So, this may be God’s answer to all of your prayers re: my safety – as of yesterday afternoon, all flights in and out of Cap Haitien have been cancelled until (at least) sometime in April, so all Haiti trips are on hold for the moment.
I’m not going to pull any punches here – I think it’s important that you understand how horrific the situation has become for our friends and loved ones in Haiti, and how desperately your prayers are needed.
This is from yesterday’s Washington Post:
CORPSES PILING UP IN STREETS OF HAITI’S CAPITOL – HAITIANS SHOT DEAD IN STREET AND THERE’S NO ONE TO TAKE THE CORPSES AWAY
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On a ride through the gang-controlled streets of Haiti’s capital on Friday, past an improvised barricade, the motorcycle taxi reached a crossroad. First came the smell — of something burning. Then, the sight: a corpse, charred black, lying in the middle of street, its bones and feet sticking out of the pile of ash.
The night before, Jimmy Boursiquot, a carpenter who lives nearby, heard two gunshots. Peering carefully out his window, checking his watch — it was 8:24 p.m. — he saw two men drive away, leaving the body behind, not far from a university administration office and one of Haiti’s largest telecommunications companies. A few hours later, he said, the men returned and burned the remains.
The streets of Port-au-Prince reek with the stench of the dead.
It’s a grisly new marker of the violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million people. In the absence of a functioning state, violent armed gangs have taken control of more than 80 percent of the capital, the United Nations estimates. Gunfire crackles at all hours. Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell.
Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses has driven some people from their homes. Others have taken it upon themselves to move or burn the bodies. Because who else will?
Even before the past week, public services in the city were sharply limited. Trash piled up in its slums; cholera had resurfaced. The gangs terrorize the population with systematic rape, indiscriminate kidnapping and mass killing, all with impunity.
Then attacks on two of the city’s largest prisons last weekend freed thousands of inmates, including some of the country’s most notorious criminals. Now the gangs, reinforced by returning comrades, have attacked the city’s airport and main port. They’ve torched at least a dozen police stations.
Intense fighting erupted Friday night between the gangs and police in the Champs de Mars, the largest park in downtown Port-au-Prince. Gangs threw Molotov cocktails at the interior ministry headquarters and fired gunshots at the presidential palace.
Hospitals are closed. Security forces are hard to come by. The prime minister, traveling abroad to rally support for an international police force, was unable this week to return to the country.
The gangs are in control.
One morgue director said he has received 20 calls in the past week from residents asking him to pick up bodies. Four calls came in on Friday, Lyonel Milfort said. He has refused all of them.
With gangs barricading the streets, Milfort said, venturing out has been impossible. Other morgues have come under attack, he said, and he doesn’t want to risk the lives of his staff.
Milfort has been in the business since 2002. Violence has forced him to halt operations before, for one or two days — but never, he said, for an entire week.
“What I’m witnessing today is unprecedented,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to go around and see bodies being eaten by dogs and see the corpses covered with sheets.”
Romain Le Cour, a political scientist who has conducted research in Port-au-Prince in recent weeks, said the unretrieved bodies reflect “extremely high levels of violence, extreme pressure on the population and a feeling of hopelessness and abandonment.”
Le Cour, a senior expert with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, described the violence and instability as among the worst Haiti has suffered in decades. The 2010 earthquake left 220,000 people dead, but there was a national and international response to give Haitians a sense that the crisis was met with action, Le Cour said.
“Right now, what is terrible is the sense of abandonment. You have no one to turn to,” he said. Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been silent. Haitians don’t even know where he is; with the airport under attack as he was attempting to return from Kenya, he flew instead on Tuesday to Puerto Rico.
“You have to do what you have to do,” Le Cour said. “But you have to do it alone.”
While the prime minister remained in Puerto Rico, people here began re-emerging from their homes on Friday in search of food and fuel. Cars and small buses returned to the streets. The few gas stations that were open saw lines stretching for several blocks long. At a street market, a man in a police uniform could be seen exchanging gas with a resident, an apparent sign of an emerging black market for fuel. The only other police officers visible were guarding the shuttered airport.
