Haiti’s World Cup-bound soccer [football] team is now scheduled as follows:
+ Opening match against Scotland in Boston on June 13.
+ Second game against Brazil at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on June 19
+ Third game against Morocco in Atlanta on June 24
Below my signature please see the Quixote Center’s updates about TPS for Haitians and a request for action on US gun trafficking through Haiti. The Quixote Center is primarily a Franciscan coalition but also partners with other Catholic and non-Catholic peace and justice organizations. It also supports community development projects such as reforestation.
I found this recent U.N. story about Haiti’s role in drug trafficking rather odd:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166460?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email It reads as though gangs have just recently begun to participate with organized crime from South America. I can remember well before the earthquake knowing that gangs were financed by South American drug money with the task of activities like putting together
manefestations (demonstrations) on busy streets in Port-au-Prince or on major highways whenever things were too quiet, so that police activity needed to be centered on those activities rather than drug interdiction. Gangs were already raising children to be their footsoldiers and their eyes and ears (the boys who washed car windows at intersections and roamed around the city hitching rides on the backs of trucks, for example). I inadvertently made use of them myself at one time. There was a gathering for Haitian clergy and U.S. partners, and a group of partners coming in from the country had been delayed and arrived in Port-au-Prince after dark, which can be disorienting. They had lost their way and were at a Sol gas station, but couldn’t see any landmarks or road signs. I thought I would have to go to every Sol station in Port-au-Prince to find them, but a person employed by the church at the time insisted that he would go instead. He returned in about ten minutes with the group. I marveled at the time. Years later, after he was indicted for weapon and counterfeit money trafficking into Haiti from the U.S. on behalf of the G-9 gang using the name of the Episcopal Church to cover his actions, I realized that he had just put the word out to the littlest G-9 boys — “A dollar to the first one who tells me where some cars full of
blan are parked at a Sol station.” I also remember a
manefestation which turned ugly when it became clear that the funds to pay the participants were not quite sufficient for the numbers and so the entire
manefestation changed course and went after the person who had arranged it. The drugs travel one direction, the guns another, and Haiti and its paid gangs are right in the middle where they have been for a long time.
Yours,
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