Gang continues deadly attack on Haiti slum, sparking violent protests over fuel shortages

The smell of death permeates the air while the remnants of burnt corpses and destroyed homes litter corridors and concrete walkways. Drinking water and food have become a rarity.

“It’s a massacre that’s happening in here,” Olwich Louis-Jeune, 39, a resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood inside Port-au-Prince’s Cité Soleil slum told the Miami Herald on Wednesday, as the sound of automatic gunfire rang through the phone line. “We need the presence of the police. People are getting killed; children are getting shot, old people are being shot. No one has come to our rescue.”

Those who could, he said, had fled their zinc-roof-covered homes inside the slum and were sheltering at area schools and churches. Others took to the sea.

“You have people who can’t swim and they are firing into their canoes,” Louis-Jeune said about the armed gang members. He said he has been sleeping in a school after being forced from his home by the nonstop shooting. “All the roads are blocked inside; there is nowhere to go and no one can get in.”

As a deadly gang siege in Haiti’s volatile capital entered another day Wednesday, the violence between the newly created coalition of armed gangs known as “G-pèp-la,” led by Gabriel Jean Pierre, from Cité Soleil, and the rival G-9 federation, led by Jimmy Chérizier, a former police officer known as Barbecue, threatened to spill over and upend life elsewhere in Port-au-Prince.

Automatic gunfire could be heard throughout the metropolitan area as residents reported rock throwing, blocked roads and burning barricades at major roadways. Police, who still had not received their salary for the past month and lack fuel for vehicles, were present at some capital intersections but absent at others.

Decrying what they view as an unprovoked attack on Cité Soleil in the gangs’ war for control of territory, moto-taxi drivers launched street demonstrations to protest the shortage of gas and diesel fuel.

Though lack of fuel is a chronic problem in Haiti, the current shortages are being blamed on the violent gang clashes. Because of the fighting, access to the nearby Varreux fuel terminal has been blocked and two boats carrying petroleum and a third carrying propane were unable to dock into the port.

The National Human Rights Defense Network said the fight was triggered by a 3 a.m. Thursday attack by the G-9 Family and Allies federation against the Brooklyn neighborhood. Brooklyn is the stronghold of the gang G-pèp-la.

In a report, the network said that as of Wednesday it had counted 89 deaths, including 21 people who were burned to death, and 16 people have been reported missing. Another 74 people were injured by gunfire or stabbing, the network said, and 127 homes were destroyed. The report accused the gang of using government-issued equipment to destroy the homes and dig trenches inside the slum, which has about 300,000 residents.

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The human rights group criticized the lack of police intervention to stop the terror as well as the lack of a response by the political coalition formed by interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

“The main victims of these armed attacks and massacres, recorded in deprived neighborhoods since 2018, remain the civil population,” the human rights group said. “They include seniors, children, babies and people with reduced mobility or ... disabilities.”

Haitian government officials, who have yet to publicly address the ongoing violence, did not respond to requests for comment about the gang warfare or accusations they are funding and arming gangs. The prime minister has previously said he and his government have no relations with armed groups.

In a video that circulated on social media, Chérizier, displaying three automatic rifles, said the war was on and described his ongoing attack as “a battle to free the country from kidnapping.”

Residents of the slum, who are already poor and living in what amounts to concrete shacks with rusty zinc roofing, disagree.

“I am not at all at ease,” said a Brooklyn man who asked to be identified only as Henry because of fear of the gang, which forced him to go into hiding. “The people in Brooklyn are not at ease.”

Henry said armed groups affiliated with the G-9 gang had used tractors to destroy homes, including his, inside the community. Others fired shots into the office of the National Port Authority, as well as at residents seeking to flee by boat.

“There is no hospital, there is nowhere to take people who have been shot,” he said, adding that one of his neighbors died after she was hit by a bullet in her chest. “We don’t sleep.”

The violence is taking place against a backdrop of increased hunger, higher food and fuel prices and a worsening political crisis. While the interim prime minister has managed to pull together a fragile coalition since coming into office after last year’s assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, he has been unable to reach a political agreement with civil-society groups.

Attending a hemispheric summit in Miami on Wednesday, both the prime ministers of the Bahamas and St. Vincent and the Grenadines called the situation in Haiti “troubling.” Both countries are part of the 15-member Caribbean Community groupi known as CARICOM, which the U.S. hopes can help mediate Haiti’s political crisis.

“The whole situation in Haiti has always been a troubling issue for all of us and it’s becoming ever [more] complicated,” Bahamas Prime Minister Philip E. Davis told the Miami Herald after speaking at the Concordia Americas Summit at the University of Miami.

The incoming chairman of CARICOM, Davis said the challenges in Haiti are a security risk for the Bahamas, which along with the Dominican Republic and Turks and Caicos are among Haiti’s closest neighbors.

“Until we secure the security elements and have those elements that protect citizens and its people and ensure that governance can come back in an orderly fashion, it’s all lost,” he said.

With the mandate of the United Nations’ special political office in Port-au-Prince set to expire on Friday, the U.N. Security Council was supposed to vote on the future of its presence in the country on Wednesday. But the vote was postponed to Friday after the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China failed to agree on a way forward.

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The U.S. is pushing for a renewal of the mandate of the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti, which China does not support. Other countries like the Dominican Republic have called for the return of a foreign peacekeeping mission to address the deteriorating situation.

“If we can’t even renew what is there, can you imagine how much more difficult it’s going to be to put boots on the ground?” St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said.

Gonsalves, also attending the UM summit, said without the renewal of the U.N.’s mandate in Haiti there is no foundation for a political solution to the crisis. CARICOM, he said, has agreed to lead a mission to Haiti in the hopes of helping the various political factions find a Haitian-led solution.

“Before we can have elections, we have to have proper security,” he said.

But that is looking increasingly difficult. Video shared with the Herald by the mayor’s office in Cité Soleil showed burnt homes with only the walls standing. Others were flattened, their corroded zinc rooftops lying on concrete piles that once served as walls.