The storming of Solino began in the dead of night with dozens of gang fighters wielding Kalashnikovs and machetes marauding into one of the last bastions of safety in Haiti’s beleaguered capital, Port-au-Prince.
As teenage gunmen torched houses and fired wildly into the air, residents fled on foot, carrying whatever they could take before the area was captured: children, bundles of clothing, suitcases, chairs.
Felicen Dorcevah, a 45-year-old boxing coach, leapt from his bed in a neighbouring zone called Kokiyo, and watched a sea of displaced people surge into his community in search of shelter.
“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! The bandits are coming!” Dorcevah remembers those bleary-eyed refugees warning as they ran for their lives last Friday.
Six hours after the attack began, the mood in Kokiyo was still tense. A pile of wooden furniture – salvaged from a Solino home before the fighters could arrive – had been propped up against a wall on the rocky trail that winds through the area. A cold-faced man with a machete stood guard at one of its entrances.
Nearby, in an area called Christ-Roi, a barricade had been fashioned from two battered cars to stop the gang advancing further. Plumes of black smoke rose from the wreckage of Solino’s smouldering homes. Videos began circulating on social media showing gang members from the criminal coalition known as Viv Ansanm (Live Together) parading through the community they had just invaded, chanting in creole: “Depi ou pa Viv Ansanm, nap boule w an sann” – “If you’re not with Viv Ansanm, we are going to burn you to ashes.”
“I feel powerless,” lamented Dorcevah, as he stood inside his cramped shack at the heart of a maze of sewage-streaked alleyways inside Kokiyo.
The former boxing champion moved here 14 years earlier after being forced from another home when one of the worst earthquakes in history reduced Port-au-Prince to rubble in January 2010 and killed tens of thousands of people.
“But this situation is far worse … This is effectively a civil war,” said Dorcevah, who feared he might soon be displaced again if the gangs continued their march across a city, of which they already control 85%, according to a UN report published this week.
“I have a wife and kids and you can’t protect your family because these aren’t ordinary people. They are heavily armed. They could rape your wife or kill your children … Each day, each month, each year, the gangs have become more powerful,” he warned.
Eight months after politically connected gangs launched a stunning insurrection that toppled Haiti’s prime minister, freed more than 4,600 prisoners from jail, closed the airport and cut the capital off from the world, there is scant sign of salvation for residents of Port-au-Prince.
Just a few hours before the attack on Solino, the head of Haiti’s interim presidential council, Leslie Voltaire, summoned journalists to an elegant government guesthouse in the hills overlooking the city to hear a state of the nation address marking six months since the temporary government took power in April.
“The country has invested us with the great responsibility of making the dream of an entire people come true,” he declared, vowing to work to rescue Haiti from a state of confusion, stagnation and the “almost total collapse” of its institutions.
“Restoring security is one of the main projects of this transition and this is where the population expects us to deliver convincing results,” Voltaire said, before being escorted out of the building by bodyguards past a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, the legendary leader of the Haitian revolution.
Even as Voltaire spoke, a few miles away gang bosses were preparing their latest assault on Solino, a strategically located neighbourhood at the heart of the capital. Control of the area would bring the gangs even closer to the wealthier hillside areas that are still in the hands of authorities.
The violence has displaced about 700,000 people across Haiti, according to the UN’s migration agency, with 10,000 forced from their homes in Port-au-Prince in the past fortnight alone – the vast majority from Solino and the area around it.
In one of the 14 camps where those people now live, an abandoned school near Solino, hundreds of destitute families squat in nine classrooms. “This is how we live,” said Hovelène Chateau, a 24-year-old widow whose husband was shot dead last year, as she toured the building.
Chateau’s bright pink braids and multicoloured skirt contrasted with her dismal surroundings. The walls were covered in dark black stains – bedbugs she said residents had killed in a futile bid to keep their temporary home clean. An elderly blind man slumped in one stairwell, a puddle of urine gathering around his right foot.
The previous day the camp’s population had grown by two with the arrival of a pair of women who had fled Solino. “Their houses were burned down – they couldn’t save anything,” Chateau said, as school-less children kicked a football around the patio outside.
The security situation in Port-au-Prince was supposed to have improved with the arrival of a multinational police force that touched down in June with the task of restoring law and order. But during a week in Haiti’s capital, the Guardian saw no sign of that Kenya-led foreign force. Day and night the sound of gunfire could be heard across town. Armoured police vehicles moved through the city’s barricaded streets with gaping bullet holes in their windscreens. Much of the area around the presidential palace remains a litter-strewn ghost town where locals and security forces alike fear to tread.
“I feel disorientated,” said one senior police officer, admitting that his troops lacked the armament to retake such areas.
The officer said he believed the gangs had briefly paused their wave of attacks after the arrival of the foreign police force four months ago. But having seen how few troops arrived they had resumed their offensive. “They saw it was only child’s play,” he said. “Now it’s a free-for-all.”
Another senior officer offered an even blunter assessment of the foreign effort to bring peace. “It’s a joke,” he said.
In a third-floor radio station overlooking Port-au-Prince, two of Haiti’s best-known journalists sat in their studio informing listeners about the latest acts of violence in a city under siege.
Three suspected gang members had been lynched by vigilantes just south of the capital, announced Guerrier Dieuseul, one of the presenters of the popular breakfast show Gran Boulva. A United Nations helicopter had made a forced landing after being hit by gunfire while flying over the southern suburbs. US embassy vehicles had been shot at not far from the embassy, which is located in another gang-controlled part of the town’s north. Thousands had fled their homes and a policeman had been shot dead in Solino.
The show’s co-presenter, Johnny Ferdinand, said there had initially been hope among the population that the multinational security force might bring peace. “But so far … there’s been no major progress,” he said. “Despite the mission’s presence the bandits continue to attack.”
What did the coming days hold? “Total uncertainty,” Ferdinand said as Solino burned.
