Haiti at a standstill to denounce crime and villainous kidnappings

Published on : 10/19/2021 – 07:57

Haiti at a standstill. The inhabitants of the capital Port-au-Prince expressed, Monday, October 18, their anger at the gang crime they have suffered for months by massively observing the call for a general strike that had been launched to denounce the insecurity, illustrated by the kidnapping of 16 Americans and a Canadian a few days earlier.

“We have been calling for help for months and we have no security in the face of kidnappings, we launched a general appeal to the population to suspend all activity,” Méhu Changeux told AFP, president of the association of owners and drivers of Haiti.

“The bandits go beyond the limits: they kidnap, they rape women, they do whatever they want … That’s enough”, denounces the trade unionist.

“It’s like we don’t live”

Shops, schools and administrations were therefore closed on Monday in the Haitian capital whose streets were exceptionally deserted, AFP journalists noted, but school activities were maintained in some provincial towns, according to local media.

Rare police vehicles circulated in Port-au-Prince on the main roads of the city where calm reigned, and only a barricade of flaming tires was observed by an AFP photographer.

“It’s as if we weren’t living,” testifies Germain Joce Salvador, a young man in his twenties met in the city center. “You can’t go on, every day hearing that it’s a loved one, a friend or someone else who is kidnapped.”

Launched last week, the call for a general strike was particularly echoed after the kidnapping of a group of missionaries and their families – 16 American citizens and one Canadian citizen – on Saturday, in a peri-urban area in the east of Port-au-Prince.

Perpetrated when foreign nationals had just visited an orphanage located between the capital and the border with the Dominican Republic, this group abduction bears the signature of the gang called “400 mawozo”.

Arrival of American investigators

The armed gang has been controlling this part of Haitian territory for months without the police being able to remedy it.

From Washington, the spokesperson for the State Department confirmed the kidnapping of these 17 people and mentioned, without providing details, the arrival of American investigators in the country.

“The small team that is now on the ground has been dispatched to Haiti to work closely with the Haitian authorities,” said Ned Price, adding that the State Department was “in close contact with the families of those who are part of the this group of missionaries “.

In April, ten people, including two French religious, were kidnapped for 20 days by the “400 mawozo” in the same region.

Asked by AFP, the Haitian police did not wish to react. The gangs, which have controlled the poorest neighborhoods of the Haitian capital for years, have extended their power over Port-au-Prince and its surroundings in recent years, where they are increasing the number of kidnappings.

Red zone

For years, a deep political crisis has paralyzed Haiti’s economic development. The assassination on July 7 of President Jovenel Moïse by an armed commando in his private residence further plunged this poor country into uncertainty.

“Nature abhors a vacuum so gangs take advantage of it to strengthen themselves,” said Gédéon Jean, director of the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, based in Port-au-Prince, explaining the proliferation of gangs by “l ‘absence of the state’.

Haiti is classified as a country in the red zone by the United States, which advises its nationals not to go there, in particular because of the numerous kidnappings of which “the victims regularly include American citizens”.

More than 600 cases of kidnappings were recorded in the first three quarters of 2021 against 231 in the same period in 2020, according to the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights.

Demanding ransoms sometimes exceeding a million dollars, gangs are quick to demand decades of wages from families living below the poverty line.

With AFP