Wtf going on in Haiti
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Haitians fear the imminent fall of Port-au-Prince to rebel gangs: ‘We will die standing’
Both the national police and a UN-backed security force have failed to staunch the year-long insurgency, with more than a million people displaced. ‘We are all by ourselves’: Haitians warn that fall of Port-au-Prince is imminent
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
MARCH 20, 2025
Both the national police and a UN-backed security force have failed to staunch the year-long insurgency, with more than a million people displaced. ‘We are all by ourselves’: Haitians warn that fall of Port-au-Prince is imminent
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
MARCH 20, 2025
Kenyan officer killed in Haiti after gang ambush, as Rubio visits Caribbean to discuss Haitian security crisis
The Kenyan police officer was initially reported missing after suspected gang members ambushed two mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles on Tuesday in Pont-Sondé, a town in the Artibonite region, according to a statement by the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS).
By Michael Rios, CNN
March 26, 2025
amp.cnn.com
- A Kenyan police officer patrols an area in the Kenscoff neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Feb. 13, 2025.
The Kenyan police officer was initially reported missing after suspected gang members ambushed two mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles on Tuesday in Pont-Sondé, a town in the Artibonite region, according to a statement by the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS).
By Michael Rios, CNN
March 26, 2025
Kenyan officer killed in Haiti after gang ambush, as Rubio visits Caribbean to discuss Haitian security crisis | CNN
A member of the international force battling gangs in Haiti has been killed, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio launches a tour of the Caribbean with Haiti’s security crisis high on the agenda.
- A Kenyan police officer patrols an area in the Kenscoff neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Feb. 13, 2025.
Haiti Doesn’t Make Guns. So How Are Gangs Awash in Them?
Federal authorities in several countries have recently nabbed several caches of weapons headed to Haiti, but armed violence continues to rise there, with gangs increasingly obtaining high-caliber firearms and ammunition.
By David C. Adams and Frances Robles
March 31, 2025
www.nytimes.com
The freighter Sara Express moored along the Miami River this month. Weapons that the authorities say were bound for Haiti were found when the ship was docked in the Dominican Republic
Federal authorities in several countries have recently nabbed several caches of weapons headed to Haiti, but armed violence continues to rise there, with gangs increasingly obtaining high-caliber firearms and ammunition.
By David C. Adams and Frances Robles
March 31, 2025
Haiti Doesn’t Make Guns. So How Are Gangs Awash in Them?
Federal authorities in several countries have recently nabbed several caches of weapons headed to Haiti, but armed violence continues to rise there, with gangs increasingly obtaining high-caliber firearms and ammunition.
The freighter Sara Express moored along the Miami River this month. Weapons that the authorities say were bound for Haiti were found when the ship was docked in the Dominican Republic
Haiti nearing ‘point of no return’ amid gang violence, UN representative warns
María Isabel Salvador tells security council the country could face ‘total chaos’ without necessary international aid
Agence France-Press at the United Nations
21 Apr 2025
www.theguardian.com
Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General for Haiti, María Isabel Salvador (Ecuador)
María Isabel Salvador tells security council the country could face ‘total chaos’ without necessary international aid
Agence France-Press at the United Nations
21 Apr 2025
Haiti nearing ‘point of no return’ amid gang violence, UN representative warns
María Isabel Salvador tells security council the country could face ‘total chaos’ without necessary international aid
Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General for Haiti, María Isabel Salvador (Ecuador)
U.S. State Department labels Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations
The Viv Ansanm coalition and the Gran Grif gang will now be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and as Specifically Designated Global Terrorists by the State Department.
By Michelle Garcia and Yamiche Alcindor
May 2, 2025
www.nbcnews.com
Gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue" Cherizier poses for a picture with gang members in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The Viv Ansanm coalition and the Gran Grif gang will now be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and as Specifically Designated Global Terrorists by the State Department.
By Michelle Garcia and Yamiche Alcindor
May 2, 2025
State Department labels Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations
The Viv Ansanm coalition and the Gran Grif gang will now be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and as Specifically Designated Global Terrorists by the State Department.
Gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue" Cherizier poses for a picture with gang members in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Damn. So they were first killing Haitians and/or burning them alive and now it's all out warfare civil war like? I don't even know anymore...U.S. State Department labels Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations
The Viv Ansanm coalition and the Gran Grif gang will now be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and as Specifically Designated Global Terrorists by the State Department.
By Michelle Garcia and Yamiche Alcindor
May 2, 2025
State Department labels Haitian gangs as terrorist organizations
The Viv Ansanm coalition and the Gran Grif gang will now be labeled as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and as Specifically Designated Global Terrorists by the State Department.
Gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue" Cherizier poses for a picture with gang members in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
@playahaitian
Do you got your ears to the ground?
Do you got your ears to the ground?
As crisis in Haiti worsens, UN council calls meeting to push for international support
Jacqueline CharlesJune 10, 2025 2:25 PM[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)]
As Haiti’s capital comes under intense gang attacks, angry Haitians in Canape Vert armed themselves with machetes and took to the streets on Wednesday, March 19, 2025 to protest the assaults and lack of response from the country’s authorities. The United Nations International Organization for Migration said gangs have forced over 60,000 Haitians to flee their homes in just one month. Johnny Fils-AiméFor the Miami Herald
Children —who make up nearly half of Haiti’s population — are being exploited, raped and recruited by armed gangs, who have also taken over many of their schools.
Some 2.85 million of them, from toddlers to teens, face famine while also being forced to flee their homes due to worsening violence.
But four months after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres presented a plan to the Security Council on how to help Haiti address its alarming gang violence, the country’s protracted crisis has only deepened, with no solution in sight.
There is still no consensus among the council’s five permanent members on the next steps to take and the U.S. is backing away, asking Congress to rescind millions of dollars in U.N. contributions. The lack of a response and budget crisis come amid a wave of fresh attacks that in April alone, displaced more than 67,000 new people after gangs moved into the country’s central region.
On Sunday, gangs continued their terror campaign, setting fire to a municipal market in the city of Mirebalais, in Haiti’s Central Plateau and also to homes in Furcy, a rural community in the hills above Port-au-Prince where some of the country’s wealthy boast vacation homes and cottages.
“When we say things are stuck, they’re not just stuck in New York or Washington. It’s also dealing with the need for Port-au-Prince, the government itself, the Transitional Presidential Council, to have a keener sense of urgency about what needs to be done,” said Robert Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.
A meeting to refocus attention
On Wednesday, Rae, who serves as president of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, will host a special meeting on Haiti alongside the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission. The goal: to keep Haiti’s protracted, multifaceted crisis in the international spotlight.“We’re not going to rest until there’s a comprehensive plan for Haiti that is led by the Haitian authorities and has the full support of all the other countries in the world and the international community. That’s our goal, that’s our objective,” he said.
But that plan, Rae said can’t just focus on the security crisis. It has to also involve addressing the root causes of Haiti’s perennial instability and worsening violence, which include poverty, exclusion and inequality.
“We all know it as well that the security situation feeds on the inequality and feeds on the unemployment; it feeds on the vulnerability of people, the fact that kids can’t get any work, there’s no work for them anywhere else, and the human trafficking that goes on. It’s terrible,” said Rae, who also chairs the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti at the U.N. and has visited the country on several occasions. “The level of violence is out of sight, and the level of safety not only in Port-au-Prince, but in the country generally, is a level that nobody can see as acceptable.
“We’ve got to have a coherent, effective on the ground strategy to deal with it. That’s where there’s a whole lot more that could happen if we could get a political will from the communities around Haiti, and also, more broadly, to support what needs to be done.”
In recent months, a Haitian government task force operating out of the prime minister’s office has turned to using weaponized drones to go after gang leaders after signing contracts with two private security firms. However, there has been no transparency on the value of the contracts or the rules of engagement.
The government also hasn’t said how it’s planning on tackling the crisis, including how to stop the recruitment of children by armed groups. According to the UNICEF, the U.N.’s child welfare agency, an estimated 30% to 50% of gang members in Haiti are children, some as young as 8 years-old, and their recruitment has been soaring.
