SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
We've reported here at NPR about how gangs took advantage of the power vacuum that formed after Haiti's president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated in 2021. Since then, the country has been without an elected leader and hasn't held elections since 2016. Because of gang violence, thousands of people have been killed and more than 1 million internally displaced. Now a new report from the United Nations says violence is spreading to rural areas. I spoke with the Miami Herald's Jacqueline Charles, who covers Haiti, and asked what most struck her about this U.N. report. And a warning - this story mentions sexual violence.
JACQUELINE CHARLES: You know, what stuck out to me is how horrific the violence is when it does take place, even in the capital. They make note of that. There was one line where they spoke about a kid who was accused of raping a 9-year-old. And "justice" was delivered to him, quote-unquote. He was killed by members of the gang. There were other stories that were pointing out where another child was killed by a stray bullet. The report also speaks about the so-called self-defense groups and how they've come up to provide protection, but at the same time, they've also been accused of some of the abuse.
PFEIFFER: To some extent, does life still go on? Is there a level of fear where people don't even want to leave their homes anymore?
CHARLES: On any given day, you can end up in the capital, and you watch what's happening, and you could say, oh, my God, what has the media been talking about? People are out. They're in the streets. They're going up and down. There's cars. Kids are in uniforms. They're going to school. That's on Monday. And then on Tuesday, that same area is on complete lockdown.
I was just in Haiti in September. We visited a camp with over 5,000 people. The situation was dehumanizing. You are walking through these corridors. You're talking to people. You see the desperation on their faces, and, you know, as poor as this country is, as much as people have struggled, the life in the camps is something that they are not used to. And they talk about the loss of dignity and how they're struggling with that.
Outside of the camps, you realize, oh, my God, I am in the 10% that's not under gang control. But still, there's no guarantee that violence isn't going to erupt. Just yesterday, the gangs and the police were involved in violent clashes, and people were told to stay indoors, to shelter in place because there were drones - weaponized drones overhead. The gangs were on motorcycle. They were fighting with the police. You know, this is the situation that Haitians are having to deal with in the capital and now in regions outside of Port-au-Prince.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. And because it's spreading to regions outside, what are the implications of that for Haiti?
CHARLES: If you have the kind of violence in Cap-Haitien that you have in Port-au-Prince, you can basically say that the country has gone to gangs. I mean, Haitians are barely holding on now, but the country doesn't have the security forces to combat this. We saw that in the recent police operations, the police - they seized a, quote-unquote, "weapon of war," which is a Barrett 50 (ph). This is a gun that can basically pierce through most armored vehicles and also walls. It's now in the hands of a number of gang members. Yet, this is a country that's under an arms embargo.
PFEIFFER: Several other countries and companies have been trying to help get the gang crisis in Haiti under control. There's that special Kenyan police force deployed to Haiti, sanctioned by the U.N. Any sense of whether those efforts have been successful at all?
CHARLES: So at the end of September, the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution that was written by the Trump administration for a gang suppression force, which will replace this current Kenyan-led multinational security support mission. It is supposed to have, you know, additional funding and equipment. We have not seen that yet. And so everybody is looking to see, when is that going to arrive? In the recent police operations, which you've seen, is this company that has been founded by Erik Prince, who formerly founded Blackwater. They have been assisting the Haitian government with weaponized drones, but we have seen collateral damage. We've seen children who have been killed because the drones missed their targets.
At the same time, we are seeing a beefed-up effort by the Haitian National Police and those foreign police officers in country to go after the armed gangs. But when I talk to Haitians, they warn, you're not going to be able to kill and jail your way out of this crisis. I mean, the gang crisis there is a symptom of much larger problems. But when you listen to the rhetoric around the security effort, what you're hearing is, you know, jail them and kill them all.
PFEIFFER: Any sense of when and if elections could realistically happen?
CHARLES: So there is this pressure coming from the Trump administration for Haiti to put an election calendar together - right? - to have elections. But what kind of elections, elections for whom, and what are these elections going to look like? People forget that we got into this crisis not because of the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise - that just made things worse. But Haiti got into this crisis because it started as an electoral crisis. He came into power with a lot of questions about his own elections, his own legitimacy and whether or not he had a mandate. He was elected with barely 500,000, you know, voters going to the polls. So this is a very critical moment. We know that elections are not going to happen in November. We hear, you know, early next year, but how can you put in elections when you don't have the security apparatus in place?
PFEIFFER: From your reporting perspective, how does this end for Haiti?
CHARLES: You know, Haiti is a country where the impossible becomes possible, and I don't think anybody can ever predict what's going to happen in Haiti. I think what everybody who's reporting or living in Haiti and living this drama, what you're always, you know, fighting against is the next chapter of chaos, you know, because just when you think things are bad, they can always get worse, even when you think you are in the worst of it.
PFEIFFER: That's Jacqueline Charles. She's a reporter at the Miami Herald. Thank you for covering this.
CHARLES: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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