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Jul 13, 2023

Haiti Held Hostage

By Jon Lee Anderson Listen to this article. Last September, Ralph Senecal, the owner of a private ambulance company in Port-au-Prince, drove a friend who needed kidney dialysis to the Dominican

By Jon Lee Anderson

Listen to this article.

Last September, Ralph Senecal, the owner of a private ambulance company in Port-au-Prince, drove a friend who needed kidney dialysis to the Dominican Republic, where the hospitals are better than they are on the Haitian side of the border. On the way home, as he passed through the town of Croix-des-Bouquets, a few miles east of the capital, a group of men with guns blocked the road and forced him to pull over. The men belonged to a gang called 400 Mawozo—in Haitian Creole, the 400 Simpletons.

Senecal was taken to a brick building in the countryside, where he was held captive, sharing two rooms with some thirty other hostages. The structure had a metal roof, which seemed to concentrate the sun. “It was the kind of heat that gets you sweating at eight in the morning,” Senecal told me. His hands and feet were kept tied. He was released only to relieve himself in a pit outside and, every three or four days, to bathe in a bucket of water.

A fit, ebullient man of sixty-two, Senecal splits his time between Haiti and the United States and previously served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Once his abductors learned of his military experience, they kept him under closer watch, worried that he might try to overpower them, or to escape. Senecal suspected that the gang members were connected to Haitian politicians. They had M16s, which he felt sure they could not otherwise have afforded, and they carried hand grenades. The leader was known as Lanmò San Jou—Death Without Warning. They were part of the same group that made headlines in 2021, when it abducted sixteen American missionaries and held them for two months.

The gang seemed to have chosen its captives without much concern for whether they could afford to pay ransom. About half of the people Senecal was held with were women and children, and few seemed rich. “There was even a guy who worked loading trucks,” he recalled. The captives did their best to reassure one another. “We talked and cried together,” Senecal said. “But we couldn’t pray.” The guards refused to allow it, because they were adherents of vodou.

Senecal was released after seventeen days; his family had paid the kidnappers more than two hundred thousand dollars, wiping out his savings and leaving him in debt. Still, he considered himself lucky. One of the men who guarded him was a previous kidnapping victim who had been held so long that he decided his best hope was to join the gang.

Violent crime has long beset Haiti, but in the past two years it has risen to an unprecedented level. In 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, and the country spiralled into chaos. Since then, an unelected government has struggled to maintain order with an inadequate and corrupt police force, as the gangs that once operated exclusively in the slums have expanded across the capital and into the countryside beyond. An estimated two hundred gangs are now active in Haiti, and they dominate as much as ninety per cent of the capital.

In a nation of twelve million people, there have been at least a dozen massacres by gangs fighting over turf, killing more than a thousand Haitians last year alone. Women are routinely raped and men murdered; many of the victims are burned alive in their homes. Since the beginning of the year, according to a U.N. report, another thousand people have been kidnapped, and at least two thousand killed, including thirty-four police officers. Last fall, a gangster known as Barbecue took over the city’s main fuel port for nearly two months, causing devastating shortages of gas, food, and water, with half of Haiti’s population afflicted by acute hunger.

The beleaguered Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, appealed to the international community to send a “specialized armed force” to break the gangs’ control. The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres promised to “stand by Haiti,” and recommended that the Security Council consider a deployment. But no international force has been willing to incur the risk and expense of an intervention. The United States and Canada, which have often led past efforts to provide relief and security assistance, have made largely symbolic gestures, including sanctions against politicians and suspected gang leaders and programs to train the police. “The Americans and Canadians say they are our friends, but if they were they’d come and help us,” Senecal said. “If I had the cash, I’d run for President. This country needs someone strong.”

Exasperated by the international inaction, Haitians have begun taking the law into their own hands, led by a vigilante movement called Bwa Kale, from a phrase that translates roughly as Shaft up the Ass. In its first week of operation, Bwa Kale reportedly killed at least a hundred and sixty gang members. At the same time, though, gangs were reportedly sending out teams to avenge their dead comrades. Few people seem to believe that the Haitian government, weakened by decades of corruption, can bring the country under control. When I asked Prime Minister Henry recently how he planned to resolve the situation, he smiled and threw up his hands. “Haitians are very resourceful,” he said. “Maybe they will invent something.”

One morning in Port-au-Prince, I came upon a young man’s body in the middle of a residential street, where houses sat behind garden walls laden with pink bougainvillea. He lay on his side, wearing jeans and a red shirt but no shoes. Blood had flowed onto the pavement from a wound in his head. In Haiti, it is not uncommon to see the bodies of people murdered by gang members and left in public as a warning to rivals. Some are charred after being set on fire. Others show signs of having been beaten or shot or hacked with machetes.

Another morning, under a brilliant blue sky, I saw the bodies of two young men sprawled at a busy commercial intersection. They had been hacked to death, but their wounds had stopped bleeding, so it appeared that they had been killed elsewhere and then dumped on the street. People walking by gave expressionless glances; the passing traffic did not slow down. A pickup truck arrived with armed policemen, who took up watchful positions but did not remove the bodies. Everyone seemed to understand that it was unsafe to show too much interest in the dead men.

During my visits this spring, I made my way through Port-au-Prince with a security detail of Haitian guards and former French Foreign Legionnaires. Most of the people I spoke to would agree to meet only inside walled homes. A few were willing to come to my securely guarded hotel, but only in daylight. There was an unofficial nighttime curfew, and most of the city shut down in the late afternoon. After dark, there were periodic gunshots, as unexplained as the bodies on the streets.

