Haitians, others can finally exit violence: Airline resumes flying Haiti-MIA route
U.S. green-card holders, Haitian nationals and others with proper travel documents who until now have been unable to get out of violencetorn Haiti will finally get a chance to leave — if they can safely make it to Cap-Haïtien, the city north of Port-au-Prince.
Haiti-based Sunrise Airways, which launched services to Miami International Airport in October, says it will operate flights three days in the week ahead out of Cap-Haïtien’s Hugo Chavez International Airport to Miami beginning on Monday. For now, the airline has confirmed a flight to Miami International Airport for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, said spokeswoman Stéphanie Armand. The carrier is also launching, beginning on Monday, daily flight service between the cities of Les Cayes, in the south of Haiti, and Cap-Haïtien.
Before the violence forced the cancellation of domestic and international flights in Haiti, Sunrise Airways operated daily domestic flights throughout Haiti. It also operated flights between Miami International Airport and Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Portau-Prince on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, and between Miami and Cap-Haïtien on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haïtien has been relatively calm compared to Port-auPrince, where a united front of heavily armed gang leaders continue to lead violent attacks on neighborhoods, police stations and other key government facilities, trapping an estimated 3 million people.
The Miami-bound flight is “totally open for sale to any passengers with the required travel document,” Armand said. The tickets can be booked on sunriseairways.net, she said. A check by the Miami Herald showed that tickets were available for $948.99, one way for Monday and for $979.00 on Wednesday and Friday.
The website includes a prompt for airline passengers who had a ticket but were stranded
after the airline and U.S.based carriers canceled commercial flights to and from Haiti earlier this month when armed gangs attacked the international airport in Port-au-Prince. The attacks also led Sunrise Airways to cancel all domestic service after three of its planes were hit by bullets.
U.S.-based carriers American Airlines, JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines have not flown to Haiti since March 4 amid attempts by armed groups to take over the Toussaint Louverture International Airport in the capital. The cancellations have left U.S.-bound passengers and others trying to escape the violence with few options as armed groups continue to take over much of the capital.
While connecting to the Sunrise Airways flight still requires those trapped in Port-au-Prince to fly by helicopter to Cap-Haïtien — or risk travel through gang-controlled roads to reach the northern city — it is an option that, until now, has not existed for most people in Haiti.
The U.S. government operated its first evacuation charter flight out of Haiti last Sunday using the Cap-Haïtien international airport. This past week, the U.S. State Department also began chartering helicopter flights to carry American citizens from Port-auPrince to Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
The U.S. government flights, which require passengers to sign a promissory note for payment, are open only to U.S. citizens. This has left holders of U.S. Permapent residency cards, colloquially known as green cards, with few options to get out of Haiti. Dominican authorities are not allowing people with Haitian passports to enter their country.
The resumption of international flights out of Cap-Haïtien comes as gang violence continues to engulf Port-au-Prince and while a plan brokered by the Caribbean Community and the United States to establish a transitional presidential council is still being finalized.
Late Friday, the nine named representatives to the panel were directed by Caribbean leaders to decide among themselves the council’s final composition — whether the panel will have nine voting members or seven, with two nonvoting observers — and how they plan to choose a president and prime minister to replace outgoing leader Ariel Henry. Henry, who was returning to Haiti after finalizing an agreement with Kenya for the deployment of a multinational security force when the violence escalated, has said he will step aside once the council has been installed. Pressured by both Washington and the Caribbean Community to resign, as first reported by the Miami Herald and McClatchy, Henry remains in Puerto Rico, locked out of Haiti.
In recent days armed groups have looted and pillaged businesses and private homes and launched assaults against the main ports and airports in the capital, leading several embassies and the United Nations to evacuate nonessential personnel. In addition to paralyzing virtually all normal activity in the capital, the violence is pushing more people to leave and has triggered a new humanitarian crisis.
It is also testing the resolve of the undermanned Haitian National Police, whose police stations continue to be targeted by gunmen. Despite that, police reported that specialized units killed at least four gang leaders this week.
On Saturday, armed groups once more launched simultaneous attacks in several neighborhoods in an effort to stretch police forces and draw officers away from protected targets like the National Palace.
Residents in several neighborhoods reported waking up at 5 a.m. to bursts of automatic gunfire as gang members attempted to take over a base of the specialized border police unit in Fort National, across from the National Palace. Another group attacked a police substation and another specialized base in the suburb of Tabarre, home to the U.S. Embassy. In both instances, police repelled the attacks, killing several gang members, a police source said.
MORE THAN 33,000 HAVE FLED
The intensified armed attacks in the capital have led more than 33,000 people to find refuge in the provinces, risking passing through gang-controlled areas like the community of Martissant, south of the capital. Since 2019, the city has been controlled by warring gangs that kidnap travelers for ransom.
The U.N. International Organization for Migration said in a new report that a vast majority of those who left the capital cited the violence in metropolitan Port-au-Prince as the reason they left and said they had been displaced from their homes even before the latest attacks.
Most of those who fled went to the cities of Léogâne, Les Cayes and Jérémie in the southern region of Haiti, which, while calmer, is still recovering from a devastating 2021 earthquake that occurred five weeks after the assassination of the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse.
“It should be noted that this region already hosts more than 116,000 people who had in vast majority fled” the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince in recent months, the U.N. agency said.
The migration agency emphasized that the provinces “do not have sufficient infrastructures and host communities do not have sufficient resources that can enable them to cope with these massive displacement flows coming from the capital.”
Meanwhile, the violence continues to disrupt the flow of international aid. The World Food Program, which in the past few days had to stop some food deliveries to displaced communities in the capital because of a lack of funding, reported not being able to deliver food to 18,000 people because of roadblocks and heavy gunfire.
A citizen’s security alert network on the social media platform WhatApp, which usually warns Haitians about neighborhoods or routes to avoid in the capital because of difficult logistics or violence, now includes alerts on dead bodies on the roadways. As of early Saturday morning, the platform was reporting at least eight corpses on the roads.