The dress rehearsal for dystopia by John Kato

There is a temptation when watching footage from Haiti to reach for the language of fiction. Dystopia. Mad Max. Failed state. The streets ruled by gangs, the government absent or ceremonial, the ordinary act of living transformed into a daily negotiation with fear. It looks, to the distant observer, like the imaginary future we’ve rehearsed for decades in novels and films, except this time the extras are real people and the set was never dismantled.

But calling Haiti a “real-life dystopia” is both accurate and dangerously lazy. Yes, gangs control neighborhoods, ports, fuel depots, roads. Yes, territory is disputed block by block, sometimes alley by alley, in a grim parody of medieval fiefdoms. Yes, the violence has its own logic, its own treaties, betrayals and hierarchies. But dystopia implies something else, intention. Design. A society engineered to be cruel. Haiti’s reality is not the product of a single evil blueprint. It is the residue of abandonment, local, international, historical, and ongoing.

What we’re watching in Haiti is not the future. It’s a warning about the present. The gangs didn’t appear because Haitians are uniquely violent or lawless, a narrative that has always hovered just beneath polite Western commentary. They appeared because power vacuums do not stay empty. When institutions collapse, courts, police, schools, healthcare, something fills the space. Sometimes it’s religion. Sometimes it’s ideology. In Haiti, it was men with guns who understood that control of movement is control of life itself.

Territory matters because territory means food, fuel, medicine, leverage. A gang that controls a port doesn’t just control imports; it controls hunger. A gang that controls a road doesn’t just block traffic; it decides who reaches a hospital and who doesn’t. This isn’t chaos. It’s governance by other means. Brutal, extractive and profoundly intimate governance.

And that intimacy is what makes the situation so unsettling. Dystopian fiction often imagines faceless regimes, towering surveillance systems, omnipotent states. Haiti offers something more unsettling: small-scale domination. Your oppressor knows your name. He grew up two streets away. His cousin went to school with you. Violence is not abstract; it’s personal, negotiated, sometimes transactional.

Still, framing Haiti as the “ground zero” of dystopia lets too many people off the hook. It allows wealthy nations to treat the situation as a tragic anomaly rather than a predictable outcome. It suggests inevitability rather than responsibility. Haiti did not simply fail; it was failed repeatedly. Economically strangled, politically manipulated, symbolically punished for its own revolution, then periodically remembered only when disaster footage made good television.

The dystopian aesthetic, burning barricades, masked gunmen, empty streets flattens all of that history into spectacle. It becomes content. Another dark example to be referenced in think pieces, panels and late-night monologues, usually followed by a sigh and a change of topic.

But Haiti isn’t a metaphor. It’s a place where people still fall in love, argue about music, send voice notes, laugh too loudly, hope too stubbornly. In dystopian fiction, civilians are often reduced to background suffering. In Haiti, civilians are the story and they are endlessly creative in surviving a reality no one should have to normalize.

There’s also a quieter, more uncomfortable implication in calling Haiti a preview of the future: it assumes this future will be evenly distributed. It won’t be. What Haiti shows is not where everyone is going, but where the margins already are. Dystopia doesn’t arrive all at once; it leaks. It appears first in places deemed expendable, places that can be ignored without immediate consequence to global comfort.

The gangs are not an alien force. They are a symptom of systems that function perfectly well for someone else. Weapons arrive. Money circulates. Narratives are shaped. Silence is maintained. Disorder is profitable if it’s contained.

So is Haiti a real-life dystopian landscape? In the visual shorthand sense, yes. It checks every box. Armed factions, territorial warfare, institutional collapse, civilian terror. But that framing misses the deeper truth. Haiti is not living in the future we fear; it is living in the present we tolerate.

The real dystopia isn’t that gangs control neighborhoods. It’s that the world has learned to live with that fact. That outrage has a shelf life. That suffering can become background noise if it happens far enough away and long enough in one place.

Haiti is not a prophecy. It is a mirror, one we keep glancing at briefly, then turning away from, because looking too long would require admitting that dystopia doesn’t begin with total collapse. It begins with selective indifference.