ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
As Haiti spirals deeper into crisis, gang violence killed nearly 200 people over the weekend. NPR's Eyder Peralta reports.
EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Ever since President Jovenel Moise was assassinated in 2021, Haiti has been moving closer toward anarchy. Earlier this year, it seemed like the country had found a way out of the chaos. An unpopular prime minister resigned. A new transitional council took over. They elected a technocratic prime minister, and a small international force led by Kenyan police officers flew into the country. But hope that Haiti would turn the corner quickly dissipated as the transitional council was paralyzed by infighting, and the Kenyan forces were too few to really take on the gangs that have taken over 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Since then, the transitional council fired their prime minister. They hired a new one, but at the same time, a defacto ceasefire that had allowed the capital city to find a sense of normalcy also collapsed. Gangs shot up commercial airliners. The airport was closed, and sensing yet another power vacuum, the gangs began extending into new territory. In a press conference, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk, said this was a particularly bad weekend.
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VOLKER TURK: Just this past weekend, at least 184 people were killed in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. These latest killings bring the death toll just this year in Haiti to a staggering 5,000 people.
PERALTA: A local human rights group said the killings were orchestrated by a gang leader known as Wa Mikano. The National Human Rights Defense Network said Mikano's child was severely ill, and a voodoo priest told him the illness was caused by elderly people in the neighborhood practicing witchcraft. Pierre Esperance, who runs the human rights group, did not return a request for more details. But brutal, indiscriminate attacks against civilians have been the hallmark of the conflict in Haiti. People displaced from their homes say gangs label whole neighborhoods enemies. When they move in, they kill whoever is in their way. They burn and loot homes. According to Doctors Without Borders, sexual violence is rampant.
In a statement, the government of Haiti called the killings a monstrous crime. A red line has been crossed, the government said, and, quote, "the state will mobilize all its forces to track down and annihilate these criminals." But what's been clear the last few weeks is that neither Haiti's police nor its international security force have been able to stop the gangs from advancing. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Mexico City. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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