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The places that were free of violence seemed to have been pacified by force. People in the capital were talking about a government prosecutor, Jean Ernest Muscadin, who had “solved” the gang problem in Nippes, a rural province west of Port-au-Prince, using what they referred to half admiringly as “tough methods.” Muscadin’s reputation had grown swiftly after a video circulated of him shooting a gang suspect to death. When a Haitian human-rights advocate criticized him for the killing, Muscadin threatened to arrest her, and thousands of people took to the streets to support him. On social media, some of his fans began acclaiming him as the next President and touting his methods as a model for securing the capital.

Commissaire Muscadin’s headquarters are in Miragoâne, the sunstruck coastal town that is the capital of Nippes. It was impossible to travel there overland from Port-au-Prince, because gangs controlled the roads in and out of the city, but, after we arranged a meeting, I found a ride in a U.N. helicopter.

A trim man in his forties with a shaved head, Muscadin arrived in an S.U.V., with a pair of fierce-looking guards and his own assault rifle. Despite being introduced to me as the savior of Nippes, Muscadin scowled and avoided eye contact. When I asked how he had rid the province of its bandits, as gang members are called in Haiti, he replied evasively: “We chased them. There were a few that were absent. They were missing, but we also caught some.” He said that there had been between a hundred and fifty and two hundred bandits in the region. And now? “Zero.”

He attributed some of his efficacy to temperament. If commissaires elsewhere had failed, he said, it was because “they’re not as brave, or not crazy enough.” He also said that he had studied counterterror techniques—especially the Americans’ search for the fugitive Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in which Special Forces mounted a ruthless campaign of strikes and interrogations around his home town. When I noted that the U.S. had lost the war in Iraq, Muscadin shot back, “Yes, but they got him.”

Muscadin insisted that the gangs had been permanently expunged from Nippes. “With my force and rigor and discipline, there is no way they can return,” he told me. When I asked where the missing bandits had gone, he gave a mirthless laugh. “They’re just absent,” he said.

For half a century, Haitians have endured a condition of menacing societal ambiguity, in which state power is inextricably intertwined with violence. It began during the Presidency of François (Papa Doc) Duvalier—a former doctor who won the country’s elections in 1957. Duvalier took office promising to break a legacy of subjugation. Haiti had been dominated by the colonial French until a revolutionary uprising swept them out in 1804, and afterward it was forced to pay crippling reparations to its former overlords; in the early twentieth century, it was occupied by the U.S. military. Then as now, Haitians, who are mostly descended from enslaved Africans brought by colonists, were the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere. Appealing to Black pride, Papa Doc advocated a credo known as noirisme, which called for seizing power from the mixed-race Haitians who made up the country’s élite. He handled the American government cannily, offering to help contain Cuba, and secured significant financial aid—much of which he and his cronies embezzled.

In office, Duvalier had himself declared President for Life. After a furtive coup tried to force him out, he formed a paramilitary force known as the Tonton Macoutes, a name borrowed from a bogeyman figure of Haitian myth. The Tonton Macoutes, heavily armed and backed by vodou priests, kidnapped political rivals and terrorized the populace with murders and rapes. The country’s democratic institutions never recovered.

When Duvalier died, in 1971, the Presidency was handed to his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude. Baby Doc, as he was known, ran a hapless and corrupt administration, further aided by the Tonton Macoutes. Over time, the Duvaliers’ enforcers killed an estimated sixty thousand Haitians and drove countless others into exile. Public unrest finally forced Baby Doc from office in 1986, but the collapse of the dynasty did not bring peace. Instead, vengeful mobs set upon regime loyalists and torched their homes. Hundreds of shops and businesses were looted, and entire swaths of downtown Port-au-Prince blighted.

The Tonton Macoutes lived on, with some of their veterans forming the core of successor groups. When the country was ruled by a series of military dictatorships, starting in the late nineteen-eighties, they were known as attachés, because they were attached to the Army and the police, who gave them their weapons and their orders. After the charismatic leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide became President, he disbanded the abusive Army and recruited his own enforcers from the vast slum of Cité Soleil; these became known as the Chimères—the Ghouls. As Aristide encouraged them in coded speeches, they deployed their own forms of terror, including one known as necklacing: executions in which victims were yoked with tires doused in gasoline and set alight. The practice has become widespread in Haiti, as a growing array of gangs have taken up the methods of the Chimères. People killed in other ways are set afire on the streets, in a gruesome display of dominance.

Haiti’s most successful gang members lead lives of minor celebrity. The gangs not only outnumber the police; they’re better armed, and they benefit from connections to the powerful élite who use them to secure influence. In YouTube videos, they brazenly celebrate their activities, often without bothering to obscure their faces. According to human-rights organizations, the gang leader known as Izo controls a port in the capital, from which he runs drugs and weapons. Ti Makak created a kidnapping ring that, in two years, raised him from obscurity to notoriety, before he was killed in fighting. Vitel’Homme, a former political activist, expanded his gang’s ambit into the middle-class suburbs, where he looted guns and bulletproof vests from the police and burned down their stations.