Late Sunday morning, Jonathan Lindor passed by three corpses lying side by side in the road. They had been men, the 27-year-old said, and around his age. Each had been bleeding, apparently from bullet wounds.
All were barefoot. In Haiti, it’s not unusual for a killer to remove victims’ shoes after shooting them.
“I didn’t eat meat for the rest of the day,” Lindor said.
He returned to the area on Wednesday. Neighbors, unable to bear the stench, had burned the remains. Another witness said the group eventually placed the remains in a ravine.
“The smell is untenable,” Lindor said. “We don’t know who can pick them up, so people don’t have any other choice than to burn them.”
The residents, Lindor said, were part of a neighborhood vigilante group — a mix of off-duty police officers and civilians, often armed with machetes or knives, who take turns watching the neighborhood.
Lindor had seen bodies burned on the streets of his city before, including during last year’s Bwa Kale movement, when large vigilante groups hunted down and killed alleged gang members. But he had never before seen conditions this dire, with an absent government leaving citizens to clear the streets of corpses themselves.
“You cannot sleep in peace,” Lindor said.
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And from yesterday’s New York Times:
WITH HAITI IN CHAOS, A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS IS RAPIDLY UNFOLDING
As gangs have united in concerted attacks against the state, the prime minister is stranded in Puerto Rico, and food, water, fuel and medical care are in short supply.
Dr. Ronald V. LaRoche has not been able to cross into dangerous territory to inspect the hospital he runs in Haiti’s Delmas 18 neighborhood since it was ransacked by gangs last week, but a TikTok video he saw offered clues to its current condition: It was on fire.
He learned from neighbors and others who dared venture into gang territory that Jude-Anne Hospital had been looted and cleared of anything of value. It was the second hospital he has had to close.
“They took everything — the operating rooms, the X-rays, everything from the labs and the pharmacies,” Dr. LaRoche said. “Imagine! They are taking windows from hospitals! Doors!”
Haiti is in the throes of an uprising not seen in decades. As politicians around the region scramble to hash out a diplomatic solution to a political crisis that has the prime minister, Ariel Henry, stranded in Puerto Rico and gangs attacking police stations, a humanitarian disaster is quickly escalating. The food supply is threatened, and access to water and health care has been severely curtailed.
While gangs expand their territory and band together in concerted attacks against the state, millions of people throughout the country are caught in the middle. Many are afraid to leave their homes for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. They are hungry. They are running out of clean water and gas. They are desperate.
“Around me everyone is running,” said Dr. LaRoche, who packed up and closed three more medical facilities to avoid more looting. “Women, children and elderly have bags on their heads, and by foot they are fleeing. It is a war zone.”
Gangs that in the past year have spread throughout the country joined forces last week to attack state institutions, releasing thousands of prisoners. They are demanding the resignation of Mr. Henry, who was prevented from returning to Haiti as violence surrounded the airport and grounded all flights.
The chaos has left people to protect themselves as best they can.
“The biggest fear is stray bullets,” said Nixon Boumba, 42, a Haiti-based consultant to American Jewish World Service, an international aid and human rights organization.
Last weekend he called the motorcycle taxi driver he uses on a regular basis to go shopping. “He told me, ‘I can’t come now. My brother was hit by a stray bullet,’” Mr. Boumba said.
The driver’s brother was struck in the stomach and is recovering at a hospital. The daughter of another friend was hit in the jaw by a bullet on the campus of the city’s main public university, he said.
Blondine Tanis, 36, a radio broadcaster who was kidnapped for ransom in July by people on her street who then sold her to another gang that held her for nine days, said the violence in Haiti was nothing like she had seen before. She compared it to the 1991 coup that led to three years of military rule, but she was a baby then.
