The inhabitants of the northern suburbs of Port-au-Prince have been undergoing a devastating gang war since Sunday April 24. Since the fall of 2020, criminal bands have continued to increase their grip on the Haitian capital.
Le Monde with AFP
According to a provisional assessment, at least eighteen civilians have been killed in recent days in Port-au-Prince, where two gangs compete in control of working-class neighborhoods located north of the capital, announced Wednesday 27 April Haitian civil protection.
Among these civilians “killed between April 24 and 26”, were “a family of eight people” as well as “three young women and three children”, indicates a report established by the public organization and transmitted to the ‘Agency France Press (AFP).
“Several hundred people” have left this zone of confrontations, including fifty who took refuge in a public square “a few hundred meters from the front line”, according to this document. Sleeping in makeshift shelters, they “are exposed to significant risks in terms of security and protection, in particular the risk of gender -based violence for women, girls and children”, alerts civil protection.
increased grip of gangs
“The armed men of the gang” 400 mawozo “set fire to my house” and “killed several of my neighbors before also fire their houses”, testified to AFP Lucien, a resident of The area. “They violate women and girls when they manage to enter a house,” added the man who, for fear of reprisals, preferred not to give his full name. This group of “400 Mawozo”, powerful and feared, had removed a group of seventeen people made up of North American missionaries and their relatives, including five children, in the fall of 2021.
Long confined to the very disadvantaged areas of the seaside of Port-au-Prince, the gangs have greatly increased their grip across the city and the country since the fall of 2020, multiplying villalic assassinations and kidnappings. The Haitian authorities have not yet expressed themselves on these violence, which paralyze all activity in the north of Port-au-Prince, and the spokesman for the national police, Gary Desrosiers, was not able to provide information to the press on Wednesday noon.
The area where these violence takes place is highly strategic because it constitutes the only road access to the northern half of the country as well as between the Haitian capital and the Dominican Republic. The authorities have already lost since June 2021 the control of the only road access which links Port-au-Prince to the south because, in the space of two kilometers, the national road is completely under the mastery of the armed bands of the slimyant slums. In this poor district, the stranglehold of the gangs forced the organization doctors without borders to close the hospital which it had operated for 15 years.