By Harold Isaac and Sarah Morland
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) -Gang members brandishing automatic rifles stormed through a town in Haiti’s main breadbasket region, killing at least 70 and forcing another 3,000 to flee, causing widespread shock even in a country grown accustomed to outbreaks of violence.
More people were severely injured in the attack in the early hours of Thursday at Pont-Sonde, in the agricultural region of Artibonite. Gran Grif gang leader Luckson Elan took responsibility for the massacre, saying it was in retaliation for civilians remaining passive while police and vigilante groups killed his soldiers.
The gang members reportedly set fire to dozens of homes and vehicles in one of the deadliest attacks in recent years in the embattled Caribbean nation that has seen many massacres and little justice for their victims.
“This odious crime against defenseless women, men and children is not only an attack against victims but against the entire Haitian nation,” Prime Minister Garry Conille said on X.
Conille added that security forces were reinforcing the area.
The killings are the latest sign of a worsening conflict in Haiti, where armed gangs control most of the capital Port-au-Prince and are expanding to nearby regions, fuelling hunger and making hundreds of thousands homeless, while promised international support continues to lag and nearby nations deport migrants back to the country.
“The gang did not meet any resistance,” Bertide Horace, spokesperson from the Dialogue and Reconciliation Commission to Save the Artibonite Valley, told Reuters, adding that police officers remained in their station, perhaps thinking they would be outgunned by the gang members.
An armored truck stationed in nearby Verrettes also failed to mobilize, added Horace, two of whose family members were injured during the attack.
Haiti’s national police did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Many victims were shot in the head as gang members went house to house, Horace said. “They were left to shoot anybody, everybody was running everywhere. They were walking, shooting people, killing people, burning people, burning homes, burning cars.”
Rights organization RNDDH said the death toll is likely higher as entire families were wiped out. “At the time of writing, corpses are strewn on the ground as their loved ones have not yet been able to recover them,” it said in a report.
RNDDH said rumors had been circulating for two months about a potential massacre in retaliation for residents’ help for a vigilante group that was preventing the gang from extorting money on the national highway through the town.
“If funds allocated to the intelligence service of various state institutions had been used effectively, the Pont-Sonde massacre could have been avoided,” it said.
PARALYZED JUSTICE
The Artibonite has been the scene the worst violence outside the capital, and residents have long called for more protection. Many residents of Pont-Sonde fled to nearby Saint-Marc, where the already under-resourced public hospital is struggling to treat the injured.
The Gran Grif gang is based in the area and accused of mass kidnappings, rapes, murders, hijackings and forcing farmers off their lands, as well as high levels of child recruitment. Its leader Luckson Elan was sanctioned by the U.N. last month.
In an audio message shared on social media on Thursday, Elan blamed the town’s victims and the state for his gang’s attack.
According to the U.N., no progress has been made in the cases of any mass killings committed since 2021, as well as several major massacres since 2017.
Police are alleged to have taken part in some mass killings. Gang leader Jimmy “Barbeque” Cherizier, a former police officer was accused by the U.N. of planning and taking part in the 2018 killing of 71 civilians in the capital’s port-side neighborhood of La Saline.
Cherizier, who leads a gang alliance in the capital, said the attack was part of a strategy to further disrupt food supplies.
The port, a key supply corridor, has been closed since late last month due to gang attacks, worsening a dire food crisis.
LONG-DELAYED SUPPORT
Pont-Sonde is a major rice producer located in Haiti’s breadbasket region.
The World Food Programme has blamed gangs operating in the region, extorting farmers, stealing crops and forcing workers off their lands, for spiraling food prices and shortages that have pushed 5 million into severe food insecurity and thousands in Port-au-Prince to famine-level hunger.
The number of people internally displaced by the conflict has meanwhile surged past 700,000, nearly doubling in six months despite the partial deployment of a long-delayed U.N.-backed mission mandated to help under-resourced police restore order.
The U.N. refugee agency on Friday warned of disastrous shortages in food and medical supplies and gangs blocking the transport of humanitarian aid.
Haiti has so far received a fraction of the resources it was promised and been frustrated in efforts to bring in a formal U.N. peacekeeping mission. Several countries made formal pledges, but so far only around 400 officers have deployed, mostly from Kenya.
A spokesperson for U.N. chief Antonio Guterres on Friday reiterated calls for more support to the mission.
The U.N. estimated at the end of September that 3,661 people were killed in the gang violence since January. It believes the gangs are armed largely by guns trafficked from the United States.
Nearby countries including the Dominican Republic and U.S. have meanwhile continued to deport migrants back to Haiti, despite U.N. pleas not to do so.
(Reporting by Harold Isaac and Sarah Morland; Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez, Bill Berkrot and Christian Plumb)
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