We are all by ourselves': Haitians warn that fall of Port-au-Prince is imminent

For weeks now Haiti’s volatile capital has been caught between cries and gunfire, armed gangs and mass exodus, and anxiety and silence.

Neighborhood after neighborhood is being emptied out as armed gangs, brandishing high-powered automatic weapons, march on Port-au-Prince, crawling through ravines and filing through concrete corridors to seize new territory while young arsonists set fires to homes and businesses.

No one has been spared in the frantic chaos that has left a trail of broken furniture, burned out buildings and a stream of misery. Not government ministries, not the pillaged enterprises or the charred homes. On Friday, the French Embassy, close to the fighting on Rue Capois and Avenue Christophe, temporarily shuttered its doors.

The intense violence by the powerful Viv Ansanm gang coalition has forced nearly 60,000 people to flee their homes in just one month, the United Nations International Organization for Migration said Tuesday. The relentless attacks, the U.N. said, have affected neighborhoods in Delmas, Carrefour-Feuilles, Martissant, Fort National, Pétion-Ville and Tabarre and eroded the last few gang-free areas.

“We have never observed a such large number of people moving in this short time” said Grégoire Goodstein, the group’s chief in Haiti.

Austin Holmes, who has directed high-stakes humanitarian efforts and extractions for nonprofits in Haiti and lived there until the violence forced him to return to Florida, says gangs’ recent movements and assaults all point to their trying to seize control of the palace or the prime minister’s office, both symbols of power.

“The collapse of Port-au-Prince is imminent,” he warned. “While recent offensives have inflicted some casualties on the gangs, they have failed to eliminate any key leaders or establish any sustainable control over the battlefield.”

On Tuesday, a Kenyan police officer was shot in the area of Kenscoff in the hills above the capital and had to be evacuated by helicopter, a spokesman for the multinational security mission confirmed to the Herald.

In recent days, members of Viv Ansanm have intensified their attacks, striking at churches and media outlets. On Saturday, the fighting between armed groups and police became so intense that Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières suspended operations at its emergency hospital in the Turgeau neighborhood. Armed groups, the medical charity said, had moved within feet of the hospital overnight.

Two nights earlier, MSF medical teams had treated 27 gunshot victims, including women and children. Now, the organization said, they were dodging bullets as they were being “repeatedly and intentionally fired upon despite prior coordination with authorities.” While no one was killed, some staff did suffer minor injuries, Benoit Vasseur, head of mission for the group in Haiti, said. It’s the second time in less than four months, he said, that MSF has been forced to suspend operations at the health facility.

“No one is safe amidst the ongoing violence between armed groups and law enforcement,” said Vasseur. “Despite our precautions, we have been targeted, and this is unacceptable.”

U.S. deportees bound for Haiti

Compounding the situation: On Tuesday, dozens of U.S. deportees from the United States were en route to Haiti aboard a flight that left Miami shortly after 11 a.m. The plane was scheduled to arrive in Cap-Haïtien, in the north, with 46 passengers, 25 of whom were convicted felons, according to a Haitian government source.

“The continued removal of individuals to a nation engulfed in crisis is not just cruel — it is a direct affront to the United States’ legal and moral obligations under international law,” said Guerline Jozef, co-founder of the San Diego Haitian Bridge Alliance, which is among several groups suing the Trump administration over its termination of Biden-era humanitarian parole programs that allowed tens of thousands of Haitians to temporarily relocate to the U.S., as well as Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.

The deportations “constitute a clear violation of international human rights law,” she added, saying they “disregard the fundamental legal protections owed to individuals facing persecution and inhumane conditions but also expose the administration’s blatant disregard for human dignity.”

William O’Neill, the U.N.’s independent human-rights expert, recently reiterated his call to stop the return of Haitians, not just from the U.S. but other countries in the region. While the violence is overwhelmingly occurring in Port-au-Prince, O’Neill said it is contributing to a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the country. Haitians are facing shortages of food and medicines, and gangs control roads in and out of the capital.

