All weekend long, thousands of residents of the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, were sent into desperate flight as the gang from the neighboring quartier populaire of Grand Ravine launched repeated assaults against them. Thus far, Haiti’s Centre d’analyse et de recherche en droits de l’homme (CARDH) believes the attacks have killed at least 15 people.

Rising on the hills above downtown Port-au-Prince, Carrefour Feuilles lies due north of the neighborhood of Savane Pistache, which has also been the target of assaults in recent days, and represents something of a buffer zone between Grand Ravine and the rest of Port-au-Prince. Ruled in recent years by a triumvirate of crime lords - Renel Destina aka Ti Lapli (who currently has a $1 million bounty on his head courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice stemming from his February 2021 kidnapping of a U.S citizen) and the brothers “Killick” and “Bougoy” - Grand Ravine has been one of the repositories for Haiti’s kidnapping industry since the 2018 murder of its former boss, Junior Décimus alias Tèt Kale. At war for years with the neighboring zone of Ti Bois, which has been ruled for more than two decades by Christ-Roi Chéry, alias Krisla (who I have met and interviewed), the two areas - along with the neighboring zone of Village de Dieu - have been in a tense truce with one another since December of last year.

Before but especially since the July 2021 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, both Grand Ravine and Village de Dieu have gone from being run-of-the-mill gang fiefdoms to cultivating a kidnapping empire on an industrial scale, mirroring in their southern locale the activities of groups such as 400 Mawozo and the Krazé Barye gang to the the north and east of the capital. In recent months, disturbing allegations have surfaced regarding the possible links between the latter and the interim government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry (who has no constitutional or legal right to hold to office he currently occupies), allegations the Henry administration has done nothing to dispel by its own actions.

The acceleration of the criminal empires of the gangs hit a sanguinary speed bump this past April when gang gunmen attempted to invade the central neighborhood of Debussy. Though some residents fled, others banded together with the police, with officers and machete-wielding locals confronting rifle-wielding gang members with rocks and small sidearms. At the same time, in the neighborhood of Canapé-Vert, police intercepted a minibus with a dozen individuals, arms and ammunition. The police arrested the suspected gunmen but an enormous angry crowd of citizens formed and, without much ceremony, the men were turned over to the mob, lynched and their bodies burned in the street. The citizen vigilante movement of Bwa Kale (Chopping Wood) was born.

All spring and throughout much of the summer, it appeared that the gangs around a large swathe of the capital were on the backfoot, afraid to venture too far out of their lairs lest the be discovered and subject to rough justice. With the Grand Ravine attack on Carrefour Feuilles, however, this may be changing.

Local police officers in Carrefour Feuilles who have been fighting to defend the community against the incursion have received almost no support from the Henry government or their colleagues, despite repeated calls for aid. On Monday evening, Elixon Anescat, a Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH) agent attached to the Direction de l’Administration Pénitentiaire (DAP)-Équipe Pénitentiaire d’Intervention et d’Escorte (ÉPINES) unit was killed in Carrefour Feuilles as police clashed with gang members, who then carried his body away.

When residents of Carrefour Feuilles attempted to protest on Monday against police inaction - asking “What are the police weapons for if they cannot guarantee our safety?” - police responded by tear-gassing them when they reached the Champ de Mars plaza near the Cour de Cassation, where the state funeral of former President Boniface Alexandre was taking place. “We are not asking for much,” said one protester. “We just want to live in peace. We do not deserve this treatment from the police.”

Though the PNH issued a press release stating it would “continue to deploy all its means to [drive out] the bandits who want to sow trouble in communities,” Haiti’s Radio Métropole reported on Monday that, despite locals working to defend the neighborhood with local policeman, there had been “inaction” from higher police authorities and that a blindé (armored vehicle) parked in front of the local police station for the past weekend, “had not deterred the bandits from launching their offensive.”

Given the urban geography of Port-au-Prince, if the gangs are able to seize and hold Carrefour Feuilles, not only will they reopen kidnapping routes that had been closed to them in recent months, but they will have a virtually unopposed line of attack towards neighborhoods like Pacot, Turgeau & Canapé Vert where Bwa Kale has been the strongest and upon whom they doubtless want to exact revenge for the murder of their soldiers.

All of this takes place amid the by-now-familiar dynamic of the Henry government staring placidly on as the international community moves with glacial slowness towards the possible deployment - someday - of security support to the PNH, most recently proposed as a Kenyan-led force with Jamaican and Bahamian components.

As the capital balances on a knife-edge amid renewed gang assault, the Apostolic Nunciature in Haiti (the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in the country) has been hosting informal meetings between the Henry government and some members of the opposition, essentially meetings to come to agreements for further meetings. The discussions have been overseen by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, though exactly who his paying him for these services remains murky.

Given the reception they receive when they appear in public, Haiti’s political actors might want to set their minds to producing something tangible to the population for all their endless talking. At the funeral for the late Haitian journalist Liliane Pierre-Paul earlier this month, André Michel, a longtime opponent of Jovenel Moïse who leads what he calls the Secteur Démocratique et Populaire (which is neither democratic nor popular) and has become a hireling of the Henry regime, was chased out of the arena under a shower of water bottles and a hurled folding chair. Jean-Henry Céant, who served as Moïse’s second Prime Minister from September 2018 to March 2019 and has been sanctioned by the government of Canada for his alleged involvement in financing gangs, was also driven away. Newton Saint-Juste, a lawyer who represented the despotic former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the case of the May 2000 slaying of journalist Jean Léopold Dominique in which nine close Aristide associates were indicted (indictments that, to this day, have never been acted upon), received similar treatment.

The danger represented by the gang push into Carrefour Feuilles remains clear for all actors, local and international, to see. Will they continue to delay and debate, letting cruel chance sort out who is among the drowned and who is among the saved in the inferno that Port-au-Prince has become for its citizens? Will what passes for Haiti’s government and the international community hear and listen to the cries of the population now, before it is too late, or are we approaching yet another massacre foretold?

Michael Deibert

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