More than 100 suspected gang members have been killed as vigilantism grows in Haiti

At least 108 suspected gang members have been killed in Haiti over three days, a Port-au-Prince human rights group has reported.

The National Human Rights Defense Network’s findings are the first real assessment of the toll of the recent upsurge in violence in Haiti, where armed gangs have been ramping up attacks and on Tuesday attempted to invade one of the capital’s upscale neighborhoods, Pétion-Ville, only to be repealed by machete-wielding residents joining forces with police.

Pierre Esperance, the executive director of the human rights group, said that “in a good number of the cases, the police killed” the armed individuals and then the population set the corpses on fire. In other instances, residents themselves killed the presumed bandits. A dozen of the killings occurred between Nov. 17-18 in the Poste-Marchand neighborhood of the capital. There were another 90 killings on Tuesday and six on Thursday.

The tallies underscore not just gangs’ escalating terror, but the lengths to which a fed-up population is going to protect itself as the gangs increasingly take control of more neighborhoods in metropolitan Port-au-Prince and the neighboring Artibonite Valley. It also points to a worrying upshot of violence in a country where the judiciary is almost non-existent and the police are increasingly coming under scrutiny for the excessive use of force.

“The authorities have totally resigned. Justice itself is sick,” Esperance said. “How do we explain in a country where since 2018 you’ve had all of these massacres, all of these rapes and gang rapes, kidnappings and there has been no judicial process? The state has completely collapsed…. and the population is giving itself justice.

“The police who want to work are frustrated because when they arrest gang members, the justice system releases them or they [thepolice] get arrested because there are gang leaders they should not go after. This is the situation,” he added.

The human rights network’s figures coincide with the recent upsurge in violence that has prompted the largest mass displacements, 40,965 people, in Port-au-Prince since the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration began tracking internal movements of Haitians forced out of their homes by armed gangs. The majority of the displacements occurred in Port-au-Prince and have taken place over the last few weeks as gangs take control of more territory. The number of displaced people stands at well over 700,000 so far.

On Tuesday, police intercepted three vehicles in the early morning carrying suspected gang members who were armed and headed toward Pétion-Ville. After the police stopped the vehicles the passengers fled. Police put the official death toll at 28 for Tuesday while acknowledging some of the individuals were killed by officers and others by local residents, who hacked the suspected gang members with machetes and then set them on fire. They have not given any other figures for the other incidents.

In its assessment, the National Human Rights Defense Network said among the 90 deaths on Tuesday, 25 occurred in the area of Canapé Verte and 15 along Panaméricaine Road near the Oasis Hotel in Pétion-Ville.

On Thursday, another six suspected gang members were killed between Delmas 57 and 59 and the Christ-Roi neighborhood.

“We are in total anarchy,” said Wilner Morin, a respected judge who on Thursday was sworn in as the country’s new citizens’ ombudsman. “We are in a situation where we have a powerless police, powerless state authorities and the population is so backed up against the wall that it feels it can take justice into its own hands.

“It’s the weakness of the justice system and bad governance that has brought us to this point,” he added. “This is very serious.”

Morin said he has formed a commission to look into killings, which has raised wider concerns about growing vigilantism.

Known as the Bwa Kale movement, the acts of vigilantism by unorganized groups of Haitians and self-defense groups, while accounting for a small percentage of the total violence taking place in Haiti, are on the rise, the Human Rights Service of the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti said in a September report. The groups often operate “with the support or acquiescence of police officers,” the report noted.

During such incidents, victims are mutilated with machetes, stoned, decapitated, burned alive or buried alive, the report said, while noting that not even children have been spared. The report also raised concerns about extrajudicial executions committed by members of the Haitian police and the public prosecutor of Miragoane, Jean Ernest Muscadin, whose lyching of suspected gang members and individuals accused of committing common crimes has been lauded by many Haitians.

“Since the beginning of 2022, this public prosecutor has allegedly executed at least 36 people,” the U.N. said, noting that it documented at least 106 extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions carried out by law enforcement, including Muscadin, between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2024.