Gangs tend to flourish when the state is weak, and the state was weakened profoundly in 2010, when an earthquake devastated Haiti. A large section of Port-au-Prince was destroyed, and more than two hundred thousand people were killed. Even the Presidential Palace collapsed. In the chaos that ensued, the police dispatched death squads to pursue prisoners who had escaped from the city’s jail. In some cases, civilians struck out at looters, and at others who seemed like a threat. I arrived in Port-au-Prince soon after the earthquake, and came upon the body of a young man tied to a wooden post. A group of displaced people had spotted him wandering in the street near where their families were sleeping, and, fearing that he was a zombie, they had tied him to the post and stoned him to death.

A semblance of order was imposed by several thousand U.N. peacekeeping troops. The force had been deployed in 2004, when Aristide was ousted from the Presidency, to aid the country’s minuscule security forces. They were not popular in Haiti. In July, 2005, hundreds of peacekeepers engaged in a seven-hour firefight with gang members in Cité Soleil, reportedly firing more than twenty-two thousand bullets and killing as many as fifty people, including women and children. The U.N. force commander, Lieutenant General Augusto Heleno, offered no apologies. (Heleno later served as the national-security adviser to Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.)

In addition to the Cité Soleil massacre, the peacekeepers were accused of sexual misconduct—and also caused a cholera epidemic, by dumping raw sewage into a river. Though ten thousand Haitians died, the U.N. never formally acknowledged responsibility, let alone compensated the victims’ families. When the U.N. finally withdrew its soldiers, in 2017, it left behind a sense that Haiti had been betrayed by the international community. It also left a security vacuum, which the gangs quickly moved to fill.

The year after the earthquake, the popular konpa musician Michel (Sweet Micky) Martelly came to power, promising to accelerate reconstruction; he also appealed to national pride by calling for Haiti’s Army to be restored. The elections were disputed, and Martelly carried traces of scandal, including admissions of past drug use and a brother-in-law reputed to be a narco-trafficker. But he was charismatic, with unabashedly pro-American and pro-business views, and he had the support of the United States.

I interviewed Martelly in 2015, and he took me to a portside slum in Port-au-Prince called Wharf Jérémie, where he was unveiling a food market he’d had built. The area was under gang control, and, from the look of the watchful young men who formed a perimeter around Martelly’s security cordon, some arrangement had evidently been struck. Martelly never explicitly admitted to dealing with gangs, but a former government adviser confirmed to me at the time that his people had made payments to them. The adviser, who had gone on to work with another political party, noted with a shrug that it, too, was paying off gangs. If you wanted to succeed in Haitian politics, you had to do business with them; whoever controls the neighborhood also controls the votes.

One evening during my visit, Martelly gave a raucous outdoor concert, delighting the crowd by pantomiming a giant phallus and teasingly asking if he should take off his pants. In mid-set, he paused to introduce his chosen successor, Jovenel Moïse. The two men were unlikely allies. Where Martelly was a famously gifted performer, Moïse was a previously obscure banana exporter who seemed a little bashful about his campaign nickname, Banana Man. But Martelly insisted that he was the kind of homegrown entrepreneur that Haiti needed. After the concert, he flew me in the Presidential helicopter to visit Moïse’s plantation in the far north of the country. Haitian Presidents are forbidden to serve consecutive terms, but Moïse, a skinny, serious man, revealed that he and Martelly had agreed to a twenty-year plan, in which they would alternate terms in office. Haiti needed that kind of stability, he said.

Instead, the country’s instability grew worse. Moïse claimed victory in the subsequent election, but an opponent alleged fraud, spurring violent protests, and Parliament installed an interim President. After Moïse was finally sworn in, two years later, the capital was riven by confrontations between police and protesters, mostly over fuel price hikes and allegations of official corruption.

Moïse ceded little ground: he raised taxes, and, after a stalled electoral process effectively closed Congress, he ruled by decree, while pushing for a constitutional referendum that would allow him to extend his time in office. He ended up managing to alienate many of Haiti’s élite—including Martelly, whom he angered by enabling one of his adversaries to run against him in the next Presidential election.

As protests continued, gangs that were apparently aligned with Moïse tried to disrupt them with attacks, human-rights observers told me. Other gangs linked to Moïse’s rivals struck back, erecting barricades, burning vehicles, and looting. Amid the violence, Moïse evidently forged an alliance with the country’s top gang leader—a former police officer named Jimmy Chérizier, more widely known as Barbecue.

Barbecue lives in the central district of Delmas, a commercial strip that runs about a hundred blocks from the center of Port-au-Prince up into the surrounding hills. He was born and raised there, amid a warren of houses cobbled together from brick, concrete, and tin. Now in his mid-forties, he claims to have acquired his nickname as a child, when his mother sold chicken on the street, though a persistent rumor maintains that the name derives from his treatment of enemies. Barbecue joined the police as a young man, and rose to become a member of a special corps known as the Departmental Unit for the Maintenance of Order—but, like many other officers, he apparently determined that working with the gangs was more profitable. In December, 2018, he was fired after being implicated in a massacre in La Saline, a slum near his home, in which at least seventy-one people were killed and more than four hundred houses were burned.

During Moïse’s Presidency, Barbecue seized control of many districts of Port-au-Prince and built a reputation as a merciless overlord of the slums. In June, 2020, he posted a YouTube video announcing a new alliance of nine gangs, under his control: the Revolutionary Forces of the G-9 Family and Allies. Since Moïse’s assassination, the G-9 has reportedly grown to more than a dozen gangs.