“There are young kids in the streets with heavy automatic weapons,” she said. “They shoot people and burn their bodies with no remorse. I don’t know how to qualify that. I ask myself what happened to this generation. Are they even human?”
Ms. Tanis said she has applied to enter the United States through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program.
As the security situation worsens, so does the food insecurity. Nearly one million of Haiti’s 11 million people are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N. About 350,000 of them are on the run, living on the streets, in tent cities or in overcrowded schools, as gangs invade their neighborhoods.
Most people now only leave their homes to do essential things, like go to the bank or shop for food and water. They take advantage of a lull in the violence to buy groceries. But experts fear that stocks will soon begin to dwindle as more and more goods pile up on the docks, because transportation by road is too dangerous and gangs have seized ports.
One person described the scene at a supermarket Saturday as a “carnival,” because so many people spent hours in line to stock up on supplies. Zanmi Lasante, a health organization affiliated with Partners In Health, which has worked in Haiti for decades, said it has enough fuel to run its generators for about a week.
Doctors Without Borders had to increase its hospital bed capacity from 50 to 75, as more and more people unable to access the closed public hospital showed up with gunshot wounds. One patient arrived at 3 p.m. for treatment of a gunshot wound from that morning. He died minutes later, said Dr. James Gana, who treats patients and helps run the clinics.
Doctors Without Borders recently reopened an emergency medical clinic in the city center after it had been closed for several months because gang members had removed patients from an ambulance and then killed them in front of the organization’s staff. Blood and oxygen supplies are running low.
“We are going very soon to have shortages of everything,” said Jean-Marc Biquet, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. “There is no more petrol in the petrol stations. People are selling fuel in small buckets, and nobody knows where that fuel is coming from.”
With no supply of clean drinking water, there is an increased risk of cholera, he said.
Mario Delatour, 68, a filmmaker, said he has not found bottled water in three days. A generous neighbor with a water-treatment system filled a five-gallon bottle for him on Saturday, but he still needs gas for the generator that powers his home. His neighborhood, a relative safe haven, has not had electricity in three months.
“I have enough fuel for tonight, but I don’t know about tomorrow,” Mr. Delatour said. “I’m a little bit on edge. It’s a hell of a thing, man.”
Julio Loiseau, a community activist in Port-au-Prince, said that with the power out, groceries spoil quickly, when you can find them.
“To have bread, one needs to get in line very early in the morning,” he said. “The only bread factory cannot cover its demands because of supply scarcity. My supplies ran out.”
Jean-Martin Bauer, country director in Haiti for the U.N. World Food Program, noted that the financial situation for many people is especially precarious because it has been too dangerous for people to go outside to work, and many people make their money on a day-to-day basis.
“What’s going on in Haiti is a protracted episode of mass hunger,” Mr. Bauer said. “This is probably one of the causes of what’s going on. We know hunger is related to instability and is a breeding ground for conflict, a breeding ground for strife and mass migration.”
Frantz Louis, 35, a security guard who was waiting for his shift on Saturday, said that like many Haitians, he feels Haiti has “completely collapsed.”
“The best solution for a young person for now is to leave the country,” he said. “If you want to stay in your country and you can’t eat and you can’t go where you want, what other choice do you have?”
Mr. Louis said he wondered what the gangs’ end game is. “Do they have an ideology?” he asked.
Robert, a 41-year-old furniture maker in Port-au-Prince, who did not want his name published for fear of reprisals, said he had been forced to sell his furniture for less than what it cost him to build.
“Sometimes you buy rice and you no longer have money to buy vegetable oil and spices, and that’s what happened to me last week,” Robert said, from his outdoor workshop. “Now the rice is finished, and I have to find another piece of furniture to sell at a low price — and also I need a customer.”
Robert has a wife and two children, a 7-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl. He avoids even looking at the large wardrobe he built in December that he has not been able to sell.
“The day I no longer have furniture to sell,” he said, “it will be hunger.”
