The United States has said it will not send troops to Haiti after a stunning eruption of gang violence seemingly designed to bring down the Caribbean nation’s enfeebled government and its unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry.
On Monday night, nearly five days after powerful organized crime bosses launched a wave of deadly and apparently coordinated attacks, the US news group McClatchy reported there had been “frantic” exchanges between US and Haitian diplomats that had raised the prospect of an emergency deployment of US special forces to help restore order.
However, a national security council official poured cold water on the suggestion there would be US “boots on the ground” in Haiti, telling the Washington-based agency: “The United States is not sending US troops to Haiti to support the Haitian national police’s security operations.”
More than 2,300km south in Haiti’s seaside capital, Port-au-Prince, the mood remained jittery and uncertain amid the still-developing gang uprising that has seen rifle-toting combatants target highly strategic and symbolic locations including police stations, penitentiaries, a container port and the city’s international airport, where residents could hear intense gunfire as army troops sought to repel heavily armed invaders.
“There has been a lot of shooting since yesterday. We can still hear them in the distance,” said Yolette Jeanty, a human rights activist who lives near the airport.
“Everyone is hiding behind their doors at home – we can’t go anywhere. My colleague had to turn back on Sunday when he went out on to the streets because there were too many corpses on his route,” Jeanty added.
“To protect ourselves … everyone has to barricade themselves in at home.”
Thousands of prisoners, among them hardened gangsters, murderers and kidnappers, fled Haiti’s two main jails after gang fighters stormed those decrepit installations. On Sunday night, the government declared a three-day state of emergency.
Police appeared to have largely retreated from the city’s eerily quiet downtown area, and many banks, businesses and government offices were closed. Three decomposing bodies still lay outside the wreckage of the national penitentiary, where cells were empty and the entrance wide open. Locals covered their noses to avoid the stench. Another eight corpses could be seen splayed out on the ground in nearby neighbourhoods.
“We’re not quite sure who they are,” said a local taxi driver who gave his name as Wisly. “Someone from the area set them on fire this morning.”
Romain Le Cour, a security specialist who was in Port-au-Prince when the attacks began, said the precise objective of the gang offensive remained unclear. “But the scale of the attacks is unprecedented,” added Le Cour, a senior expert from the Geneva-based civil society group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
“The level of violence and firepower that has been deployed over the past five days is incredible … It has been days of fighting and the gangs just keep on going,” Le Cour said, describing how gang members had also launched a ghoulish propaganda campaign in which videos of police officers being killed or tortured were posted on social media or even sent to the families of victims.
“This is something that sends a phenomenal message of superpower and terror,” Le Cour said.
Jean-Marc Biquet, the head of the Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Haiti, said its trauma centre near Port-au-Prince’s airport had been overwhelmed by patients suffering bullet wounds. Many were women and children hit by stray bullets in the arms, legs and stomach.
“[The city centre] is a battlefield … Around the airport is really tense,” said Biquet who was unsure who currently wielded power in the city.
“Who is in control? I think nobody is in control,” the MSF chief said. “And my personal fear is that the policemen are going to [give up fighting and say]: ‘It’s a lost battle.’
“Then what can happen? Well I guess, total chaos,” Biquet added on Tuesday morning.
Henry, who also acts as Haiti’s president, was out of the country when the violence began last week and has so far been unable to return. On Tuesday afternoon, the embattled politician landed in Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, after reportedly being denied permission to land in the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti, for reasons that were not immediately clear. The Dominican newspaper Listín Diario reported that Henry had tried to fly there from Teterboro airport in New Jersey earlier in the day.
When the violence erupted last Thursday, Henry, who took power after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, was flying to Kenya to meet its president, William Ruto. The trip was part of efforts to speed up the controversial deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers to Haiti as part of a UN-backed police force supposed to restore some measure of calm to a nation which suffered nearly 4,800 murders last year.
The west African country of Benin has offered to send 2,000 police officers.
Haiti’s gangs have vastly expanded their grip on the country since Moïse’s murder, with some 80% of its capital said to fall under their control, even before last week’s offensive.
Some analysts suspect the criminal assault – which has claimed at least nine lives, including those of four police officers – is designed to dissuade the international community from sending its security force to confront them.
“They are making this great show of force to show what they are capable of in case eventual confrontations with foreign personnel,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti expert from the International Crisis Group who recently visited the country.
“They are also sending a very clear message to [Henry’s] interim government saying that they can at any moment bring the Haitian state to its knees when they wish to do so.
“The message is: we have a united front, we are able to completely overwhelm the Haitian security forces and we can strike simultaneously on several fronts effectively.”
Addressing reporters in Port-au-Prince last week, Jimmy Chérizier, a notorious gang boss nicknamed “Barbecue”, claimed responsibility for the attacks and said he was leading a crusade against Haiti’s prime minister alongside a coalition of other gangs.
“We have chosen to take our destiny in our own hands. The battle we are waging will not only topple Ariel’s government. It is a battle that will change the whole system,” Chérizier said in a statement.