“When people say to me, ‘Well, development is not so important. The real issue is security.’ I say to them, you can’t separate out the two, those two things go together,” Rae said. “And you can’t separate out development and security from human rights and from creating a sense of opportunity for people.”
Ahead of the meeting, which will be broadcast on UN web TV, Rae and the special representative for the U.N. secretary general in Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, will host a press conference. Then they will move into discussions in addition to a representative of civil society, invitations have also been extended to senior U.N. officials, Haitian government officials and the Inter-American Development Bank. IDB President Ilan Goldfajn visited Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haïtien, last month.
International visits
Goldfajn’s visit is part of efforts by Haitian authorities to get the international community to pay closer attention to areas outside of the gang-ridden capital that are also in need of attention. In a communique on Tuesday, Spain’s Embassy in Port-au-Prince said that its ambassador, Marco Antonio Peñin Toledano, recently visited several project sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, known as ACEID, in the cities of Miragoâne in the Nippes region and Les Cayes.The ambassador participated in an inauguration ceremony for the rehabilitation and expansion of the drinking water supply system in the city of Miragoâne, as well as visited a similar project in Les Cayes. He also learned about other initiatives supported by Haitian civil society and Spain. During his three day tour of the region the ambassador also met with the nongovernmental organization, Biwo dwa moun, which is currently implementing a project “Defending the Human Rights of Women, Children and Vulnerable Groups in Port-au-Prince, Cayes, Coteax, and Aquin” with funding from ACEID.
The joint meeting of ECOSOC, which is responsible for coordinating the U.N.’s international work on economic and social issues, and the Peacebuilding Commission will focus on measures to address community-level peacebuilding and violence reduction, including the role of women and youth. Among the questions that will be tackled, what can the international community do to help accelerate efforts in Haiti and how can civil society help.
Rae is prioritizing discussions around the recruitment of children, who now make up 30% to 50% of gangs, and prevention efforts as well as their safe exits. The issue of arms trafficking, most of which are coming from the U.S. via ports in South Florida, will also be raised.
Also likely to come up is the ongoing effects of aid cuts. Last week, the World Food Program said that its warehouses in Haiti are bare and there was just enough food stock until July. An effort by the U.N. to raise $908.2 million for its Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Haiti has so far only garnered 9% of funding.
Meanwhile, both the country and U.N. agencies are continuing to reel from recent U.S. government foreign aid cuts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. USAID has been a funder of foreign aid to Haiti, where in addition to the more than 1 million people internally displaced by gangs, the country is among one of the world’s worst hot spots for hunger with 5.7 million Haitians, nearly half of the population, facing hunger.
“No question, the USAID decisions in Haiti have been devastating. They have had a massively negative impact on what’s going on. But we also need to recognize that there needs to be other ways. We can’t just throw up our hands and say, ‘This is awful.’ We’ve got to figure out, what more can we do?” Rae said.
“That’s what Canada is doing, and that’s what we all are continuing to do, to see ‘Okay, these decisions are being made. We don’t agree with the decisions, but we’ve got to move forward and see what else we can do.’ That’s the spirit with which we’re addressing this thing.”
In addition to providing foreign assistance to Haiti, Canada is the leading financial contributor to a U.N. Trust Fund to support the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti. As of Monday, the fund had $111.9 million in pledges with the country of Denmark being the latest to offer $1.5 million last month.
As crisis in Haiti worsens, UN council calls meeting to push for international support
Jacqueline CharlesJune 10, 2025 2:25 PM
[COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65)][/COLOR]
As Haiti’s capital comes under intense gang attacks, angry Haitians in Canape Vert armed themselves with machetes and took to the streets on Wednesday, March 19, 2025 to protest the assaults and lack of response from the country’s authorities. The United Nations International Organization for Migration said gangs have forced over 60,000 Haitians to flee their homes in just one month. Johnny Fils-AiméFor the Miami Herald
Children —who make up nearly half of Haiti’s population — are being exploited, raped and recruited by armed gangs, who have also taken over many of their schools.
Some 2.85 million of them, from toddlers to teens, face famine while also being forced to flee their homes due to worsening violence.
But four months after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres presented a plan to the Security Council on how to help Haiti address its alarming gang violence, the country’s protracted crisis has only deepened, with no solution in sight.
