They have a stranglehold on the country’s infrastructure, from police stations to seaports. They have chased hundreds of thousands of people from the capital. And they are suspected of having ties to the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president.
Western diplomats and officials say the influence and capability of many Haitian gangs are evolving, making them ever more threatening to the Kenyan-led multinational police force soon deploying to Haiti as well as the fragile transitional council trying to set a path for elections.
With their arrival just days away, the 2,500 police officers will confront a better equipped, funded, trained and unified gang force than any mission previously deployed to the Caribbean nation, security experts say.
Once largely reliant on Haiti’s political and business elite for money, some gangs have found independent financial lifelines since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and the collapse of the state that ensued.
“The gangs had been making their money from kidnappings and extortion and from payouts from politicians during elections and the business elites in between,” said William O’Neill, the United Nations-appointed human rights expert for Haiti.
“But the gangs are now much more autonomous and don’t need the old guard’s financial support,” he added. “They have created a Frankenstein that is beyond anyone’s control.”
Aiding the gangs is an arsenal more powerful than any they have ever possessed before, according to two Justice Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments. Since February, some gangs have acquired automatic weapons — possibly a mix of arms stolen from regional militaries and others converted from semiautomatic rifles, the officials said.
The gangs have also changed their public posture, posting social-media videos of themselves acting like militias with national ambitions and less concerned with their usual turf wars.
Some of Haiti’s gangs started working together last September, when they announced the alliance called Vivre Ensemble, or Living Together, just days after the Dominican Republic closed its land border with Haiti.
The idea was to unite the gangs to overcome the obstacles that the border closure posed to their drug-smuggling operations, according to two Western diplomats focused on Haiti who were not authorized to speak publicly.
But the alliance fell apart about a week after it was announced, after some two tons of cocaine was stolen from the Haitian gang leader Johnson André, known as Izo, the diplomats said.
Izo’s 5 Segonn gang, or “Five Seconds” in Creole, is believed to be the largest cocaine trafficker in the country, sending much of its product directly to Europe, according to the diplomats.
In late February, Vivre Ensemble was resurrected. The gangs publicly pledged to overthrow the country’s prime minister and vowed to resist the Kenyan-led security force once it…
2024-05-21 00:04:22
Link from www.nytimes.com
