24 Sep 2025 | About Index, Americas, News, Newsletters
Haiti has played on my mind for months, not least since reading a piece in the Miami Herald in June about people being beheaded in a church. That level of violence will always make one sit up but what really got to me were the perpetrators. It was not at the hands of the infamous gangs – it was at the hands of so-called self-defence brigades set up to fight the gangs. At the time of reading this I was surprised the story wasn’t more widely covered. I mostly put it down to one simple fact – a challenge we are all too familiar with – distraction by other world events. I’ve now done some digging and it’s more than that.
Today Haiti is facing an intense crisis, or “total chaos” as the UN has described it. They’re led by a coalition set up almost two years ago to offer stability after the former prime minister, Ariel Henry, was ousted. Except the coalition is deemed dysfunctional and useless. A network of gangs control swathes of the country, a main spokesman for the largest being the ominously named Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier (Barbecue is in fact simply a reference to his mother’s food stall). The gangs run many of the roads, a convenient way to tax people using them and grow rich in so doing. The country’s main airport, in the capital Port-au-Prince, is effectively closed after several planes were shot at. A patchwork of counter militia have emerged who rival the gangs in violence. Thousands have been killed, millions displaced, starvation is rife, as is rape.
Given the violence, alongside the logistical challenges of getting in and out of the country and travelling internally, international media have largely stayed away. This is a big frustration for Michael Deibert, an author, journalist and Index contributor, who is rare in actually still visiting (and will be writing more in-depth for Index on this). He has been reporting from Haiti for decades and was last there in July. While he recognised the extreme difficulties for foreign correspondents, he did nevertheless stress that they needed to be there. As an aside Deibert also told me that he regularly receives videos of gang atrocities.
Deibert’s point about the absence of foreign media is made all the more important because local journalists are struggling to report the story. They are terrified of both sides – the gangs and militia – and speaking to either in the interests of impartial journalism risks them being deemed a “collaborator”. Meanwhile even seemingly neutral areas to cover, like the reopening of a hospital, have led to the death of several of their own.
The violence isn’t just about silencing the messenger, it’s about the message: A viral video of someone being murdered, the ringing sounds of gunshots in the distance, a woman raped in the open – these make people incredibly cautious about speaking out lest they’re next. The UN might describe the scenes in Haiti as “total chaos” but they’re also ones motivated by total control.
14 Nov 2024 | News, United States
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