“People who are sent back, if they have family or networks in the capital, how do they get back?” he said noting that with no airlines landing in Port-au-Prince since November, it means returnees will need to risk their lives traveling through gang checkpoints to get out of Cap-Haïtien.

O’Neill, who visited Haiti earlier this month, said the desperation of Haitians is growing, saying students had recently thrown stones at people displaced from their homes.

“The desperate turning against the more desperate,” he said. “In the makeshift camps, hunger and sexual violence are widespread. For many, it’s a matter of survival.”

‘The capital can collapse’

Pierre Esperance, a human rights activist in the capital, said the deportations are just complicating the problem.

“The government doesn’t have the means and doesn’t have the capacity to deal with deportees,” he said. “The state is flattened. The government is flattened. At a moment when they are trying to help us with insecurity they are sending criminals to us..”

In the last two weeks the situation has become increasingly unbearable, Esperance added. If the security forces, which include the country’s national police, armed forces, the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission and a newly launched drone strike force don’t start coordinating, Port-au-Prince will fall to the gangs.

“The capital can collapse at any moment,” he said.

Since November armed groups have been on a path to sezie control of neighborhoods: Solino, Nazon and over the last two weeks: large swaths of Christ Roi and Delmas. Those that have yet to fall have so-called self-defense brigades that have put up barriers to keep out the gangs.

“Everything since November has been defensive, not offensive,” Esperance said.

Tuesday’s deportation flight is the second by the Trump administration. When the previous flight arrived, all of its passengers were put in prison by Haitian police even though they did not have criminal records. The return of individuals with criminal convictions is worrying given Haiti’s inability to jail criminals.

Failing security strategy

Cap-Haïtien is already saturated with fleeing residents from the capital, including the heads of international organizations Its only prison, built to hold about 300 inmates, currently has 908 inmates, according to government figures. Meanwhile, Haiti’s two largest prisons, both located in Port-au-Prince, remain closed a year after armed gangs destroyed them after staging a prison break. A detention facility built to hold 80 minors now houses over 400 men, women and children.

Holmes said the current gang-fighting strategy is not working. The Haiti National Police, he notes, has repeatedly failed to capture key gang leaders, including Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, whose Delmas stronghold had been the target of recent drone strikes.

The belief that a domestic Haitian police force, riddled with corruption and internal divisions, can somehow partner with an under-resourced international mission to retake the city, he said, is flawed. Adding to the frustration is the internal political battles within the transition government.

“Even if Haiti had the necessary manpower, its leadership remains more concerned with squabbling over the remnants of wealth in the treasury than taking decisive action against the gangs,” Holmes said. Gangs, he added, that are no longer just young men with pistols but “organized narco-terrorist networks that have collectively raped entire communities, murdered and kidnapped tens of thousands, and aligned themselves with drug cartels trafficking narcotics to the U.S.”

‘We are all by ourselves’

Since the beginning of the year, the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission has been augmented to bring the force to nearly 1,000. Despite the increased numbers, they still seem to be no match for the gangs that launched coordinated attacks last week on areas of Port-au-Prince. The attacks, which came in escalating waves and darkened the skies from burning buildings, brought the capital to a crawl as people poured into the streets desperately seeking refuge.

Patrick Saint-Hilaire, the president of the Provisional Electoral Council, charged with organizing elections, acknowledged in a radio interview that there is no way Haiti can hold a long anticipated referendum on a new constitution in May. The violence also threatens to derail general elections in November.

Haitians say they feel abandoned and powerless, as leaders act with no sense of urgency while the capital is crumbling.

“We are all by ourselves. No government, no international community, no coherent security forces,” said Richard Senecal, a filmmaker who lives in Port-au-Prince.

”Local politicians are too busy grabbing small pieces of power and the associated advantages. Same thing with the private sector,” he added. “They forget that we will all be losers if the boat ends up sinking.”