There is still no consensus among the council’s five permanent members on the next steps to take and the U.S. is backing away, asking Congress to rescind millions of dollars in U.N. contributions. The lack of a response and budget crisis come amid a wave of fresh attacks that in April alone, displaced more than 67,000 new people after gangs moved into the country’s central region.
On Sunday, gangs continued their terror campaign, setting fire to a municipal market in the city of Mirebalais, in Haiti’s Central Plateau and also to homes in Furcy, a rural community in the hills above Port-au-Prince where some of the country’s wealthy boast vacation homes and cottages.
“When we say things are stuck, they’re not just stuck in New York or Washington. It’s also dealing with the need for Port-au-Prince, the government itself, the Transitional Presidential Council, to have a keener sense of urgency about what needs to be done,” said Robert Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.
A meeting to refocus attention
On Wednesday, Rae, who serves as president of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, will host a special meeting on Haiti alongside the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission. The goal: to keep Haiti’s protracted, multifaceted crisis in the international spotlight.
“We’re not going to rest until there’s a comprehensive plan for Haiti that is led by the Haitian authorities and has the full support of all the other countries in the world and the international community. That’s our goal, that’s our objective,” he said.
But that plan, Rae said can’t just focus on the security crisis. It has to also involve addressing the root causes of Haiti’s perennial instability and worsening violence, which include poverty, exclusion and inequality.
“We all know it as well that the security situation feeds on the inequality and feeds on the unemployment; it feeds on the vulnerability of people, the fact that kids can’t get any work, there’s no work for them anywhere else, and the human trafficking that goes on. It’s terrible,” said Rae, who also chairs the Ad Hoc Advisory Group on Haiti at the U.N. and has visited the country on several occasions. “The level of violence is out of sight, and the level of safety not only in Port-au-Prince, but in the country generally, is a level that nobody can see as acceptable.
“We’ve got to have a coherent, effective on the ground strategy to deal with it. That’s where there’s a whole lot more that could happen if we could get a political will from the communities around Haiti, and also, more broadly, to support what needs to be done.”
In recent months, a Haitian government task force operating out of the prime minister’s office has turned to using weaponized drones to go after gang leaders after signing contracts with two private security firms. However, there has been no transparency on the value of the contracts or the rules of engagement.
The government also hasn’t said how it’s planning on tackling the crisis, including how to stop the recruitment of children by armed groups. According to the UNICEF, the U.N.’s child welfare agency, an estimated 30% to 50% of gang members in Haiti are children, some as young as 8 years-old, and their recruitment has been soaring.
“When people say to me, ‘Well, development is not so important. The real issue is security.’ I say to them, you can’t separate out the two, those two things go together,” Rae said. “And you can’t separate out development and security from human rights and from creating a sense of opportunity for people.”
Ahead of the meeting, which will be broadcast on UN web TV, Rae and the special representative for the U.N. secretary general in Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, will host a press conference. Then they will move into discussions in addition to a representative of civil society, invitations have also been extended to senior U.N. officials, Haitian government officials and the Inter-American Development Bank. IDB President Ilan Goldfajn visited Haiti’s second largest city, Cap-Haïtien, last month.
International visits
Goldfajn’s visit is part of efforts by Haitian authorities to get the international community to pay closer attention to areas outside of the gang-ridden capital that are also in need of attention. In a communique on Tuesday, Spain’s Embassy in Port-au-Prince said that its ambassador, Marco Antonio Peñin Toledano, recently visited several project sponsored by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, known as ACEID, in the cities of Miragoâne in the Nippes region and Les Cayes.
The ambassador participated in an inauguration ceremony for the rehabilitation and expansion of the drinking water supply system in the city of Miragoâne, as well as visited a similar project in Les Cayes. He also learned about other initiatives supported by Haitian civil society and Spain. During his three day tour of the region the ambassador also met with the nongovernmental organization, Biwo dwa moun, which is currently implementing a project “Defending the Human Rights of Women, Children and Vulnerable Groups in Port-au-Prince, Cayes, Coteax, and Aquin” with funding from ACEID.
