Escalating Gang Violence in Haiti and the Emergence of Vigilante Groups
Haitian civilians take matters into their own hands to combat rising gang violence as gangs gain control of 90% of the Port-au-Prince capital.
Although Haiti has long experienced periods of political instability, almost none have been so dire as the deterioration we are currently witnessing. One of the largest contributors to this instability was the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. Since then, Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been ruling by decree alone, and even prior to the assassination, no official legislative elections had been held since 2019 and no presidential elections since 2016. Few elected officials have remained in office since then and the last of them have officially departed as of January this year. This leaves Haiti with not a single elected representative in the country.
However, pinpointing the Moïse assassination as the beginning of the political instability in Haiti is not entirely accurate. Many argue that Haiti never fully recovered from the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the centre of their capital, Port-au-Prince, in 2010 and the widespread cholera outbreak that followed. At its peak there were 820,000 cases of cholera in Haiti, and transmissions remained endemic through 2019. This was later followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and yet another 7.0 magnitude earthquake that occurred only a few months after Moïse’s assassination, causing catastrophic damage to the lives of Haitian citizens.
The weakness of Haiti’s intuitions and the devastation left behind from natural disasters and disease outbreaks have left the country ripe for an explosion of gang violence. As of August 2023, Haiti has over 150 criminal networks at play and approximately 90% of Port-au-Prince is currently controlled by gangs. The police remain severely understaffed with only 9,000 total officers for Haiti’s total 11 million population, and without a functioning government, institutions remain too weak to contain the threat that gangs present.
Between June and July of 2023, a record 2,094 homicides were reported, a 67% increase from the latter half of 2022. Much of these recorded homicides includes innocent civilian victims, especially those that are caught in the crossfires of turf wars that have now engulfed Port-au-Prince. There have been reports of gang members using civilians as human shields, beheading them in public, and burning people alive. Sexual violence is also frequently used as a scare tactic, most predominately against women and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Often civilians who are accused of affiliation with rival gangs become the victims of such violence and are tortured/killed as a warning to others.
Gangs also control most of the roads connecting into major cities like Port-au-Prince. Due to poor road infrastructure, there are limited key roads that lead into urban areas and gangs capitalise on this as ways to implement tolls and extort travellers. This has severely limited the ability to deliver necessary goods into the city such as food and fuel. With this lack of essential goods, 4.9 million Haitians are food insecure (nearly half its total population) and electricity outages are common in most areas of the city.
In light of the inability of Haiti’s institutions to handle this spike in gang violence, vigilante groups have formed and taken matters into their own hands. They have given themselves the name Bwa Kale which translates literally to peeled wood in Haitian Creole and is a metaphor for swift justice. They first arose after a particularly devastating round of gang violence in that month alone.
In the small district of Canapé Vert in Port-au-Prince, a band of 14 suspected gang members were successfully detained by a local police force, and civilians came to the scene demanding justice. They ended up storming the group of detainees, killing them on the scene by stoning and burning them alive. Images and videos of the attack were shared widely on social media, and in the days following, similar incidents arose in other areas of Port-au-Prince. These included civilians overrunning gang houses and taking suspected gang members from police detention to kill them in the streets.
However, their tactics can be problematic, especially as many of those targeted in the waves of mob violence are not given a chance to prove their innocence. Similarly, it is easy for violence to get out of hand and for civilians in the area to become inadvertent victims of these brutal mob killings. This even includes the incident in Canapé Vert that is widely acknowledged as the start for the Bwa Kale movement, where at least one police officer was reported to have been mistakenly killed in the chaos.
Although brutal, Bwa Kale’s tactics did yield positive results. In the month following the creation of Bwa Kale, there were no reported abductions and only 43 assassinations compared to 146 in the month prior. However, some are highly critical of the role Bwa Kale has played as a vigilante justice-seeker. The World Politics Review and Insight Crime both published articles warning of the potential threat the movement could cause to Haitian civilians and their violent tendencies. Yet, others express more understanding for the circumstances that have led up to the need for this type of vigilante violence.
“We must not forget that extreme poverty and the lack of basic services lie at the root of the current violence and of the gangs’ power over communities,” said United Nations High Commissioner Volker Turk, adding that “The Government, with support from the international community, must do its utmost to comply with its obligation to provide people with regular and unimpeded access to clean water, food, health and shelter.”
In response to Bwa Kale, a leader of one of the gangs in Port-au-Prince expressed that they would be responding to the movement with Zam Pale, or to “let the weapons speak for themselves.” These threats of retaliation infer the likely possibility of increased violence from the gangs in Port-au-Prince, especially as they try to curb the Bwa Kale movement.
In response to the escalating violence from both gangs and vigilante groups, the UN Security Council unanimously approved (with Russia and China abstaining) the implementation of a multilateral security mission in Haiti on 2 October 2023. This Kenyan-led security mission has already received a pledge of support from other Caribbean nations, such as Jamacia, Bahamas, and Antigua and Barbuda who have all promised to send additional officers to assist in their mission. It has also received substantial financial aid, including $100 million (£79 million) from the United States. The mission is set to deploy before the end of 2023, and their ability to curb the growing state of anarchy in Haiti will soon be seen.
Image courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps via Flickr, ©2023. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
