“Madame, madame. They are putting fire everywhere. I just heard it on the radio.” It was late morning last Thursday and Monique Clesca’s gardener, Calixte, had come dashing into her home in the mountains above Haiti’s capital with hair-raising news. “He was in shock,” said the 71-year-old political activist and author. “I knew something was wrong even before he spoke.”
All afternoon, Clesca flicked between Port-au-Prince’s plethora of FM stations, trying to fathom the mayhem unfolding outside. Their progressively alarming broadcasts told of gang members with machine guns marauding through town, sending residents scattering for cover.
One group of fighters was seen advancing on the international airport. Another mob had stormed a university, shooting a student in the ear. Police stations had been sprayed with bullets and burned.
By the time Radio Métropole’s 6pm evening news came on air, Clesca had no doubt what had transpired. “The gangs had taken over the city,” the writer said.
Over the next seven days, members of Haiti’s ruthless, politically connected gangs would launch an unremitting wave of attacks across the capital, leaving in their wake what the country’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, called “a cortege of fire, blood, corpses, incalculable damage and fear”.
“It has been pure terror,” Clesca said, describing the despairing mood among her peers. “It is sadness. It is terror. It is horror. It is anxiety. It is desolation.”
A full picture of the uprising – not to mention the tangled and obscure political and economic calculations driving it – is still emerging. On Thursday – one week after the turmoil began – the disorder and uncertainty continued, with one US official warning: “The government could fall at any time”. If gang fighters seized the airport or presidential palace, “it’s over,” the official told the news agency McClatchy.
The death toll remains unclear, although numerous bodies have been dumped in the streets and at least six police officers have been killed. Haiti’s debilitated government has said almost nothing about the convulsion bar a lackluster statement thanking citizens “for their calm, despite the very difficult times”. Haiti’s prime minister – and acting president – Ariel Henry, was abroad when the unrest began and has been unable to return. The future of the politician, who took power after President Jovenel Moïse’s 2021 assassination plunged Haiti into a spiraling security crisis now reaching a crescendo, looks bleak.
But a chronicle of Haiti’s seven days of bedlam – and interviews with witnesses and experts – paints a startling portrait of how an already vulnerable country and its citizens have been pushed to the limit by a highly calculated revolt whose political architects remain in the shadows.
“This not just random violence and this is not gangs taking power. It is gangs bringing down power,” said Romain Le Cour, a security expert from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Who or what would replace it with remains unclear.
Daniel Foote, the outspoken former US special envoy to Haiti, said: “I believe that the situation in Haiti has kind of crossed a Rubicon here. It’s gone from being protests against Ariel Henry to a full-on revolution.”
Le Cour was in a “red-orange” zone of Haiti’s violence-racked capital conducting research when the fighting broke out last Thursday morning. His first hunch something extraordinary was afoot came not over the radio, but from the man he was interviewing: a resident of Carrefour Feuilles, a strategically located suburb from where gang fighters were reputedly marching north towards the heart of the capital. “There is something big coming – this is not just like normal shootings,’” the man warned.
Soon after, the researcher’s phone confirmed that premonition. A barrage of WhatsApp alerts brought news of attacks in other parts of town, including the police academy just south of the US’s fortress-like embassy. Gunmen and police were exchanging fire outside the Poste Marchand market near the city centre. “There was a lot of shooting for almost an hour,” said Liline, a midwife in her 20s who lives nearby.
Shortly before 2pm, a tweet from one of Haiti’s police unions, the Syndicat de la Police Nationale d’Haïti, captured the scope of the battle: “There are shootings all over downtown, students and vendors are running in all directions like crazy ants.”
The perpetrators of the violence quickly identified themselves. That morning, the infamous gang leader Jimmy Chérizier – a former special forces police officer nicknamed Barbecue – had summoned a small group of reporters to one of his strongholds. As anarchy spread, a nine-minute video was posted online in which Chérizier took responsibility and claimed he was leading a coalition of gangs that had united to bring down the unelected Henry, who has repeatedly resisted calls for a political transition.
“The people of Haiti must be free – and we will achieve that with our guns,” declared Chérizier, dressed in black tactical gloves and a balaclava and vowing to stop the prime minister coming home. Which, if any, political players lay behind the attempted power grab was not made clear.
The next morning Port-au-Prince’s stunned citizens woke to an uneasy calm. After a day of “hellish turmoil” Haiti seemed to be on holiday, Le Nouvelliste reported, facetiously. The lull was short-lived.
Within hours there were reports that fighters were trying to invade Port-au-Prince’s container port. Chérizier called another outdoor press conference, appearing flanked by a dozen gun-toting bodyguards in ski masks and straw hats. The gangster’s finger hovered near the trigger of his semi-automatic weapon as he gave further details of his anti-government crusade.
“It was like a complete takeover,” said Clesca, astonished that Haiti’s government seemed to have almost entirely disappeared. “It was a massive assault on the city.”
Even more shocking developments lay ahead. At 9.21pm on Saturday, the police union tweeted another panicked appeal. It urged members of the security forces to race to the city’s main prison to help repel a gang onslaught apparently designed to free thousands of dangerous inmates. If the criminals escaped, “no one in the capital will be spared”, the union warned. “TOGETHER we can avoid the disaster.”
At around the same time, gunmen tried to overrun the international airport. “The gunfire was so intense, I thought they had reached my level in the building,” said one of the terrified police officers inside, who asked not to be named.
Airport security managed to beat back the assailants, but by daybreak on Sunday it became clear the national penitentiary had fallen. Nearly 4,000 inmates had fled, vanishing into the smoke and havoc consuming the second largest city in the Caribbean. Cadavers lay outside the jail’s shattered entrance, putrefying in the sun. “Our police officers … did not succeed in stopping the bandits from rescuing a large number of prisoners,” the government admitted in a chastening press release – its only public statement on the violence to date.
As Haiti’s already fragile government appeared to crumble and gangsters occupied the city’s football stadium, the airport terminal filled with anxious citizens and foreign visitors whose organizations or governments had advised them to get out. The mood in the check-in zone grew twitchy after an American Airlines flight to Miami was cancelled.
Le Cour, who was among those trying to leave, secured a seat on one of the last flights to the US before the airport shut down. “Before we took off, people were just crossing themselves a thousand times,” the security expert remembered. “People were just praying for the plane to actually take off.”
Le Cour voiced relief at having departed but said he feared for the safety of Haitian colleagues and friends left behind to face a “devastating” humanitarian emergency.
Monique Clesca can see the besieged airport, which army troops are still battling to defend, from her hilltop home but has no plans to leave.
Part of an opposition coalition known as the Montana Group, Clesca said she was determined not to capitulate to the growing sense of doom. Instead, she vowed to keep struggling for a peaceful, democratic future so Haiti was no longer continually disparaged by headline writers as the hopeless “poorest country in the whatever”.
“Two-thirds of the population is under 24. They are the ones who are going to inherit this country. And I think it is a responsibility, it is a duty, to leave something worthwhile for them ... so they don’t think dying in the sea is better than staying and working in Haiti,” Clesca said.
“I am fully into resistance mode. I’m not putting my head down. No,” the writer insisted.
“We are fighting and we have been fighting for a long time and we are continuing to fight because I believe Haiti is worth it.”