The joint meeting of ECOSOC, which is responsible for coordinating the U.N.’s international work on economic and social issues, and the Peacebuilding Commission will focus on measures to address community-level peacebuilding and violence reduction, including the role of women and youth. Among the questions that will be tackled, what can the international community do to help accelerate efforts in Haiti and how can civil society help.
Rae is prioritizing discussions around the recruitment of children, who now make up 30% to 50% of gangs, and prevention efforts as well as their safe exits. The issue of arms trafficking, most of which are coming from the U.S. via ports in South Florida, will also be raised.
Also likely to come up is the ongoing effects of aid cuts. Last week, the World Food Program said that its warehouses in Haiti are bare and there was just enough food stock until July. An effort by the U.N. to raise $908.2 million for its Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Haiti has so far only garnered 9% of funding.
Meanwhile, both the country and U.N. agencies are continuing to reel from recent U.S. government foreign aid cuts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. USAID has been a funder of foreign aid to Haiti, where in addition to the more than 1 million people internally displaced by gangs, the country is among one of the world’s worst hot spots for hunger with 5.7 million Haitians, nearly half of the population, facing hunger.
“No question, the USAID decisions in Haiti have been devastating. They have had a massively negative impact on what’s going on. But we also need to recognize that there needs to be other ways. We can’t just throw up our hands and say, ‘This is awful.’ We’ve got to figure out, what more can we do?” Rae said.
“That’s what Canada is doing, and that’s what we all are continuing to do, to see ‘Okay, these decisions are being made. We don’t agree with the decisions, but we’ve got to move forward and see what else we can do.’ That’s the spirit with which we’re addressing this thing.”
In addition to providing foreign assistance to Haiti, Canada is the leading financial contributor to a U.N. Trust Fund to support the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti. As of Monday, the fund had $111.9 million in pledges with the country of Denmark being the latest to offer $1.5 million last month.
Haiti better get their act together ASAP or they gonna find themselves in the same situation as the Palestinians.
What is their goal? that will determine the terminolgy used.
I’ve noticed it Depends who’s telling the story
Blackwater founder Erik Prince to send hundreds of fighters to strife-torn Haiti
Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent
14 Aug 2025
www.theguardian.com
Hundreds of combatants from the US, Europe and El Salvador will reportedly be deployed to Haiti in the coming weeks to battle the country’s gangs as part of a mission led by the controversial Blackwater founder and Donald Trump backer Erik Prince.
According to Reuters, Prince’s new security firm, Vectus Global – which has been operating in the violence-ravaged Caribbean country since March – is preparing to intensify its activities there to help authorities win key roads and territories back from heavily armed criminal groups...
Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent
14 Aug 2025
Blackwater founder Erik Prince to send hundreds of fighters to strife-torn Haiti
Critics say Vectus Global’s presence – including snipers – will undermine Haiti’s police and UN security force
Hundreds of combatants from the US, Europe and El Salvador will reportedly be deployed to Haiti in the coming weeks to battle the country’s gangs as part of a mission led by the controversial Blackwater founder and Donald Trump backer Erik Prince.
According to Reuters, Prince’s new security firm, Vectus Global – which has been operating in the violence-ravaged Caribbean country since March – is preparing to intensify its activities there to help authorities win key roads and territories back from heavily armed criminal groups...
Exclusive: Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep personnel in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes
Sarah MorlandAugust 14, 20255:00 PM UTCUpdated August 14, 2025
Aug 14 (Reuters) - The prominent Donald Trump supporter and private security executive Erik Prince says he has a 10-year deal with Haiti to fight the country's criminal gangs, and then take a role in restoring the country's tax-collection system.
In an interview with Reuters, Prince said his company, Vectus Global, would be involved in designing and implementing a program to tax goods imported across Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic once the security situation is stabilized.
He said he expected to wrestle control of major roads and territories from the gangs in about a year. “One key measure of success for me will be when you can drive from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitian in a thin-skinned vehicle and not be stopped by gangs,” Prince said in the interview.
Prince would not comment about how much the Haitian government would pay Vectus Global, nor how much tax he expects to collect in Haiti.
