Gangs advance to the seat of Haitian government
Gangs are increasing their chokehold on Haiti’s capital, using bulldozers to raze entire neighborhoods, overwhelming poorly armed police and taking their violence to within blocks of the seat of government.
Although Haitians have endured relentless bloodshed and tragedy for years, the escalation of lawlessness in recent weeks and the government’s inability to exert control has terrified the nation.
In just a nine-day period in July, more than 470 people were killed, injured or missing as a result of gang warfare in Cite Soleil, the country’s largest slum, according to the United Nations.
Government agencies and ministries have urged employees to stay home as gangs expand their territory and are now close to the presidential palace, interior ministry, the central bank and the national penitentiary, where hungry prisoners are threatening to riot, officials warn.
In Cite Soleil, home to about 300,000 people, gangs fighting for control are using bulldozers to topple homes, gang-rape women and girls, and kill at random, according to interviews with residents.
One woman, Wislande Pierre, said she lost nearly everything during a single day, one of more than 3,000 people who fled Cite Soleil in July, according to the U.N. The gang clashes started in Pierre’s neighborhood before spreading to downtown Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Pierre was home at about 5 a.m. when she said she was awakened by someone shouting, “Leave this place! You are all going to die! They are coming!”
The distant sound of metal crunching under metal, gunshots and the roar of flames quickly followed. Pierre threw what she could into a backpack and fled as three bulldozers ripped through and obliterated her neighborhood and gang members set fire to what remained, details backed up in interviews.
But Pierre’s sister Jona was not as lucky.
Jona had left her 1-month-old infant daughter on her bed early that morning as she emptied the family’s chamber pots on a nearby beach. Her husband was at work. Like many in Cite Soleil, Jona lives in a house made of metal sheets with no running water, the family relieving themselves in buckets.
For two days, Jona took shelter on the beach, in anguish over the fate of her child but unable to return home while the gang warfare raged on.
Eventually, the fighting subsided and Jona rushed back, her hopes sinking as she passed flattened houses. Hers, miraculously, was left standing.
But there her daughter lay on the bed where Jona had left her, the baby’s small body riddled with seven bullets, the metalsheet walls of her home offering no resistance to the gangs’ ammunition.
By that time, the fighting had migrated to a nearby cemetery. Unable to give her daughter a dignified burial, Jona placed the body in an empty box of crackers, went down to the shores of Cite Soleil and buried her in the sand.
“We are still alive, but I cannot say we are alive,” said Pierre, Jona’s sister. “If this is life, what is hell?”
One gang, the G-9 Family and Allies run by a former police officer named Jimmy Cherizier, who is known as Barbecue, has gained control of more territory in Cite Soleil, wresting it away from a rival gang, the G-pep.
In many ways, Cherizier embodies the reasons Haiti is where it is today: The country’s political and business elites have supported competing gangs to achieve their own objectives, whittling away at any semblance of a functioning nation.