Haiti: misery, murder and kidnap in the Caribbean
In the past month, there has been much news coverage of the plight of Haitian migrants camped in their thousands by the Rio Grande as they vainly seek entry to the US, said Nora T. Lamontagne in Le Journal de Montréal. But it has taken the kidnapping of a busload of American missionaries in Haiti to focus global attention on the chaos that reigns in the impoverished Caribbean nation from which those migrants have fled. The group of 17 missionaries linked to the charity Christian Aid Ministries had just visited an orphanage near the capital, Port-au-Prince, last week, when an infamous armed gang known as 400 Mawozo boarded their bus and abducted all inside, including an eight-month-old baby and children aged three, six, 14 and 15. The gang is demanding a ransom of $1m per head. “I swear by thunder if I don’t get what I’m asking for, I will put a bullet in the heads of these Americans,” says gang leader Wilson Joseph in a video posted on social media. The FBI has now sent agents to Haiti to assist in negotiations for their release.
Latin America’s first independent state of the colonial era (it shook off French rule in the 19th century), Haiti has suffered cycles of intense violence for most of its history. But the gang violence gripping the country in recent years has created a new “climate of terror”, said Guy Taillefer in Le Devoir (Montreal). There were 234 kidnappings in 2020; so far this year there have been more than 600. In Port-au-Prince, some of Haiti’s 90 or so gangs, funded by business leaders, politicians and drug dealers, have literally taken power. Formerly they’d been contained by a UN peacekeeping force, but that was dismantled in 2017. Haiti’s woes don’t end there, said Edver Serisier in Le National (Port-au-Prince). It has been ravaged by Covid; its president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in July. In August, a huge earthquake killed some 2,200 people and left tens of thousands homeless. The debris is everywhere, and survivors are sheltering in squalid tent camps, yet “state action is almost non-existent”.
That’s because there is no state, said Patrick Bèle in Le Figaro (Paris): while he was president, Moïse reduced Haiti’s political landscape to “a vast field of ruins”. One by one, he destroyed all the institutions: there’s no functioning parliament or high court; the electoral council has been discredited. Much of the blame for all this lies with the US, said Guy Taillefer. It has routinely supported Haiti’s corrupt strongmen rulers despite widespread opposition from civil society. And it remains “indifferent to the fate of Haitians”: look how Biden’s administration has forcibly repatriated thousands of migrants back to the chaos they had struggled so hard to escape. “An inhuman decision,” the US’s special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, rightly called it, before handing in his resignation. Until the US, along with the other rich nations, changes its attitude, we’ll continue to see Haitian refugees amassing on the Mexican border.