When I was in Haiti, Barbecue agreed to meet me, and one morning I was taken to a corner in his neighborhood and told to wait. After ten minutes, he appeared—a stocky, hard-faced man, surrounded by a cordon of teen-age boys with semi-automatic weapons. He wore black sweatpants with a colorful shirt, and carried a pistol loosely in one hand. Barbecue introduced himself, then immediately stepped away, saying that he needed to take a shower. He wandered into a house across the road, where a woman lingered in the doorway.

When Barbecue returned, he was wearing a black turtleneck and black jeans, and had traded the pistol for an iPad. Waving his bodyguards to sit in the shade nearby, he led me to a set of plastic chairs, next to a small house with a peeling pink façade and grilles on the windows—his home.

For several minutes, Barbecue studiously ignored me, apparently absorbed by his iPad. I asked him what he was reading. “I read the news,” he said, looking up briefly. Any particular kind? “Nothing special,” he said. “Everything.”

He finally put down his iPad when I asked about the allegations against him; several human-rights organizations had concluded that, as he fought for turf, he was involved in a series of vicious attacks, in close coördination with senior police officers. “Let them prove it,” he said. “The La Saline massacre. False. I was never in La Saline. Bel Air massacre. False. Massacre, massacre, massacre. False. All of these accusations are made because they can’t control me politically.” Barbecue argued that he had been unfairly fired from the police force: “That is the cause of misfortune that led to where I am today, but it also made me realize I had been a slave of that system and that I had to fight against it. Today, I feel much more useful than when I was a member of the Haitian police. There are a lot of people who depend on me.” During our meeting, he walked into the road and ostentatiously handed a big bag of rice to an elderly woman. “Every two weeks, she comes to me to ask for food,” he told me. “If I have rice or peas, I give it away. The little kids, I pay for their school. And the young girls, fourteen or fifteen years old, I must watch over them to prevent them from being sexually abused. The community has been there for me, and I for them.”

Barbecue became animated as he talked about his heroes—a series of nation-building revolutionaries. He mentioned Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s iconic first ruler, as well as the Burkinabe revolutionary Thomas Sankara, Fidel Castro, and Malcolm X. “I like Martin Luther King, too, but he didn’t like fighting with guns, and I fight with guns,” he said, with a short, explosive laugh.

Barbecue wore his ideology almost literally on his sleeve. He had on a large gold pendant and a matching ring with Masonic symbols, which he said marked him as “someone who was seeking the truth.” On his cell-phone cover was a Pop Art image depicting him as Che Guevara, complete with beret. “I’m not a Communist,” he explained. “I just like their philosophy. People who love their country. People who see the need to develop their country.”

This was the root of his affinity with Dessalines, he said: “His dream was to share the country’s riches with the little people. Today, a tiny group controls all the land, all its resources, its entire economy, while the majority lives in misery, in grime. Look at this neighborhood: we all live in misery, in grime. We have to fight to change that.” Castro had pursued the same goals, he said: “He built schools, hospitals, universities.”

When I asked Barbecue if he was evolving into a political figure, he gave another staccato laugh and pointed skyward. “That’s the big architect who has all the power,” he said. “I’m just one person who has a vision for my country. Haiti is a country of Blacks, but Haiti is a racist country. For example, there’s never a Black who can have a supermarket, a Black who can own a house and a car. All those government posts, there’s never a Black that has access to them; there’s all this money, but it never comes back to them.”

Barbecue blamed the island’s inequities on what he called “the Lebanese”—Haitians of Syrian and Lebanese descent who constitute much of the economic élite, including food and fuel importers, bankers, and merchants. “We need to create a Black bourgeoisie,” he said. “But all the riches of the country are in the hands of the five per cent, the oligarchs, the Lebanese.” He complained that there wasn’t even a good hospital in Port-au-Prince, “because when the oligarchs get sick they take private jets straight to Miami, where they are treated in Jackson Memorial Hospital.” He added, “It’s those people we need to eliminate and come with another group in our country, who are credible—who are Haitian above all. Those people aren’t Haitians, and they don’t even like Haitians.”

It is indisputably true that Black Haitians have suffered centuries of disenfranchisement. But, when Barbecue speaks of fighting on their behalf against the light-skinned élite, it inevitably evokes Duvalier, who used the tenets of noirisme to justify his violent rule. Indeed, Barbecue has spoken of admiring Papa Doc.

Last fall, as part of what Barbecue describes as his “fight for a better life,” he led an armed blockade against the main Port-au-Prince fuel terminal of Varreux. For nearly two months, the capital suffered devastating fuel shortages and growing famine, even as a cholera epidemic spread. The blockade was ostensibly aimed at forcing Ariel Henry to resign, but all indications are that Barbecue was aiming to enrich his gang. Some Haitians speculate that he released the port only after reaching a secret agreement with Henry to supply government jobs for some of his men and to lift arrest warrants; others say that Henry simply paid him. (Both men deny this.) Someone with knowledge of the port’s operations told me that the company that runs it didn’t pay off Barbecue, but that it took care to hire its stevedores from areas he controlled, paying twice the going rate. He added that the stevedores “tithed” to their community leaders.

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Although Barbecue presents himself as an enemy of the state, he is widely believed to have been linked to Moïse. He carried out his attacks on turf associated with Moïse’s political rivals. And though he was a wanted criminal, he lived openly in Delmas, occasionally making public appearances with active-duty policemen. When I asked how he felt about the police, he gave a confiding look and said, “Once a policeman, always a policeman.”

