Violence Between Gangs in Cite Soleil

Haiti Reborn/Quixote Center, Haiti Report, 9 September 2002

Twenty people have been killed, many injured, and some 400 houses have been set on fire in the latest wave of violence that has swept Cite Soleil since August 19, according to a resident interviewed on Radio Haiti Inter.

The population of the city’s largest shantytown recently elevated to the status of commune are on full alert. Many of them have been forced to leave their homes to escape the violence that has engulfed Cite Soleil over the last twenty days. The inhabitants of Boston, Brooklyn, Soleil 9, and Route Nine are particularly affected by violence and ghettoization of their commune.

It all began when someone called Ti Fre killed Valentin Michel, the resident explained. Since then, twenty people have been killed and many dozens more wounded. Rape, theft, pillage and arson are the norm nowadays for those who have not fled for their lives. At least three gang leaders, two of them going under the names of Ti Lepe and Miguel, were killed in exchanges of fire between rival armed groups, notably those from Anba Ray and Anwo Ray, the two sides of the old railway track that used to transport sugar cane to the HASCO refinery.

This is new. Before the victims were just usually ordinary people and not gang leaders, added the interviewee. Gangsters under the leadership of a certain Colonel put an end to several months of calm in Cite Soleil when on 19 August they killed Valentin Michel and the sixty-year-old Maurice Louis, and wounded many others in the area.

Colonel is one of the prisoners who escaped from the prison in Gonaives when it was attacked by armed men who freed Raboteau neighborhood leader Amiot Metayer, and over 150 other prisoners, on 2 August. (HPN, translated by HSG, 9/4)