Police patrol around Bernard Mevs Hospital, where armed gangs have spread violence, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Dec. 17, 2024. (Clarens Siffroy, AFP, Getty Images via TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — The first fighting contingents of soldiers and military policemen from Latin America arrived in Port-au-Prince on Friday to join the armed international security mission in the country’s fight against terrorizing gangs.
The 83 security personnel arrived included an advance team of eight soldiers from El Salvador and the first 75 of 150 military police officers from Guatemala. While the Salvadorans will be be providing casualty and medical evacuations in support of the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission, the Guatemalans will be joining operations to take down Haiti’s gangs. Their presence adds a much requested beefed up military presence to the fight, which until now has been mainly police-led.
The group, which traveled aboard a U.S. Air Force aircraft, was greeted at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport by Haitian authorities including the head of the Presidential Transitional Council, Leslie Voltaire, Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and police chief Rameau Normil. Also present was U.S. Ambassador Dennis Hankins as well as the commander of the force, Godfrey Otunge, and deputy commander Colonel Kevron Henry of the Jamaica Defense Force.
Otunge told the Guatemalans and Salvadorans that they were joining “a family that is welcoming.”
In preparation for the additional boots on the ground, the Biden administration has flown at least 22 flights into Haiti in the past month with much needed equipment for the Haitian police and the Kenyan mission including armored vehicles.
The group’s arrival has been long awaited and comes at a critical moment for Haiti, which is seeing an alarming rise in armed attacks in the metropolitan area.
For days now, armed gangs from the Grand Ravine and Martissant areas of Port-au-Prince have been getting more aggressive and determined to control Pétion-Ville and mountainous areas of Laboule, Fermathe and Kenscoff after burning and looting several businesses in the lower parts of the capital near the international airport earlier in the week, and attacking hospitals and journalists in December.
The latest attempt at Pétion-Ville, a wealthy suburb that has been relatively free from gang control in the gang-ridden capital, has led to fierce battles with security forces and members of local self-defense groups on one side, and dozens of heavily armed gang members on the other. Gang control of the area would give armed groups greater access to Pétion-Ville by allowing them to easily descend from the mountains above the suburb.
Gangs’ continued inroads and control of territory both in Port-au-Prince and the neighboring Artibonite region have triggered fears and outrage both inside and outside of Haiti where no one has been immune from the widespread violence.
Ahead of the contingents’ arrival on Friday, the United Nations designated expert on Human Rights in Haiti, William O’Neill, urged the international community to do everything it can to help Haitian authorities combat the rampant insecurity “and ensure the realization of the right to health, including unhindered access to health facilities, goods and services.”
O’Neill expressed concerns that recent gangs attacks and threats aimed at health facilities are not random spasms of violence but intentional assaults on the healthcare system, which is already on the verge of collapse with just 37% of health facilities in metropolitan Port-au-Prince fully functional.
“Access to health care and the lives of those who provide it are clearly at great risk in Haiti,” said O’Neill, who was designated by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in April 2023. “Criminal gangs have murdered and kidnapped physicians, nurses and health care workers, including humanitarian workers. The gangs have burned, ransacked, and destroyed many hospitals and clinics, forcing many to close or suspend their operations.”
“The situation,” he added, “is compounded by the high number of medical staff fleeing the country fearing for their lives.”
On Dec. 17, armed gangs in the capital set fire to one of the only critical care and trauma facilities in the country, the Bernard Mevs Hospital, which is also the reference hospital for injured police officers. A week later, gangs attacked another medical facility, the Hospital of the State University of Haiti, better known as the General Hospital. As the authorities prepared to reopen the hospital and journalists waited, gang opened fire, killing several journalists and a policeman, while wounding others.
The Christmas Eve attack, O’Neill said, underscores that Haiti remains one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, many of whom have been killed in recent years or forced to flee the country in the face of death threats.
“The state must also investigate and arrest those responsible for the attacks and ensure that they are brought to justice,” he said.
Gang violence killed more than 5,400 people in Haiti last year, according to the U.N. It has also led to the displacement of more than 700,000 people, including 41,000 since November who were forced to flee amid fresh attacks in Port-au-Prince. In addition to the violence, thousands of Haitians outside of the capital are also homeless after torrential floods washed out their homes in the southern and northern regions of the country last month.
The Central Americans will now join 416 police officers and military soldiers from Kenya, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Belize. They are expected to be joined by other personnel in the coming days, including the remaining 75 Guatemalans who have been deployed to join the U.N. authorized and heavily U.S. financed security mission.