A diplomat in the region told me, “We had a strong suspicion that there was a connection between the gangs and the government at the highest level.” Barbecue denied any links to Moïse. “I never met him, I never liked him,” he told me, laughing roughly. “I liked him when he died.” But after the assassination Barbecue appeared at a mourning ceremony attended by more than a thousand people. Dressed in a white suit and a black tie, he led a procession of gang members as they circled a bonfire and cast in salt to honor Moïse’s memory.

In the course of our conversation, Barbecue told me that he had just one regret. “There are people who I don’t want to see still alive,” he said. He smirked, then offered a clarification: “I don’t want to see them continuing to hurt Haiti.” Despite his claims of nation-building, he seemed more like a bandit than like a revolutionary. “The notion of good and bad doesn’t exist for me,” he told me. “I do good for one group of people. I do bad for another. That’s the law of life. The black and white. The equilibrium.”

Barbecue blames Pierre Esperance, the executive director of the independent National Human Rights Defense Network, for the “false accusations” that cost him his job with the police. A sociologist by training, Esperance, a sturdy, bald-headed man of sixty, has been documenting abuses in Haiti for twenty-eight years. Having survived thus far, he is as outspoken as he is impatient. He describes Barbecue as “a killer, a gangster, a rapist,” and as “a danger to human rights and democracy.”

Esperance’s headquarters, a squat villa in central Port-au-Prince, whirls with activity, as staffers attend to people who have come seeking help. In his office, I met a group of women from the community of Cabaret, an hour north of Port-au-Prince, who had survived an attack last November, as a gang sought revenge for the murder of one of its members by a local man. The women’s stories had a terrible sameness. Gang members arrived suddenly at their houses, and took their brothers, husbands, fathers—and sometimes their mothers—into the street and murdered them. About fifty people in all were killed. The women were kept inside and raped in front of their children or their younger siblings. Afterward, the gang members torched the neighborhood. The women wept as they spoke of their desolation; all were living on the charity of friends or relatives in other slums, surviving by washing clothes or by selling candy on the streets.

A young woman named Claudette, from the Port-au-Prince slum of Bel Air, told me that her district had been riven by fighting for several weeks, as a gang in Barbecue’s G-9 alliance moved to take over a coveted well. Her family and their neighbors had been sleeping on the street, for protection. When I asked why it was safer outside, Claudette gave a surprised look and said, “Because when they come they burn our houses, and if we are inside we will burn, too.”

Catherine, a strongly built woman with a baby girl in her arms, told me that she was from a section of Cité Soleil known as Brooklyn. In August, 2021, she was a twenty-seven-year-old widow with two young children, working in an industrial park. One evening, she was riding home in a group taxi when cars pulled in front of it and blocked the road. Masked gunmen leaped out and forced the passengers into the street. In an empty lot, the men started shooting, killing a little boy. Catherine cried softly as she recounted what happened next: the gang members beat her, yanked off her clothes, and raped her, over and over, for several hours. Catherine touched a scar on her face, where they had hit her with a gun. She didn’t know who her tormentors were, because they wore masks. “There were other women raped at the same time,” she said quietly. “One didn’t make it.”

Catherine spoke of the gangs that fought over Brooklyn without mentioning their names; it seemed not to matter much who they were, since they all behaved the same. But she deduced that the men who had raped her were from “the new gang,” which had recently moved in. After displacing the previous gang, it blockaded the neighborhood, allowing no one in or out. “Since we couldn’t leave and had no water, we drank sewage water,” Catherine said. “Some people got cholera.” The gang continued killing people and burning houses. Pierre Esperance said that his office had documented fifty-seven cases of rape in the neighborhood during that period.

When Catherine was finally able to leave Brooklyn, a month later, she walked to a facility run by Médecins Sans Frontières, where doctors told her that she was pregnant and that she had contracted syphilis. Catherine received medical treatment and psychiatric counselling, but she could not imagine bearing a child. In despair, she jumped from the roof of a two-story house, the highest elevation she could find. It was Mother’s Day, 2022. When she woke up, she was in hospital, giving birth.

As it turned out, Catherine’s baby was healthy except for a facial injury sustained during her mother’s suicide attempt. “When she was four months old, I tried to give her away at a hospital,” Catherine said. “A counsellor helped me. She told me I had a pretty baby.” Catherine spoke plainly, allowing herself no sentiment. “Now I love this baby.”

Her greatest hope, she said, was for “someone to help me.” She had two other children who needed protection, so she had moved in with a man, but he was beating her. She pointed to places where he had hit her. “If I get help, I can move out and take care of my children,” she said. “I am intelligent.”

Haitians looking for official help are perpetually disappointed. The country has only about nine thousand police officers, many of whom are believed to be involved with gangs. “The police force is at the scale of the state—about five per cent of the needed capacity,” the diplomat in the region said. The Army is effectively nonexistent, with some two thousand active troops. What spending the government can afford often goes to patronage. Despite a dismal economy, the diplomat added, “the employees of the civil service have increased by thirty per cent in the past five years, the result of the governments stacking the civil service with their party militants.”

The Trump Administration showed little interest in Haiti. In an Oval Office meeting in 2018, Trump asked why the U.S. had to accept immigrants from Haiti and other “shithole countries.” Joe Biden, during his long political career, has demonstrated little more concern. In 1994, when President Clinton was considering an intervention, Biden counselled against it: “If Haiti—a God-awful thing to say—if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean, or rose up three hundred feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interests.” During his Presidency, officials I’ve asked about the Administration’s priorities in the Western Hemisphere tend to list Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela—and to throw up their hands when I mention Haiti.

