Caught in the Crossfire: A New International Force Hopes To Stop the Gangs, Police, and Vigilantes Terrorizing Haitians

Nanouse Mertelia was inside her house in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince on a recent Saturday in September when she heard an explosion. Running outside to check on her son, she found him on the ground, his leg and arm blown off. 

“Come get me, come get me, please mama,” he begged her, as she recounted to the Guardian. “(But) by the time we got to the hospital, he died.” 

The blast occurred at a birthday party as an alleged gang leader was distributing gifts to children in the Cité Soleil neighborhood of the capital. This quarter is controlled by Viv Ansanm, a powerful gang coalition designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization. The explosion was due to a drone attack by security forces, part of an operation to wrest control of the capital away from the gangs that terrorize its population.  

It killed eight children and seriously injured six more. 

The incident highlights how the situation in Haiti has spiraled out of control, leaving civilians caught in the crossfire between gangs, state officials, and also vigilante groups, and the violence their war on each other produces.  

“With armed gangs expanding their influence, self-defense groups morphing into gang-like entities and public officials acting with impunity, Haiti is slowly becoming something like the Wild West,” said William O’Neill, the United Nations’ human rights official for Haiti. “It’s hell on earth… desperation is not some abstract idea in Haiti – it is a lived reality.”  

Most of Port-au-Prince has been under Viv Ansanm’s control for 18 months. Last year, gang-related violence claimed 5,500 lives across the country – another 1,600 people died in the first quarter of this year. More than 1.3 million people have been driven from their homes due to the chaos – sexual violence is widespread, as is gang recruitment of children. Meanwhile, the economy is in tatters, and UN officials warn that half of the country is going hungry. 

Last year, a Kenyan-led mission arrived to help. But it barely exceeded 1,000 police at its peak, and was never well enough funded to fulfil its brief.  

Now the Trump administration has a plan, presented to the UN Security Council, which approved it last week, that would create a so-called Gang Suppression Force, a 5,500-strong international security operation charged with bringing order. 

“Haiti is facing an unprecedented, multi-dimensional crisis that requires our decisive attention,” said Eloy Alfaro de Alba, Panama’s ambassador to the UN. 

The initiative comes around two months after Haiti’s transitional presidential council appointed businessman Laurent Saint-Cyr as the country’s head of state. The founder of a local insurance company, Saint-Cyr, is the former leader of the American Chamber of Commerce in Haiti and Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry. His prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who formerly ran an Internet company, also once led the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

Soon after Saint-Cyr took the oath of office, he faced pushback. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the leader of Viv Ansanm, immediately threatened to oust the new president and his premier, the Associated Press reported. 

Chérizier was a Haitian police officer with deep ties to top politicians until he was fired in 2018 for organizing extrajudicial killings, explained InSight Crime. Since then, he has evaded capture while organizing Haiti’s gangs into an alliance that is ostensibly united in their goal to stop foreign influence in their country and take over politically.  

Other efforts have failed to bring order to Haiti, but the Gang Suppression Force is the most aggressive effort yet to challenge Chérizier and his allies. Commentators say the force must adopt rules on how it will detain and imprison alleged criminals or a culture of justice and accountability will never take hold in the country, something that is needed to get it back on track. 

The problem is, there are few institutions left to even begin to enforce accountability – Haiti has not had an elected government of any kind since the last president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in 2021. The Transitional Presidential Council, appointed by an unelected cabinet last year, is theoretically a government but it doesn’t have much control over the country. Its mandate expires next year.  

Meanwhile, the new president and prime minister are tainted by ties to corrupt businesspeople and are suspected of working with the gangs, along with other government and security officials, say analysts.  

“That’s why criminals are roaming freely and acting so arrogant,” Pierre Esperance, director of the Haitian National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, told El País. “The gangs wouldn’t be so arrogant if they didn’t have the complicity of the authorities.”  

He added that without strengthening Haitian institutions, the current situation cannot be contained: “I don’t think there’s a real intention to put an end to the gangs. The problem is institutional. Our institutions are collapsed, and we need to work on governance and justice alongside security. We can’t stand idly by, waiting for help to arrive from outside.” 

However, that help, in the form of vigilante groups that have sprung up to take back control of the streets, is now becoming part of the problem: They are proving just as deadly to civilians as the gangs and the police operations – especially those using drones – to fight them.  

Haitian poet Ricardo Boucher recounted how his childhood friend, Carlos Gustave, was killed by members of the vigilante group, the Carrefour Feuilles self-defense brigade, last year. Gustave’s ID said he was from the Grand Ravine slum, Boucher said, and the vigilantes considered anyone from that area a criminal. 

Two weeks ago, meanwhile, his neighborhood’s vigilante group beat an elderly neighbor because his ID card was damaged and illegible. 

“I believe the brigades do more harm than good,” Boucher told the Washington Post. “They are a temporary fix – a palliative…If nothing is done, the abuses committed by the brigades will be worse than those of the gangs.”