Central America’s offer of help
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo first announced the deployment of his troops in September at the U.N. General Assembly, three months after volunteering to deploy a contingent from the Guatemalan Army with personal equipment to help Haiti take on violent gangs.
Two months later, El Salvador’s Congress also agreed to send troops to help Haiti with medevac operations. The country’s president, Nayib Bekele, first announced on a post on X in March that he could help fix Haiti but needed a U.N. Security Council resolution, the consent of the host country and all expenses of the mission covered. In the end, however, rather than soldiers carrying out gang operations, his troops will be involved in helping to save the lives of those injured by evacuating them to the neighboring Dominican Republic, which has offered to provide medical assistance as part of its contributions to the MSS.
U.S. officials first announced in December that they were working to grow the mission to 1,000 personnel before year’s end, with additional personnel joining from Guatemala, The Bahamas and Kenya. Though the deployments were delayed until after the Christmas holiday, the goal remains the same: By boosting boots on the ground, the mission will finally be able to have the impact many envisioned.
Since its deployment in June, the police-led international force has struggled to take control of gang strongholds and has not arrested any major gang leaders. Rather than seeing a decrease in violence, Haitians have seen gangs seize control of more territory and carry out three major massacres since October.
In December gang members in Port-au-Prince targeted and killed more than 100 elderly residents in the Wharf Jérémie neighborhood. That same weekend, another massacre was carried out in Petite-Rivière, a small rural town in the Artibonite region where residents were killed by both gang members and a neighborhood vigilante group that was formed to protect itself from gangs.
Meanwhile, the country’s main international airport in Port-au-Prince remains off limit to U.S. commercial and cargo carriers — at least until March — due to an ongoing Federal Aviation Administration ban. The ban was announced after three U.S. commercial jetliners sustained gang gunfire as they flew over Port-au-Prince’s airspace on Nov. 11. While JetBlue Airways has said its daily service remains suspended until at last April, American Airlines announced the indefinite suspensions of flights between Miami and Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
The stepped-up reinforcement to the Kenya-led security mission comes not only amid the worsening gang violence but also deepening political turmoil in the ongoing transition. Last month, the U.N. Integrated Office in Port-au-Prince issued a plea to Haiti’s political actors to redouble their efforts to keep their commitments in order to move toward the restoration of social peace and the organization of elections.
“Security efforts will only allow concrete and lasting progress if they are effectively accompanied, in parallel and in a spirit of consensus for the common good, by progress toward the organization of credible, participatory and inclusive elections in Haiti, as soon as possible,” the U.N. office said. “In this period of major uncertainty and emergency, political stability is necessary for an improvement in the situation in the country.”
First authorized for a year, the mission was recently extended until October of this year by the U.N. Security Council. Despite its extension, however, it continues to be under-resourced despite the United States providing hundreds of millions of dollars for operations including the construction of its base near the international airport in Port-au-Prince. In addition to suffering from the lack of personnel and equipment such as helicopters, the force has also lacked strategy, some observers say, pointing out that it’s been based more on the availability of supply rather than demand.
Despite the mission’s setbacks, it is still viewed by some as a necessity to help Haiti’s under-equipped and understaffed police force to take on heavily armed gangs, some of whom have gained access in recent days to military-grade automatic rifles.
But with President Joe Biden preparing to exit the White House this month and being replaced by President-elect Donald Trump, the mission’s fate remains uncertain. Republicans in Congress were among those who opposed efforts by the State Department to provide funds to the mission, forcing the administration to override lawmakers and to use Biden’s presidential powers to get the necessary funding to begin deployment.
Biden administration officials, who are currently lobbying at the Security Council to get the mission transformed into a formal U.N. peacekeeping mission, say they plan to provide nearly $628 million in financial and in-kind support before leaving office. The support, which has been arriving on U.S. military flights, includes additional armored vehicles, radios, night-vision goggles and drones.
“We are squarely focused on continuing to do everything we can to support and address the insecurity crisis in Haiti,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said in November after the Federal Aviation Administration first issued the ban against U.S. flights after the gang attack. “We are also pursuing the government of Haiti’s request to transition the MSS into a UN peacekeeping effort, so the support of the MSS mission is —can ultimately be sustained over a long term. And ultimately, our hope is that it paves the way to security conditions that result in holding free and fair elections.”
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