By David C. Adams and Andre Paultre
In the predawn hours on a Sunday in late July, members of one of Haiti’s largest armed gangs attacked the town of Ganthier, about 25 miles east of the capital and on a road that authorities say is used to smuggle weapons.
When police reinforcements arrived in armored vehicles hours later, officers found the streets deserted, the gang members having left after destroying Ganthier’s police station and torturing and killing several residents, according to the town’s mayor and police.
“The whole town of Ganthier is emptied; there is no one left,” the mayor, Jean Vilonor Victor, told The New York Times.
Weeks after the arrival of a United Nations-backed international security force in Haiti, the gangs who have brought the capital, Port-au-Prince, and other regions in the country to their knees show no signs of letting up.
The international effort to reinforce Haitian police and a transitional government has alleviated conditions in some sections of Port-au-Prince, experts say, but gang members have refocused their attacks on the outskirts, marauding towns that had escaped their campaign of killings, kidnappings and rape.
The attack on Ganthier, a town of 60,000 people on a major highway linking the capital to the border with the Dominican Republic, is emblematic of the persistent security problem Haiti’s government faces as it tries to rebuild the shattered country, which has seen three years of violence, mass migration and economic ruin.
The first wave of Kenyan police officers to deploy in Haiti as part of the multinational force lacks the numbers or the armaments to dismantle the powerful gangs, experts said.
To make matters worse, three members of the Presidential Transition Council, a governing body that took office in late April, tasked with paving the way for national elections, is under investigation by an anti-corruption government agency over the handing out of government jobs to members of its coalition of political and economic groups.
Council members have denied any wrongdoing.
But Nixon Boumba, a Haitian human rights advocate, said: “Corruption and security go hand in hand. For most of us, the more things change, the more things remain the same.”
The appointment in May of a new prime minister — a respected technocrat, Garry Conille, with experience as a senior United Nations executive — is part of a tricky transition back to democratic rule, with elections scheduled for next year. Haiti has been in turmoil since July 2021, when the last president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his bedroom.
The arrival of 400 Kenyan police officers this summer was meant to reinforce the beleaguered Haitian police force, which has been fighting a coordinated gang offensive since late February.
For now, the Kenyans are not straying very far from their base, built by U.S. contractors, at Port-au-Prince’s international airport, which reopened to commercial flights in May after being closed for more than two months because of gang violence outside the airfield.
Haitian police have helped reduce violence overall in recent months, analysts said. From March to June, at least 1,379 people were killed or injured because of gang violence throughout the country, a 45% drop compared with the previous four months, according to the United Nations.
“It’s much quieter in central Port-au-Prince,” said William O’Neill, the United Nations-appointed human rights expert for Haiti.
With Kenyan officers providing support, Haitian police have entered parts of the capital they had abandoned, said Diego Da Rin, who monitors Haiti for the International Crisis Group.
But large parts of Port-au-Prince, including downtown, are still no-go zones where residents fear to tread and businesses are boarded up. When Conille, a TV news crew and a heavy police escort went last month to Port-au-Prince’s main public hospital, which has been abandoned because of gang violence, they came under fire and had to make a speedy getaway.
“The government needs to act quickly to reassure the public,” O’Neill said. “People want to see results more quickly.”
As part of his first moves, Conille fired Haiti’s police chief and several top commanders, promising bold action to regain control of “all areas controlled by gangs, house by house, district by district and city by city.”
But many Haitians remain unconvinced.
“There are a lot of promises being made but no positive signs of change yet,” said Kesner Pharel, a leading Haitian economist. “The capital is still cut off from the rest of the country by the gangs. They control the roads, and they are still taking territory.”
Conille acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC that Haiti’s police were “undermanned” and that international support was arriving too slowly.
The Kenyan force is equipped with armored vehicles but has no air or sea assets, limiting its ability to respond to gang attacks, experts said, adding that the 400 officers already in Haiti need significant beefing up.
“It’s a small force under any account of what is needed,” said Keith Mines, the vice president of the Latin America program at the United States Institute of Peace, who follows Haiti closely.
“It’s a restraint on what they can do,” he added. “We just have to accept that’s what’s there.”
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