In Haiti, Gangs Gain Power as Security Vacuum Grows - The New York Times

Gangs have long held sway in the country, but their dominance has expanded in recent years and the government has been accused of using them as tools of repression.

It was organized by senior Haitian officials, who provided weapons and vehicles to gang members to punish people in a poor area protesting government corruption, the U.S.

Since then, Haiti’s gang members have grown so strong that they rule swaths of the country.

After gangs shot at a government convoy and shut down the official commemoration of the death of the country’s founding president on Sunday, Mr.

The brazen kidnapping of 17 people with an American missionary group over the weekend, believed to have been carried out by a rival gang called 400 Mawozo, underscored the growing power of Haiti’s gangs.

And while the American government and United Nations have long been aware of the growing connection between the gangs, the government and the Haitian police, they made few moves to combat the problem, partly for fear of upending what little stability Haiti had, current and former officials say.

“His administration weakened the police and justice system,” Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, said of Mr.

And then, they used the gangs to massacre the people in the slums.”.

Espérence’s organization has documented more than a dozen armed attacks by gangs since 2018, leading to the death or disappearance of more than 600 people.

In many cases, those reports cite a police role in the killings, including the involvement of active officers and the use of equipment like armored cars or tear gas.

But the “intellectual architect” of the massacre in 2018 was Joseph Pierre Richard Duplan, an elected member of the president’s party who provided weapons to gang members, the Treasury Department said last December.

Duplan admonishing gang members during the attack, a United Nations report stated, saying, “You killed too many people.

Both the American government and the United Nations, whose support are considered essential ballast for any Haitian president, have been accused of turning a blind eye to repeated reports of gang infiltration in his government.

In November 2017, Haitian police officers — including Mr.

Cherizier, who was still on the force at the time — raided a school campus, looking for a cache of weapons, according to an internal inquiry conducted by the Haitian government.

Police officers with the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti, who were working with the Haitian police and helped plan the operation, had been standing guard outside.

In protest, the Moïse government recalled its ambassador to the United Nations.

spokesman, said in a statement that the justice support mission had not authorized the “high-risk search” conducted by the Haitian police.

The United Nations withdrew its large peacekeeping force in 2017, with a damaged legacy that included peacekeepers introducing cholera to the country and sexually abusing and impregnating girls as young as 11.

After several massacres involving gang members and Haitian police officers, including Mr.

Cherizier, more than a hundred members of the United States Congress wrote to the Trump administration in 2019 to demand an investigation into extrajudicial killings by the authorities.

Kidnappings have exploded, long surpassing last year’s high, which itself had increased significantly from the year before, according to the United Nations.

Cherizier, who leads a rival collection of gangs, has denied any links to the government.