(Tribune News Service) —Ganthier, a rural community 28 miles east of Port-au-Prince and 14 miles from the Dominican Republic border, was among the last holdouts from gang control in Haiti.

For two years, the town’s residents resisted one of the country’s most notorious gangs, fighting alongside their local police against bandits who raided and pillaged businesses, kidnapped U.S. missionaries and launched repeated attacks in the area.

On Thursday, as Ganthier found itself on the verge of a full-blown gang take-over, Haitian police, joined by Kenyan officers who are part of the Multinational Security Support mission, launched an offensive. After weeks of planning, meetings and joint patrols to familiarize the foreign forces with Port-au-Prince’s dizzying landscape, the first major attempt to take down a gang and regain control during an active attack was underway.

The reinforcements arrived in two armored vehicles, and were soon joined by a third stationed up the road in Fond-Parisien, a neighboring community close to the Dominican border. Among what the officers found: a destroyed police station, an emptied-out city and gang members on the run.

Hours earlier, the town’s mayor had sounded the alarm.

“If in 72 hours there is no significant reinforcement, no action taken, Ganthier will have fallen completely to gang control ... all the way to the Dominican border,” Mayor Jean Viloner Victor told the Miami Herald. “This is dangerous not just for the commune, but for the nation.”

In the fight against gang rule in Haiti, Ganthier stands out not just because of its citizens’ resistance but its strategic location: Control of the town would allow gangs to spread their violence eastward all the way to the Malpasse border crossing with the Dominican Republic. That reach, Victor and area business owners say, would provide uninhibited access to Haiti’s porous border, allowing gangs to easily smuggle weapons, ammunition and other contraband across.

But before arriving at Malpasse, 400 Mawozo gang members would first need to take over Fond-Parisien, a neighboring rural community. It’s the town where retired Kansas City vascular surgeon Ted Higgins built and runs one of the only medical facilities still operating in the area since gang attacks made travel to and from Port-au-Prince risky. The Higgins Brothers Surgicenter for Hope is located seven miles from Malpasse and Ganthier.

“Ganthier has been our front line and until recently they’ve been able to hold back the gangs and we’ve been able to operate,” said Higgins, whose clinic sees between 1,500 and 2,000 patients a month.

After police failed to regain control of Ganthier on Wednesday, Higgins asked his doctors and other staffers living in a housing complex — which he built in Fond-Parisien to keep them safe from gang attacks while traveling to and from work — to relocate.

“This is not good for us, to have Ganthier fall like that,” he said. “We are the next step. We need help.”

Help finally rolled through late Thursday afternoon. But instead of arriving by helicopter, as both Higgins and Victor had anticipated, it came by road.

The Multinational Security Support mission, which began arriving in Haiti a month ago, has been outfitted with armored vehicles, radios, high-caliber weapons and drones — but no dedicated air or sea assets, a U.S. State Department spokesperson confirmed.

The lack of helicopters, planes and boats is a significant constraint in the fight against gang violence, say security experts and area residents who note that the gangs are expanding their grip outside of Port-au-Prince.

“Armored vehicles alone aren’t sufficient to tackle the type of criminality we have here,” said Victor, who had pleaded for helicopter support.

Réginald Delva, a former public security official, said he doesn’t see how the mission can be successful in Haiti’s terrain — bumpy roads, agricultural and and ramshackle dwellings — without air support. “The gangs know where to hide, and without aerial support, you cannot conduct a serious operation, even if you have drones,” he said.

With no access to choppers, which are a standard in traditional United Nations peacekeeping operations, both the Haitians and Kenyans spent hours Thursday mapping out a plan of attack. It required not just secrecy, but a way through a street blocked with shipping containers in neighboring Croix-des-Bouquets, which gangs used to cut Ganthier off from the rest of Port-au-Prince.

“It makes so much sense to use helicopters,” Higgins said.

Brian Nichols, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, who visited Haiti earlier this week, doesn’t disagree.

But aviation, he said, is expensive “and we’d like to see other countries step up to provide those resources.”

The U.S. is the largest donor to the multinational security support force, providing $309 million from the State and Defense departments and another $60 million in equipment and services from other U.S. government agencies. Nichols said the amount, along with $21 million in contributions to a U.N.-controlled trust fund, is sufficient to support the 400 Kenyan police officers currently in Haiti and the 200 or so who will be arriving shortly from Jamaica. But the mission needs more money.

Nichols said there are several conversations taking place about the resources, policing and security. One of the questions is whether the mission needs to have as many as 2,500 personnel, as has been projected, and whether they should all be based in Port-au-Prince.

“One of the reasons why you have this deployment of the MSS in support of the Haitian national police is so the Haitian national police can take on some of the other jobs,” Nichols said. “The requirement for them to defend vital infrastructure had sort of taken up a large chunk of their forces.

Gang invasion

On Sunday, gang members invaded the Ganthier, setting fire to the police station and a customs annex. In a video showing the destruction Lanmou Sanjou, the current leader of the 400 Mawozo gang, compared himself to a sleeping lion that becomes dangerous once awake. Then he announced his next target: Fond-Parisien, he said, and there would be blood.

Nichols, who visited Haiti on Monday along with Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said the issue of Ganthier was raised by Prime Minister Garry Conille during a meeting.

Last week, in an address to the nation, Conille said the government had declared a state of emergency for 14 areas under gang control and he had asked the police, along with the Haitian army and the Kenyans, to carry out anti-gang operations in those communities. Despite his declaration, sources involved in conversations with government officials about sending reinforcements to Ganthier told the Herald that they were beginning to lose hope that anything would be done to help the city.

Late Thursday, word came that the two armored vehicles were moving through the city, where hours before gang members had roamed the streets with heavy artillery and taken “control of every government building,” Victor said.

Delva, the security expert, said although Haiti’s powerful gangs are not carrying out the same kinds of coordinated attacks they did in late February and March after trying to capture Port-au-Prince, they are still very active.

Over the weekend, when police were called to respond to Ganthier, they were also deployed to Gressier and Léogâne, two cities south of metropolitan Port-au-Prince, the spokesman for the Haiti National Police, Michel Ange Louis-Jeune,s confirmed this week.

“Gangs are on standby mode … waiting to see,” Delva said.

In Ganthier,Victor said he is anxiously waiting to see if the joint operation will return a sense of normalcy to his community of 92,000.

“It is really alarming,” he said. “The gangs are pillaging people’s properties. They are the ones making the law, and controlling the city.”

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