By David C. Adams
On Thursday morning, Bertide Horace, a local leader in central Haiti, was startled awake by a frantic phone call from a woman in distress.
“The gang is invading Pont-Sondé, please send assistance,” the woman stated, according to Horace.
At that time, members of a Haitian gang equipped with automatic firearms were wreaking havoc in Pont-Sondé, as reported by the United Nations, local human rights organizations, and videos recorded by residents during the attack, shooting indiscriminately and igniting homes and vehicles.
When Horace, located about 10 miles away in Saint-Marc, arrived with heavily armed officers four hours later as dawn broke, she recounted that the streets were littered with corpses.
“People were emerging from their hiding spots, attempting to escape,” she shared during an interview. “It was utter chaos.”
According to her, the injured roamed the area “pleading for help.”
The violence, attributed to the Gran Grif gang, has resulted in at least 88 fatalities, including 10 gang affiliates, as stated by the U.N.
Two of the deceased, Horace mentioned, were her cousins who worked in agriculture. They were found lifeless outside their wooden homes in Pont-Sondé, a farming community with a population of about 10,000, situated roughly 60 miles north of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Almost 6,300 individuals fled their residences following the assault, according to the U.N. migration agency. Numerous survivors, now without homes, are currently residing in tents in the main square of Saint-Marc.
The gang seemed to specifically target civilians who had allied themselves with a self-defense faction formed in the area, as Haiti’s police have been largely incapable of safeguarding them from criminal organizations, the U.N. noted.
One survivor, Anièce Raphaël, 51, reported that she was resting in Pont-Sondé with five family members when the gang invaded the town.
She and three relatives fled to neighboring hills, but an aunt and a 12-year-old nephew who stayed behind were shot.
“We had to lie flat on the ground,” Raphaël recounted, explaining how they concealed themselves in the darkness while the gang continued to fire. “We were terrified.”
During a brief pause in gunfire, she and her family escaped.
“I had to run for quite a while,” stated Raphaël, who is currently sheltering with a friend. “The only logical escape was to climb the hills. We encountered others doing the same.”
The morgue at the sole hospital in Saint-Marc was unable to accommodate additional bodies arriving from the massacre, necessitating that some be dispatched to private funeral homes, according to Dr. Frantz Alexis, the hospital director.
The hospital received numerous patients suffering from severe gunshot wounds. “It was a highly distressing situation,” Alexis remarked.
This massacre, the most extensive mass killing in Haiti in decades, presents a significant setback to an international initiative aimed at restoring order to a nation that has been devastated by a severe outbreak of gang violence since the assassination of its last elected president in 2021.
A multinational force ratified by the United Nations and spearheaded by Kenya began arriving in Port-au-Prince over the summer, tasked specifically with tackling the gangs whose reign of terror has instigated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises.
Families have been living in temporary shelters for months, and approximately half of the population is struggling to secure sufficient food, according to humanitarian officials. About 700,000 individuals remain displaced due to the violence.
However, with merely over 400 officers, far short of the projected 2,500, the multinational force’s patrols have mainly stayed within Port-au-Prince. There is virtually no presence outside the capital in areas where gangs have proliferated.
Pont-Sondé and Saint-Marc lie in the Artibonite region, a critical rice-producing area where at least 20 gangs are recognized to operate. A major thoroughfare runs through this region, connecting the capital to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s primary northern city, and gangs are vying for control of it to conduct kidnappings and extort citizens.
The day prior to the massacre, Horace reported that Gran Grif gang leader, Luckson Elan, issued a threat via social media, cautioning residents that he would punish them for not paying the tolls established by the gang for using the main road.
Horace, who is a lawyer and radio host, remarked that the massacre was the peak of escalating terror unleashed by the Gran Grif gang in the region over the past two years, and she had attempted to alert authorities about the gang’s activities.
The Haitian National Police did not respond to requests for comment. The local police chief in Pont-Sondé was dismissed the day after the massacre, as per an official government statement released in the Haitian media.
Horace said that she and Elan grew up in the same town in the Artibonite region, not far from each other. In October 2022, his gang raided her hometown, Petite Riviere, burning her home and causing the deaths of 11 members of her family, according to Horace.
“He’s one of the most notorious criminals in the country,” she stated.
Both Elan and a local politician accused of aiding his rise to power have recently been sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council and the Biden administration.
Elan has been linked to numerous crimes and human rights violations, such as murder, sexual assault, extortion, and kidnapping, according to statements from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
In the weeks prior to the massacre, Horace said Elan had been issuing threats against Pont-Sondé through audio messages shared on social media. “It was broadly recognized that he was planning something,” she commented.
In one audio message that Horace indicated was released days before the attack and shared with The New York Times, Elan is heard speaking to the residents of Pont-Sondé: “We have bullets and ammunition to accomplish what we intend to do.”
Simultaneously, experts noted that the Haitian police are also facing dwindling resources, with only about 10,000 officers for the entire nation, often finding themselves outnumbered and outgunned during confrontations with gangs.
Monsignor Max Leroy Mésidor, the Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince, made an urgent appeal to the government following the massacre.
“Who is safeguarding the population?” he asked in an audio message. “The population has had enough.”