The new president of the transitional council, Laurent Saint-Cyr, who was inaugurated on August 7 as part of a planned rotation of council leaders, did not respond to requests for comment. Haiti's former council president and prime minister also did not respond to requests for comment.
Vectus began operating in Haiti in March, deploying mainly drones in coordination with a task force led by the prime minister, but the long-term engagement and the involvement in tax collection have not been previously reported.
A person familiar with the company's operations in Haiti told Reuters that Vectus would intensify its fight against the criminal gangs that control large swathes of Haiti in the coming weeks in coordination with the Haitian police, deploying several hundred fighters from the United States, Europe and El Salvador who are trained as snipers and specialists in intelligence and communications, as well as helicopters and boats. Vectus's force includes some French and Creole speakers, the person said.
Prince, a former U.S. Navy Seal, founded the Blackwater military security firm in 1997. He sold the company in 2010 after Blackwater employees were convicted of unlawfully killing 14 unarmed civilians while escorting a U.S. embassy convoy in Baghdad's Nisour Square. The men were pardoned by Trump during his first term in the White House.
EXPANDING ROLE
Since Trump's return to the White House, Prince has advised Ecuador on how to fight criminal gangs and struck a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo to help secure and tax its mineral wealth.“It’s hard to imagine them operating without the consent of the Trump administration,” said Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, head of the Haiti program at Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
When asked for comment about Le Cour Grandmaison's assertion, a State Department spokesperson said it has not hired Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
A senior White House official said: "The U.S. government has no involvement with the private military contractor hired by the Haitian government. We are not funding this contract or exercising any oversight.”
It's unclear whether Prince's contract would be affected by the change of leadership in Haiti earlier this month.
In an August 7 televised address, Saint-Cyr said he welcomed more international support to fight the gangs. “I am inviting all the international partners to increase their support, send more soldiers, provide more training," he said. "Help us with a more robust international force.”
The crisis in Haiti has worsened in recent years, as armed gangs gained territory and attacked hospitals, police stations and prisons, taking control of strategic transport routes and extorting funds from the population. Rights groups accuse the gangs of massacres, rapes, kidnappings and arson. About half the population is food-insecure and over 8,000 people in displacement camps face famine-level hunger.
Haiti used to collect half of its tax revenue at the border with the Dominican Republic, but gang control of key transport routes has crippled trade and cut off state income, a report commissioned last year by Haiti's government and several multilateral organizations found. This has undermined the government's ability to respond to the crisis or deliver basic services, the report said.
The Dominican Republic is a key source of grains, flour, milk, water and other food staples for Haiti, according to customs data. Haiti also relies on imports from the Dominican Republic for textiles, consumer goods, and medical supplies.
Security contractors working in Haiti have faced challenges operating in a country with entrenched links between the gangs, local police and some factions of the government.
Earlier this year, a team from American security firm Studebaker Defense abandoned their mission in Haiti after two of their members were abducted, likely due to corrupt police officials, the New York Times reported.
Mounir Mahmalat, who serves as a country coordinator of the World Bank's Fragility, Conflict and Violence Group, said that it was virtually impossible to ensure the safe transport of goods or the security of people working in Port-au-Prince.
Other security firms working in Haiti have raised questions about how Vectus would hold onto cleared gang territory as well as the wisdom of channelling resources to private security firms instead of the country's own security forces.
"Resorting to private military companies cannot be seen as a solution to insecurity in Haiti,” said Gedeon Jean, head of Haiti’s Center for Human Rights Analysis and Research. “The use of private companies has often resulted in human rights violations.”
While a private force could help police restore security, Jean warned against large spending on a foreign company while Haiti's own security forces lack funds and equipment.
Reporting by Anna Hirtenstein in London, Sarah Morland in Mexico City and Harold Isaac in Port au Prince. Editing by Suzanne Goldenberg
Our Standards:
https://www.reutersagency.com/en/li...rcom-article-media&utm_campaign=rcom-rcp-lead
Sarah is a British-French journalist covering news from across Latin America and the Caribbean, including gender violence, mining developments, regional finance and conflict in Haiti. She joined Reuters in 2019 and studied investigative journalism at City, University of London. Based in Mexico City, Sarah enjoys spicy food, dad rock and befriending the local cat population.
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