More bodies found in Haiti’s streets amid week of police, gang clashes

Violence continued in Haiti’s capital on Friday, with a dozen bodies found scattered through the streets in a week of clashes between the police and armed gangs.

Currently the most affected area of the capital is Petion-ville, in the hills of Port-au-Prince, where more than 30 bodies have been found in the streets in less than a week. On Friday the scenes of recent days were repeated there, this time in the Haut-Delmas area, where the remains of a dozen people were found. EFE witnessed the bodies – most burned and some piled up – lying in the streets, while life went on with a certain normality around them: neighbors walked next to the smoking remains and vehicles drove around them until municipal services arrived. The remains were then loaded onto stretchers and put into an ambulance to be buried in a common grave at the cemetery.

These have been almost daily scenes this week in Haiti, where violence continues unchecked, especially since the end of February, when new steps were taken and attacks on institutions, public buildings, companies and private property added to the usual kidnappings, massacres and rapes. The situation worsened further when, after an assault by armed gangs, some 3,000 prisoners escaped from the capital’s two main prisons, including members and leaders of the powerful gangs. Violence, along with rampant inflation and poor harvests, have led to Haiti experiencing the worst food insecurity data ever recorded, with “record levels” of hunger, the World Food Program (WFP) warned Friday. The United Nations agency said that, according to the latest analysis of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (ICF), 4.97 million people, almost half of Haiti’s 11 million population, face “crisis” or worse levels of acute food insecurity, and of these 1.64 million are at “emergency” levels. Among the most affected areas is the Artibonite valley, considered the country’s breadbasket, “where armed groups have taken over farmland and stolen harvested crops.” Faced with this situation, the WFP warned that “humanitarian operations in Haiti are woefully underfunded” and that the agency needs $95 million over the next six months.

“Now more than ever, donor support is needed to allow WFP to keep its programs up and running and continue serving the most vulnerable Haitians caught in this crisis,” it said. The World Health Organization (WHO) also sounded an alarm about the health and humanitarian situation in Port-au-Prince, which is worsening due to the closure of its airport and the difficulty of access to the port, given that the surrounding areas are controlled by gangs. It did not rule out the situation deteriorating significantly in the coming weeks if fuel becomes scarce and access to essential medical supplies does not improve soon, saying there is already “a pressing need for safe blood products, anesthetics and other essential medicines,” and only half of Port-au-Prince’s health facilities are “functioning at their normal capacity.” These needs are even greater among the thousands of displaced people who have fled their homes — and even refugee camps — due to the violence, and wander around Port-au-Prince in search of a safe place. EFE mm-acm/tw