Haiti’s gangs shop for firearms in U.S.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When Walder St. Louis entered a Miami pawnshop in October 2021, his shopping list contained just a few items: Two AK-47s and an AR-15.

Germine Joly, then head of the Haitian gang 400 Mawozo, had placed the order from a Port-au-Prince prison. St. Louis would soon send two barrels of firearms back to the Haitian capital.

Heavily armed gangs control 80% of Port-au-Prince, the United Nations has estimated, where they rape, kidnap and kill with impunity. Haiti doesn’t manufacture firearms, and the U.N. prohibits importing them, but that’s no problem for the criminals. When they go shopping, the United States is their gun store. The semiautomatic rifles that have wrought human carnage from an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., to a Walmart in El Paso are also being used to menace the Haitian government and terrorize the population.

U.S. authorities seized some of the guns in the 400 Mawozo plot before they could be smuggled, and Joly, St. Louis and two others pleaded guilty to federal gunrunning conspiracy charges. The gang would later gain notoriety for kidnapping 17 American and Canadian missionaries.

Other firearms, purchased in part with ransom money, slipped into Haiti undetected. That’s the most common outcome, analysts say, owing to easy access in the United States, corruption in Haiti and insufficient screening in both countries.

William O’Neill, the U.N.’s independent expert on human rights in Haiti, called conditions here “cataclysmic.” The presidency is vacant; the prime minister has announced his intention to resign; the National Assembly has gone home. Security forces are outgunned by criminals, who have grown in power since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

“There’s got to be much, much more vigorous enforcement of the arms embargo by everybody, but certainly the United States,” O’Neill said last week, “because if the gangs don’t have guns or bullets, they lose their power.”

The influx of U.S. guns to criminals is a growing problem across the Caribbean.

Nearly 85% of guns found at crime scenes in Haiti and submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available, were traced to the United States.

In the Bahamas in 2022, that figure was 98%.

“The right to bear arms is still a raging debate in the United States,” said Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas. “We don’t intend to get involved,” but “their right to bear arms … ought not to give them the right to traffic [them].”

U.S. officials say they’re trying to disrupt what they describe as a relatively new flow.

Anthony Salisbury, head of the Miami office of Homeland Security Investigations, said authorities have noted a “marked uptick” in the number and size of guns smuggled into Haiti. When they seized .50-caliber sniper rifles, a beltfed machine gun and a cache of other high-powered weapons bound for Haiti in 2022, he said, “It hit us on the head with a hammer.”

Traffickers are taking advantage of Miami’s “break-bulk” port, a miles-long stretch of the Miami River lined with freighters that carry cargo that’s broken into individual items rather than transported in containers. Haitians in Florida use the freighters to send rice, beans and other supplies home to loved ones.

When the freighters are loaded up, Salisbury said, they resemble a “giant, floating secondhand store” — and are notoriously difficult to search.