Yet another gruesome gang horror has played out in Haiti, as at least 184 people — most of them elderly — were variously slashed, hacked or shot to death on the orders of a warlord who’d been advised that aging slum residents had used sorcery to give his son a severe illness. Interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé called it “a barbaric act of unbearable cruelty.”
The brutality was reportedly ordered by Monel “Mikano” Felix, who leads the Wharf Jeremie gang. The carnage took place on Friday and Saturday in the densely-populated seaside slum of Cité Soleil, a neighborhood in the capital city of Port-au-Prince which The Guardian has called Haiti’s “most notorious slum…Much of the slum is an open sewer…infant children bathe in water contaminated with sewage. The stench is unbearable.”
According to a human rights group, Felix’s son had contracted a serious illness, and he sought the counsel of a Voodoo priest, or “bòkò,” who advised the murderous warlord that elderly people in the gang’s area of operations were harming his son through the use of witchcraft.
“He decided to cruelly punish all the elderly people and Vodou practitioners who, in his imagination, might be capable of sending an evil spell to his son,” said Haiti’s Committee for Peace and Development in a statement reported by the Haitian Times.
Members of the gang surrounded the neighborhood, then proceeded to search the shacks for people over 60 years old, who were then hacked with machetes, slashed with knives and shot with guns.
The victims included some younger people who tried to defend the gang’s elderly targets. Bodies were dragged into the streets where they were mutilated and torched, filling the neighborhood with a foul stench of death. Felix’s ailing son died as the massacre was being carried out.
In a statement issued via Facebook, Haiti’s feeble government said “A red line has been crossed, and the state will mobilize all its forces to track down and eliminate these criminals. Justice will strike with exemplary rigor.”
Given Haiti’s police forces have been plagued by mass desertions amid the country’s deep descent into chaos, that promise rings hollow to say the least. “These latest killings bring the death toll in Haiti this year to a staggering number of 5,000,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk on Monday.
As domestic law enforcement grows ever-more-desperate, foreign governments have failed to follow through on their commitments to send help:
In June, a Kenya-led multinational police force was deployed to help Haitian authorities regain territory from gangs but has since made few advances amid chronic shortages of funding and personnel. A little more than 400 of the 2,500 foreign officers pledged to the mission have been deployed. — Wall Street Journal
Haiti’s descent into a Hellscape accelerated in 2021, when President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. Since then, gangs have ruled almost the entire capital city, perpetrating extortion, kidnapping, rape and murder on mass scale.
Mass murder is frequently used to punish neighborhoods accused of undermining a gang — as was the case with an October massacre that killed at least 70 people, including women and children, in Pont-Sondé, 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince. More than 700,000 Haitians have fled their homes, and half live in hunger as gangs control ports and thwart food and fuel distribution.
Last weekend’s attack is not the first time Felix’s gang has lashed out at supposed practitioners of witchcraft: In 2021, his thugs were accused of killing a dozen elderly women under that same suspicion, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network.
