Venite Bernard’s feet are bloodied and torn because, she said, she had no time to grab her sandals when she fled her shack with her youngest children as gangsters roamed the Haitian capital’s most notorious slum, shooting people in their homes.
Now the 47-year-old Bernard and her family are camped in the courtyard of the town hall of Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince, along with more than 200 others, fleeing an outbreak of violence that is part of what civic leaders say is the country’s worst lawlessness in more than a decade.
“Bandits entered the homes of some people and beat them, and they were shooting,” Bernard said through her tears, lying on a rug in the shade of a tree. “Everyone was running so I left as quickly as I could with the children.”
UN peacekeeping troops withdrew from Haiti in 2017 after 15 years, saying they had helped to re-establish law and order in the poorest country in the Americas, where nearly 60 percent of the population survives on less than US$2.40 a day.
However, that left a security vacuum that has been exacerbated over the past year by police forces being diverted to deal with protests against Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
“With limited resources, they have been unable to contain the activity of gangs as they might have wished,” UN Police Commissioner Serge Therriault said in an interview in Haiti.
An economic downturn with ballooning inflation and a lack of investment in low income districts has also helped boost crime, turning them into no-go areas.
The situation — which diplomats fear represents a growing threat to regional stability that could have knock-on effects on migration, and drugs and weapons trafficking — is causing alarm in international circles.
The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday held a hearing on Haiti, its first in 20 years.
Moise’s critics say he has lost control of the country and should resign.
The 51-year-old says the situation is already calming down and he will carry out his full term.
Residents say gangs fight over territory where they extract “protection” fees, and carry out drugs and arms trades.
Politicians across the spectrum are using the gangs to repress or foment dissent, providing them with weapons and impunity, according to human rights advocates and ordinary Haitians.
“When those in power pay them, the bandits stop the population from participating in the anti-government protests,” said Cite Soleil resident William Dorelus. “When they receive money from the opposition, they force people to take to the streets.”
Opposition leaders and the Haitian government deny the accusations.
Moise said in an interview last month that he was working on strengthening Haiti’s police force and had revived a commission to get gang members to disarm.
“Allegations of unlawful violence will be investigated and responded to by our justice system as a matter of priority,” the presidency wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
However, critics say that under his watch, authorities have failed to prosecute gang leaders, effectively giving the criminals carte blanche and weakening the authority of police.
“Every time the police stop a gangster, there is always the intervention of some authority or another to free them,” said Pierre Esperance, who runs Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network.
Esperance, who addressed Tuesday’s Congress hearing, said that more than 40 police officers had been killed this year, compared with 17 last year.
The most high-profile case of apparent impunity is the massacre a year ago in the neighborhood of La Saline, a hotbed of mobilization against Moise’s government, rights advocates said.
Over two days, gangs killed at least 26 people, while police failed to intervene, a UN report said.
Eyewitnesses cited in the report say they saw a senior government official with the gang members.
“These allegations raise the possibility of a complicity between the gangs and state authorities,” the UN wrote.
The government eventually fired the official, who denied any involvement. Neither he nor anyone else has been arrested or prosecuted over the massacre.
“This dossier [on the La Saline massacre] is in the hands of the justice system,” Moise told reporters.
Lo Saline residents say they feel abandoned to their fate.
“We never received an official visit after these events,” said Marie Lourdes Corestan, 55, who said she found her 24-year-old son’s corpse among a pile of mutilated bodies and whose house was burnt down. “The bandits said they would come back, and not distinguish between children, women, and men.”
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