When I recently asked Brian Nichols, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, about Henry’s plea for security assistance, he said that the Administration was working to build support in the U.N. Security Council, while remaining focussed on “insuring that the Haitian people be the protagonists in their own future.” (A senior government official working in the region put it more directly: “Everyone agrees it has to be a Haitian solution, because if it is delivered from abroad everyone will say, ‘The white man has spoken,’ and it would be doomed not to last.”) In mid-July, the Security Council agreed to develop options for consideration within thirty days. In the meantime, the U.S. is training some police, and has levied sanctions on various actors, including Barbecue—though sanctions are unlikely to produce an immediate effect on the street. When I mentioned them to Barbecue, he scoffed: “Morally, they don’t bother me. Economically, they don’t bother me, either, because I’ve never left Haiti.”

Dan Foote, the former U.S. special envoy to Haiti, acknowledged that the situation was tenuous: “It’s so bad now that people look wistfully back on the days of the Tonton Macoutes, when garbage was collected and their children played in the streets.” Still, he noted that an intervention couldn’t succeed unless the Haitian state was strengthened. “We try to build a government without a stable foundation and then it just fucks up,” he said. “Haiti is going to be a generational challenge, but it’s not insurmountable. We just need to help the Haitian people unfuck themselves. All they need is a leader.”

Ariel Henry is a reticent figure who has given few interviews since assuming his post, but he agreed to meet me in a secure government compound above Port-au-Prince. A tall man with a clipped salt-and-pepper beard, he was dressed soberly, in a black suit and glasses. Despite having served briefly as interior minister under Martelly, Henry is best known as Haiti’s foremost neurosurgeon. For years, he was the island’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci—the preëminent medical authority during the cholera epidemic that began in 2010, and again during the recent outbreak of COVID-19.

In a darkened living room with gold-and-silver curtains drawn over the windows, Henry spoke for nearly two hours. He said that he “never imagined” he would become Prime Minister, until Moïse approached him about the post in 2021. Early that July, they’d had a long meeting, talking about the realities of governance: COVID-19, joblessness, forthcoming elections. “He said security was not an issue, that he had some plan for how to fight the gangs,” Henry recalled. Moïse, who had only a few months left in office, seemed eager to maintain his influence, and asked to name two ministers in Henry’s government. His wife, Martine, also asked to name one. At 11 o’clock on July 6th, Moïse called, sounding agitated, and asked why Henry hadn’t finished assembling the new cabinet. “I told him it was because I hadn’t been named yet,” Henry recalled. A few hours later, he said, he was awakened by another call. There had been a break-in at the Presidential residence; Moïse had been shot twelve times.

It emerged that a group of assailants, including Colombian mercenaries, had made their way in with help from paid-off security men. Most of the mercenaries were soon captured, though three were killed in a firefight. The survivors said that they believed they were part of a “C.I.A. operation.” Investigators eventually found that the operation was funded by a Haitian Chilean former drug trafficker, Rodolphe Jaar. Last month, Jaar was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Miami courtroom.

Still, rumors circulate in Haiti that others may have been involved. Moïse’s wife, Martine, who was injured but not killed in the raid, has been the subject of speculation, as has Martelly, his estranged ally. (A lawyer for Martine denies that she had any involvement, or that she asked to name a minister. Martelly could not be reached for comment.) Ariel Henry has also been the object of suspicion. People mention that, in the hours after the killing, he spoke to Joseph Felix Badio, a former justice official who has been alleged to be a key architect of the plot. The diplomat in the region told me, “Henry has explained in a very awkward way that he doesn’t remember the call.” But, the diplomat added, this doesn’t provide evidence of conspiracy. “He was already nominated to be Prime Minister,” he said. “He’s wealthy. He’d done surgery on everyone in Haiti. What would be his motivation?”

After Moïse’s assassination, Henry quickly went into hiding. “If he had done something that led people to think the only solution was to kill him, then the same thing could happen to me,” he said. He explained that this was why he had avoided media contacts. “Times were turbulent,” he said. “There was a big campaign to associate me with the assassination. I had just become Prime Minister, and suddenly I was a criminal. I wasn’t prepared for it. Now my skin is thicker,” he said, laughing.

Henry’s many critics regard him as illegitimate. When he took office, he displaced an ambitious young nationalist named Claude Joseph—a change that Moïse agreed to only under pressure from Martelly. Dan Foote, the former special envoy to Haiti, told me, “Martelly had been coming and going from Miami, where he was living, busting Moïse’s balls. They have a meeting, after which Moïse basically signs the paper Martelly has handed him, naming Henry as his Prime Minister. He goes home after that and gets killed.”

According to Foote and other observers, the U.S. Ambassador helped insure that Henry was appointed. “Henry is compliant,” Foote said. “He gets in there, looks good, knows how to tie a tie.” He has coöperated with the Biden White House to accept deportations of Haitian immigrants; he has assured I.M.F. officers that he is working to shore up the economy. The diplomat in the region told me, “He is trying to restore some institutionality in this country at a time when most institutions are no longer functioning. Justice is completely broken. There have been no criminal trials in five years. Education is very damaged.”

Public sentiment is against him, though. Around the capital, you see graffiti reading, “Down with Henry!” He has been promising new elections for the past eighteen months, but no one seems to believe that he will hold them. Foote told me, “There is no social contract between the Haitian people and Henry, and, as long as he’s in there, the crisis will continue. Every time he tries to engage with the gangs, they take his money and tell him to fuck off. The Haitians are embarrassed by him, because he can’t get shit done.”

