the recolonization, exploitation, and extraction of Haitian resources.

“Following that logic, the gangs were created by national and international mafias that needed to exercise control over the Haitian people, especially the masses in working-class neighborhoods and peasants in rural areas. To that end, they created misery and confinement to keep them under imperialist control,” Henrilus explained.

For that reason, the peasant movement is critical of the idea of holding elections in such an undemocratic context. It considers the solution to be a structural change in society, through the construction of a new state in which power truly rests with the people and serves them.

“Tèt Kole aspires to a change of state. A radical change, meaning not only changing the people who are in government but building a popular and socialist state capable of assuming its responsibilities for the benefit of the country and all people,” Pierre-Mary Louis said.

“The creation of a new state and a truly sovereign nation can only begin with popular organization. It is the only possible path to fight against this system of oppression. If we do not unite to put an end to it and uproot it, the nation is lost, the homeland is lost, and we are lost as a people,” Henrilus stressed.

teleSUR/ JF

Source: Brasil de Fato

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