When Kenyan police arrived in Haiti as part of a U.N.-backed mission earlier this year to quell gang violence, hopes were high.

Haiti’s interim prime minister was ousted last week by the Transitional Council—the government “oversight mechanism” that the US, Canada and various factions of the country’s bourgeois elite put together earlier this year to provide a fig leaf of “popular” legitimacy for the latest imperialist-sponsored military intervention in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

As gangs escalate violence in Haiti, the UN Security Council debates upgrading the current security mission to a peacekeeping force despite opposition from Russia and China.