In our conversation, Henry confessed to having no solution for the security problems in Port-au-Prince. He noted, with strained politeness, that Haiti had purchased some armored personnel carriers from a Canadian company, but they hadn’t all arrived yet. “There have been quite a few—what do you call them, private contractors?—who have been offering their services,” he said. He declined to give specifics, but said that they included some Americans and some Haitian Americans who had served in the U.S. military. “They are not proud of what’s going on here, and they want to put together a force to fix the country,” he said. “But we cannot accept. If you start there, you cannot predict the end.”

When I asked how long Haiti could endure the current strife, he said, “Yesterday some industrialists came to see me, and they asked the same question. I said I couldn’t speculate, but I didn’t think we could go on for too much longer.” Still, Henry said that he took comfort from a “deep feeling that the Haitian people can come up and astonish the world.” He couldn’t explain exactly what he meant, but said he felt hopeful that “peace would first take shape through a single spark and go on from there.”

Other Haitian officials seemed less hopeful. One morning, I went to see Mirlande Manigat, one of the country’s most respected public figures. Madame Manigat, as she is known, is eighty-two, an expert in constitutional law and the widow of a President who served for four months in the eighties before being ousted by the military. In 2010, Manigat ran for President herself, but lost to Martelly. She was now a co-leader of a Presidential transition council, whose office occupies an entire floor of a ministry in Port-au-Prince. When I arrived, the vast space was unfurnished except for a desk, a chair, and the Haitian flag. Manigat gave a mockingly expansive wave around and said, “We understand that others are looking to us and saying, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Her council’s task, to propose changes to the electoral process and to the constitution, was stalled. “Nothing can be achieved until security is established, but security is nonexistent,” she said. “If I were in power, I would declare a state of emergency.” Henry had not done so, but she thought that the justice department might have the power to do it without him. “We are in an urgent situation,” she said. “We need the government to adopt certain measures, even if they are illegal.” Manigat feared that it was “already too late.”

Because of the sour legacy of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, she did not favor an international stabilization force. “The idea demoralizes Haitians,” she said. “We know what happens.” In any case, Manigat said, it was clear that the countries that had previously aided Haiti were now principally concerned with Ukraine. “We watch the news,” she said. “We understand that the international community doesn’t want to send troops to Haiti, to send their kids to die here—and I don’t blame them.”

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Manigat believed that the Haitian military needed to be reconstituted to restore order. She had grown up in an Army family, she said, and didn’t “suffer from the same revulsion many people have toward the military.” But there were obstacles, including the fact that the U.S. Congress had placed an arms embargo on the Haitian military. Manigat argued that the U.S. could ask other countries—she mentioned Israel and Egypt—to provide arms. Wryly, she added, “We don’t have a very sophisticated Army, so the Army wouldn’t need very sophisticated weapons.”

She was unconcerned by the possibility of human-rights violations. “When you are dealing with bandits, human rights don’t apply,” she said. “What do we have to do, implore them for mercy? No, we should show them no consideration, just as they do with us.” Manigat spoke about Che Guevara, who died in Bolivia, in a battle with forces supported by the U.S. “His cadaver was exposed, and everyone saw that Guevara had died,” she said. “Here the bandits have names—we all know who they are—and their bodies need to be exposed as well, so as to shock the population. The body dies from the head.”

Nearly everyone I spoke to in Haiti agreed that defeating the gangs would require loosening laws. The country’s interim justice minister, a novelist named Emmelie Prophète, met me at a café on the grounds of a luxury hotel where the U.N. has its headquarters. Prophète was guarded by two edgy-seeming security men.

I asked about a controversial recent statement, in which she had said that citizens should be allowed to take the law into their own hands in self-defense. Prophète laughed and nodded. “It was after a series of brutal home invasions and kidnappings,” she explained. “A lot of people had been raped and killed, and many people had been writing me to ask whether, if they had weapons, they could defend themselves. I said yes!” Prophète added, “People are fed up with politics. People want security.”

In April, reports of vigilante groups began to emerge. Civilians sealed off their streets and prepared to fight. In Port-au-Prince, people began lynching and burning gang members. The Bwa Kale movement was born.

Bwa Kale touts itself as a spontaneous civic phenomenon, but it clearly has backing from the police. In videos of the most explosive early attack, in which fourteen suspected gang members were beaten and burned alive, uniformed policemen can be seen kicking prostrate men as a jeering crowd gathers to throw tires on top of them. Foote confirmed that the police supported Bwa Kale: “They’re outgunned, so they have no other options.”

One afternoon, the head of the National Union of Haitian Police, Lionel Lazarre, came to my hotel, just after attending a funeral for three policemen who had been killed by gangs. He confirmed that gangs controlled as much as ninety-five per cent of the capital, and conceded that the police were incapable of defeating them. But, he said, if the population supported them, and if the private sector and the government could “put their hands in their pockets to get them the resources they needed,” things could improve. (The diplomat in the region reluctantly agreed: “If we can get a military intervention force here in a reasonable amount of time, we can have some results. The gangs will not be defeated in twenty-four hours, but they will take a step back. If there isn’t one, then we have no choice but to rebuild the police.”)

