Dear Haiti Friends,
From two different sources, bad news from Pont-Sonde, Haiti. Pont Sonde is located where the Artibonite River crosses the road between Port-au-Prince and Gonaives, not far from St-Marc. The road from Mirebalais west past the HUM Hospital and continuing along the Artibonite River ends up at Pont-Sonde. Although it’s not a large town, it is important as a transport point for crops from the Artibonite Valley.
Haitian gang slaughters at least 70 people as thousands flee | Reuters
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New York Times:
Oct. 4, 2024Updated 11:50 a.m. ET
At least 70 people — including 10 women and three infants — were killed in a gang attack in central Haiti on Thursday that sent hundreds of people running for their lives, posing another challenge for the international security force that has been deployed in Haiti since June, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
The attack took place at about 3 a.m. in Pont-Sondé, roughly 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The town is in the Artibonite department, a key agricultural region that has seen a surge in gang violence, the Health Ministry said.
Gang members reportedly set fire to at least 45 houses and 34 vehicles, forcing a number of residents to flee, a U.N. statement said, calling for more international security assistance to Haiti.
Gangs that the international security force has been sent to confront are mostly concentrated in Port-au-Prince, but the Artibonite region has also seen a rise in violence.
At least 50 more people were injured, according to the Haitian Health Ministry.
“This attack comes amid an upsurge in violence in the region, exacerbating an already extremely precarious security situation,” the health ministry said in a statement. “This violence disrupts the daily lives of residents, limiting their access to basic services, particularly health care. Persistent insecurity also prevents humanitarian interventions in certain localities, making the situation increasingly critical.”
While the ministry was attempting to use United Nations resources to respond by air, “direct intervention capacities are severely limited, due to the almost impossible access to the affected area,” the ministry said.
A spokesman for the Haitian National Police did not respond to requests for comment. The Multinational Security Support mission, a deployment of 410 officers from Kenya, Jamaica and Belize that arrived in late June, said it would also respond. The mission is based in Port-au-Prince and has no presence in the rural Artibonite region.
The force and the Haitian National Police deployed officers “by road and air” to “pacify and bring sanity to the area,” said Jack Ombaka, a spokesman for the international force.
Haiti has been in awash in extreme violence in the more than three years since the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse. Gang killings and kidnappings spiked earlier this year when several rival armed groups joined forces to attack police stations, prisons and hospitals. They succeeded in forcing the resignation of the prime minister, who was out of the country and unable to return after the airport closed for two months because of gang violence. Some areas of Port-au-Prince have seen a return to normalcy, but more than 700,000 people who fled their homes after gang attacks on their communities are still unable to return. More than 100,000 people are living in squalid camps, while others have dispersed to homes of friends and family throughout the country.
The Artibonite area is known to be home to the Gran Grif gang. Last week the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned its leader, Luckson Elan, as well as a local legislator who helped fuel his rise. When a person involved in gangs, violation of human rights or widespread corruption is sanctioned by the Treasury Department, U.S. banks are prohibited from doing business with them, and they can no longer travel to the United States.
In August, even the country’s former president, Michel Martelly, was sanctioned for allegedly participating in drug trafficking and “sponsoring” gangs.
| Treasury Sanctions Former Haitian President for Drug Trafficking WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the… |
Mr. Elan was responsible for serious human rights abuses including kidnapping, murder, beating, and the rape of women and children, as well as looting, destruction, extortion, hijacking, and stealing crops and livestock, the Treasury Department said in a statement. “The situation is especially devastating for his child victims who have been subjected to forced recruitment and sexual violence,” the statement said.
Artibonite is the rice growing area of central Haiti that sits between the capital and the main city in the north, Cap-Haitien. The country’s main road runs right through it — making it a source of revenue for gangs who set up kidnap ambushes on the road, taking people off buses en masse. Gangs in the Artibonite have also increasingly invaded farmland there.
More than 20 criminal groups operate in the area, according to a report by Global Initiative, an organized crime research organization in Geneva. From January 2022 until October 2023, more than 1,690 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in the Artibonite. At one point, the region represented more than a quarter of the victims of violence in Haiti, the report said.
There are several reasons that the Lower Artibonite Valley would be an active “gang” area. The principal one is that the area includes a bust sea port at St-Marc, a highway between two major cities, and also flat places to land small planes, making it historically one of the very active areas for narcotics trafficking from South America to the U.S., the principal source of gang funds Related to the flow of traffic and goods through the area are the opportunities for kidnappings, another source of funding. The spectacle of the gang leader blaming the victims for not defending the gangs (“my soldiers”) against the U.N. forces is a new low in the long list of crimes against humanity.
