Amid a serious upsurge in gang violence in Haiti, police joined protesters in large rallies on Thursday. In protest against the murder of at least six officers at a Liancourt police station attacked by criminals, the mobs led to a day of chaos in the nation’s capital.
Important roads in Port-au-Prince were blocked with barricades, Toussaint Louverture airport, the country’s main airport, had its runway invaded, interrupting aircraft traffic. Plainclothes demonstrators, who identified themselves as police, arrived at the terminal after attacking the prime minister’s official residence, a witness told Reuters news agency.
Ariel Henry was not at the place, but returned to Haiti this Thursday, after a trip to Argentina, in which he participated in the CELAC summit. The politician was temporarily unable to leave the airport, but in the end he was able to return home — not without being followed by demonstrators. A person present at the time told Reuters he heard a series of shots near the official residence.
The Haitian National Police and the prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
A video filmed by local media showed a group of men, some of them wearing shirts emblazoned with “police”, arguing heatedly with uniformed officers at the airport. In the sequence of images, they seem to pass without any resistance.
Roads around Port-au-Prince and in several cities across the country, especially in the northern region, were also blocked.
The Haitian human rights group RNDDH said in a statement that 78 police officers had been killed since Henry came to power in July 2021 – the prime minister took over after the assassination of then-president Jovenel Moïse. For the NGO, the politician and the head of the National Police, Frantz Elbe, are “responsible for each of the lives lost”, an average of five per month.
“History will remember that they did nothing to protect and preserve the lives of these agents who chose to serve their country,” says the text, which asks the police to remember their duty to protect the Haitian people, “despite their frustrations”.
Since the beginning of the year, 14 agents have been killed by gang members, according to the security forces union. Just last week there were two cases of repercussions. In one, the Vitelhomme group murdered four policemen. Another was the one at the Liancourt police station, where criminals from the Savien group killed two agents and surrendered four others, later taken to a field and executed, according to the account of police chief Jean-Bruce Myrtil.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, is experiencing a spiral of uninterrupted crises, which accumulate in social, political, economic and humanitarian layers. The action of gangs, which in practice control a large part of the territory, is linked to many of these issues.
In 2022, the UN recorded 1,359 kidnappings in the country – actions used by these criminals as a form of financing – and more than 2,000 murders. The entity is considering sending a foreign collegiate force to confront the gangs, but so far no country has offered to lead the mission, and even in Haiti there have been manifestations of opposition to the idea —in part due to the experience, unsuccessful in many points, of the so-called MINUSTAH.
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