Thousands of Haitian citizens marched through the streets of Port-au-Prince on Wednesday to protest escalating gang violence and their government’s failure to control it.
Some of the protesters told Reuters they wanted to demonstrate their defiance of the gangs and their refusal to live in fear. Many of the protesters were armed with clubs and machetes, and some carried guns.
Others said there was plenty to be afraid of and they faulted their government for not doing enough to defeat the gangsters. Some wondered if government officials were actively colluding with the gang lords, who seem to have a great deal of money to spend despite Haiti’s general poverty.
“Do you see what is happening? Today, Haitian people will fight to be free already. We are free. Those men today cannot frighten me,” one Port-au-Prince resident told Reuters.
And fight they did, as police attempted to break up the demonstrations and gunfire rang out. At least a dozen of the protesters fired their guns at police near the offices of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime and his transitional government in Port-au-Prince. The crowd panicked at the sound of gunshots.
Other demonstrators blocked roads with stacks of flaming tires and chanted “Let’s go and get them out!”
A protest organizer explained to the Associated Press (AP) that they wanted to “take over the prime minister’s office and burn down the CPT.” CPT stands for Conseil Presidentiel de Transition, the transitional governing council.
Gregoire Goodstein, chief representative for the U.N. International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Haiti, said the surge of gang violence over the past month has displaced over 60,000 people.
“We have never observed such a large number of people moving in this short time,” Goodstein said.
Monday’s gang attack on the central Haitian town of Mirebalais seems to have galvanized the public to greater heights of both anger and despair. The attack included a raid on the local jail that freed about 500 prisoners. The IOM said over 5,900 people from Mirebalais and the neighboring town of Saut d’Eau were left homeless by the attack.
The Miami Herald spotted red-and-black flags in the crowd, traditionally the symbol of the Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from the 1950s to the 1980s. The protesters have apparently embraced the flag as a means of expressing severe discontent with the current government, a grievance they also expressed by spray-painting “Down with the prime minister’s office” on the walls of buildings.
The Miami Herald noted that, awkwardly, one of the protest organizers is himself a police officer who works for the presidential palace unit, and also manages a “citizens’ self-defense brigade.”
Thursday was the one-year anniversary of the agreement that established the transitional government, which is currently mired in corruption allegations and has lost a great deal of public confidence by failing to schedule new elections.
The last election in Haiti was the one that sent Jovenel Moise on his ill-fated journey to the presidential office. The 2016 election was a do-over, after Moise won the 2015 election, but his victory was annulled by accusations of cheating.