The U.N. forces have been growing at a very slow rate, and, as the articles point out, are concentrated in Port-au-Prince. The numbers are not yet sufficient to offer much help to the country as a whole. A stronger force is urgently needed. Lack of funding is one of the problems. The plan was for 2500 U.N. police to stabilize the situation; 410 are currently there:
UN extends Kenya-led security mission in Haiti amid rising hunger, violence
| UN extends Kenya-led security mission in Haiti amid rising hunger, violence The UN extended its authorization of a multinational policing mission in Haiti led by Kenya on Monday amid repor… |
Haiti’s armed gangs are also trafficking drugs. Why is the DEA closing its office there?
Updated October 02, 2024 4:08 PM |
In this file photo, a man walks past the government port in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where graffiti on the walls calls for the DEA to arrest someone for drug dealing. Jose A. Iglesias jiglesias@elnuevoherald.com
President Joe Biden has identified Haiti as a critical choke point for drugs flowing into the United States, naming it last month to a list of 23 countries designated as “major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries.”
| Memorandum on the Presidential Determination on Major Drug Transit or Ma… The White House Presidential DeterminationNo. 2024-12 MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF STATE SUBJECT: Presid… |
But even as South American cocaine and Jamaica-grown cannabis are running rampant through the lawless country, Biden’s own drug-fighting agency has decided to shut down its operations in Haiti.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has listed its Haiti field office among 14 foreign operations that the agency is shutting down, along with offices in The Bahamas and Nicaragua. The decision comes at the same time the U.S. leads a struggling international effort to restore security in Haiti, where violent gangs are spreading hunger and violence, and concerns are growing about the gangs’ collaboration with South American and Mexican drug cartels.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted by this news, to be honest,” said Luis Moreno, a retired State Department official who headed the narcotics-control office in Bogotá, Colombia, and once served as deputy chief the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Calling the DEA’s decision “shortsighted,” he added: “You can trace the violence in Haiti to the gangs, and how do the gangs pay for themselves? Everyone knows the Haitian gangs’ finances come from drug trafficking.”
A DEA spokesperson told the Miami Herald that the decision to close the office in Haiti and other countries was made following “a thorough review of our foreign operations, which was initiated in August 2021 and completed in March 2023.”
“DEA made a strategic decision to reallocate resources to focus on what matters most: saving American lives by attacking every link of the global synthetic drug supply chain,” the spokesperson said, referring to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become a focus of the Biden administration. As part of the “data-driven” move, the spokesperson said, the agency will open two new foreign offices and close 14 existing ones.
The spokesperson would not say where the two new foreign offices will be established, though it has been reported they will be in Jordan and Albania.
Besides Haiti, the offices slated to close are: The Bahamas, Burma, China, Cyprus, Egypt, Georgia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Russia, Senegal and Shanghai.
Biden recently said he’s launched a global fight against fentanyl, which is fueling record number of overdose deaths and resulted in the arrests and prosecution of several high-level cartel leaders, drug traffickers and money launderers. He also called for “urgent action by countries in the region” on cocaine, which he said is at record-high production and cultivation rates in South America.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security specialist at the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution in Washington., said she recognizes “the decisions have been driven by a set of factors that are overarching and specific to each place,” noting that Haiti has been a challenging security environment for agents. But she believes that the DEA “losing eyes on the ground” is not a good development.
She and other Haiti observers say the DEA should not have to choose between fighting fentanyl shipped from Mexico and China rather than cocaine smuggled through Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean.
Haiti’s powerful gangs are evolving, trading kidnappings-for-ransom for drug trafficking, she said. And just as high-caliber firearms are freely flowing into the country, so too are illicit drugs, and they are being moved across the country often with the help of gangs, she said.
“We clearly see some gang leaders like 5 Segond’s Izo trying to transform themselves into at least small regional cartels,” Felbab-Brown said about one of Haiti’s more prominent gangs. “Izo is openly going around calling himself a cartel leader. He drives around in armored vehicles with his territorial labels, and he has also invested intensely in building up a maritime capacity.”
Not having a DEA office in Haiti also affects the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against Haitian businessmen and politicians accused of having gang links, she said. In several cases, State Department officials have emphasized some of the sanctioned people’s involvement in drug trafficking.
Felbab-Brown said a DEA presence in Haiti means “more indictments can be made and there can be better detection on how sanctioned politicians and businessmen are adapting to the sanctions and working via proxies, brokers to deal with the gangs.”
Keeping this woeful situation in front of your congressional representatives would be a good idea, especially considering the harmful and untrue reports about Haitian refugees recently.