I asked about Muscadin, the regional authority who had reportedly defeated the gangs by indiscriminate force. “I don’t have a problem with his work,” Lazarre said. “Of course, people’s rights need to be respected. But some people say if we had several Muscadins maybe we wouldn’t have the problems we have today.” Yet he declined to disavow Barbecue. “He was pushed into what he is now by human-rights organizations,” he said. “I can’t judge that one way or the other. But life has its turnarounds, and, because of the situation we’re in, it could be that there may be those who could ask for an amnesty for him, in return for a change in his behavior.”

The advent of Bwa Kale had put Barbecue in a curious position. Though the vigilantes had pledged to fight the gangs, many of those they fought were also Barbecue’s enemies. And the police, to whom he had at least a sentimental allegiance, seemed to support them. When we spoke, I asked whether he was going to align himself with Bwa Kale. Laughing, he said, “That’s a strategic question.” Rather than expanding, he spoke enigmatically about how the conflict might play out: “It was vodou that gave Haiti its independence, and it will liberate this country again.” Gesturing broadly, he said, “The spirits of our ancestors, despite everything that’s been done, continue to watch over us. Haiti will shake off all the dirt and once more become the Pearl of the Antilles.”

On May 18th, Flag Day in Haiti, Barbecue appeared before a crowd, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Bwa Kale.” He gave an impassioned speech saluting the heroes of independence, describing his alliance of gangs as an extension of their struggle. He also hailed Bwa Kale, though he warned its members to “avoid collateral damage.” He assured the crowd, “If there is any collateral damage, that’s not us.”

Barbecue went on, “We G-9 have no problem with Bwa Kale. I say to the people, ‘Stay firm with Bwa Kale, because Bwa Kale is giving results.’ There’s no team that will give results like Bwa Kale. Bwa Kale all the way!”

In the weeks after Bwa Kale formed, kidnappings declined in the capital, and there was a surge of wary optimism. But the presence of another armed group seems unlikely to bring an enduring peace to Haiti. “The basic truth is that there is no state,” the diplomat in the region said. “It is gone, and to rebuild it will be very slow.”

One of the most contested front lines in the gang wars that have reshaped Port-au-Prince runs through Cité Soleil—a sprawling slum, which came into being in the nineteen-fifties, when American companies built factories in Haiti without also erecting housing for the workers. Barbecue’s turf borders an area dominated by an enemy gang called G-Pep. One afternoon, I was escorted there by Sean Roubens Jean Sacra, a Haitian journalist who had cultivated a relationship with members of the gang. We made our way by a little-used road, bounded by weedy vacant land and an old concrete wall that marked a no man’s land between the gangs’ territories. Near a crude lookout tower, young men with guns surrounded the car threateningly, until Sacra explained in Creole that their leader had sanctioned our trip.

Down the road, in front of a wall painted with a portrait of a dead gang member, G-Pep members hustled us onto motorbikes, and we roared off into the slum, riding for ten minutes through a trough with a deep sluice of raw sewage. People with bundles on their heads leaped aside as we passed, but nobody complained to the gang members, or even dared to make eye contact.

The sewer opened into a stretch of roadside shanty-shops, where a heavyset young man was waiting—G-Pep’s third-in-command. He was in cell-phone contact with the leader, Gabriel Jean-Pierre, but our presence had evidently not been entirely approved. Soon after we arrived, a crew of young men rode up on motorbikes and began to argue with the local boss.

Sacra told us to stay out of sight during the negotiations, so we stood behind a cinder-block hut, where a man was burning charcoal in an oil drum. In the shade, a woman cut a young man’s hair; he held a broken piece of mirror to review her handiwork. A mentally impaired man wandered through the alley. Children swarmed around.

After fifteen minutes, we were allowed to proceed to a packed neighborhood of shacks built out of corrugated tin and scrap metal. While the gang members kept watch outside, we were allowed in. The shacks had dirt floors, with open fires in the corners, rudimentary beds, and shelves for a few possessions. The heat inside was ferocious.

The residents, nearly all women, said that they didn’t have enough food, and that they faced persistent danger. One of them, a sixty-year-old former domestic worker, who wore a faded tunic decorated with pink roses, explained, “We can’t sleep well. There is no water—we get a little when it rains. There is no government presence here. We live like animals. The only way in and out is the sewer, the way you came in, but you can get killed if you try and leave. These guys”—she waved toward the street—“can take you and kill you behind the wall.” The killing was done at the corner where we had met the G-Pep sentinels. “We are prisoners here. Animals have more value than we do.” (In the days after our visit, fighting nearby killed more than eighty people, as Barbecue forced out a rival leader.)

Outside, the gang leader was waiting to escort us to the front line. Gesturing for silence, he led the way through a labyrinth of narrow alleys until we reached an open area, bounded on one side by the ocean, still and dank, and on the other by a clutch of bullet-riddled tin houses. In front of us was the front line, marked by a jerry-built cinder-block wall, about ten feet high, that ran all the way to the sea.

The gang leader hustled us to the wall, looking out for enemy fighters. At the base was a small vodou altar: an effigy of a Catholic saint, surrounded by conch shells. Nearby, several of his men sat in the shade of a small blockhouse, holding automatic weapons. A hole in the wall gave a view of a copse of trees and a few oil-storage silos—G-9 territory, Barbecue’s turf.

One of the guards, a skinny young man whose face was obscured by a mask patterned with an American flag, came out of the guardhouse, carrying a sawed-off shotgun. I asked if he was a fighter at the front line. He nodded, and said that he was. When I asked what he was fighting for, he paused for a moment and then mumbled in Creole. Sacra translated: “He said he doesn’t know why. He is just here.” ♦