Dr. Ronald V. LaRoche hasn’t been able to cross dangerous territory to inspect the hospital he runs in Haiti’s Delmas 18 neighborhood since it was ransacked by gangs last week, but a TikTok video he saw offered clues to his current condition: let’s disappear.
He learned from neighbors and others who dared to venture into gang territory that the Jude-Anne hospital had been ransacked and cleared of anything of value. It was the second hospital to close.
“They took everything: the operating rooms, the X-rays, everything from the labs and the pharmacies,” Dr. LaRoche said. “Conceived! They’re taking windows from hospitals! Doors!”
Haiti is in the throes of an uprising the likes of which has not been seen in decades. As politicians across the region scramble to find a diplomatic solution to a political crisis that has Prime Minister Ariel Henry stranded in Puerto Rico and gangs attacking police stations, a humanitarian disaster is rapidly escalating. Food supplies are threatened and access to water and healthcare has been severely reduced.
André Michel, an adviser to the prime minister, said Henry had refused to resign and called on the international community to take all necessary measures to ensure his return to Haiti.
US and Caribbean leaders tried to convince Henry that remaining in power was “untenable”. An international security mission led by Kenya was blocked. The United States offered to fund the mission, but showed little interest in sending its own troops.
The US military carried out an operation on Sunday to add more security forces to the US Embassy and airlift non-essential personnel out of the country, US Southern Command said in a statement. “No Haitians were on board the military plane,” the statement read.
As gangs expand their territory and unite in concerted attacks against the state, millions of people across the country find themselves caught in the middle. Many are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being caught in the crossfire. They are hungry. They are running out of clean water and gas. They are desperate.
“Everyone around me is running,” said Dr. LaRoche, who packed his bags and closed three other medical facilities to prevent further looting. “Women, children and elderly people have bags over their heads and flee on foot. It’s a war zone.”
Gangs that have spread across the country over the past year joined forces last week to attack state institutions, freeing thousands of prisoners. They are calling for the resignation of Mr. Henry, who has been barred from returning to Haiti due to violence surrounding the airport and grounding all flights.
The chaos forced people to protect themselves as best they could.
“The biggest fear is stray bullets,” Nixon Boumba, 42, said at Haiti-based consultant to the American Jewish World Service, an international aid and human rights organization.
Last weekend he called the motorbike taxi driver he usually uses to go shopping. “He told me: ‘I can’t come now. My brother was hit by a stray bullet,’” Mr. Boumba said.
The driver’s brother was hit in the stomach and is hospitalized. Another friend’s daughter was hit in the jaw by a bullet on the campus of the city’s main public university, she said.
Blondine Tanis, 36, a radio broadcaster who was kidnapped for ransom in July by people on her street who then sold her to another gang who held her for nine days, said the violence in Haiti it was nothing like what he had seen before. She compared it to the 1991 coup that led to three years of military rule, but she was a child then.
“There are kids in the streets with heavy automatic weapons,” he said. “They shoot people and burn their bodies without remorse. I don’t know how to qualify it. I wonder what happened to this generation. Are they even human?”
Ms. Tanis said she applied to enter the United States through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program.
As the security situation worsens, so does food insecurity. According to the United Nations, nearly one million of Haiti’s 11 million people are on the brink of famine. About 350,000 of them are on the run, living on the streets, in tent cities or in overcrowded schools, as gangs invade their neighborhoods.
Most people now leave their homes only to do essential things, such as going to the bank or shopping for food and water. They take advantage of the break in violence to go shopping. But experts fear supplies will soon start to dwindle as more and more goods pile up on the docks, because road transport is too dangerous and criminal gangs have seized ports.
One person described the scene at the supermarket on Saturday as a “carnival” because so many people spent hours queuing to stock up on supplies. Zanmi Lasante, a health organization affiliated with Partners In Health that has operated in Haiti for decades, said it has enough fuel to run its generators for about a week.
Doctors Without Borders had to increase bed capacity from 50 to 75 as more people who could not access the closed public hospital showed up with gunshot wounds. A patient arrived at 3pm to treat a gunshot wound from that morning. He died minutes later, said Dr. James Gana, who treats patients and helps run the clinics.
Doctors Without Borders recently reopened an emergency medical clinic in the city center after it had been closed for several months because gang members took patients from an ambulance and then killed them in front of the organization’s staff. Blood and oxygen supplies are running low.
“Very soon we will have shortages of everything,” said Jean-Marc Biquet, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. “There is no more petrol in the petrol stations. People sell fuel in little buckets and no one knows where it comes from.”
Without a supply of clean drinking water, the risk of cholera increases, he said.
Mario Delatour, 68, a director, said he hadn’t found bottled water for three days. A generous neighbor with a water treatment system filled him a five-gallon bottle on Saturday, but he still needs gas for the generator that powers his house. His neighborhood, a relatively safe haven, has had no electricity for three months.
“I have enough fuel for tonight, but I don’t know for tomorrow,” Delatour said. “I’m a little tense. That’s an amazing thing, man.
Julio Loiseau, a community activist in Port-au-Prince, said that without electricity, foodstuffs deteriorate quickly, when you can find them.
“To get bread you have to line up very early in the morning,” he said. “The only bread factory cannot cover its needs due to the shortage of supply. My pleas are over.”
Jean-Martin Bauer, director in Haiti for the United Nations World Food Programme, noted that the financial situation of many people is particularly precarious because it is too dangerous for people to go out to work, and many people earn money in a day. -on a daily basis.
“What’s happening in Haiti is a prolonged episode of mass starvation,” Bauer said. “This is probably one of the causes of what is happening. We know that hunger is linked to instability and is a fertile ground for conflict, strife and mass migration.”
Frantz Louis, 35, a security guard waiting his turn Saturday, said he, like many Haitians, believes Haiti has “completely collapsed.”
“The best solution for a young person for now is to leave the country,” he said. “If you want to stay in your country and you can’t eat and you can’t go wherever you want, what other choice do you have?”
Mr. Louis said he wondered what the end game of the gangs was. “Do they have an ideology?” he asked.
Robert, a 41-year-old furniture maker from Port-au-Prince, who did not want his name published for fear of retaliation, said he had been forced to sell his furniture for less than it cost him to build. .
“Sometimes you buy rice and you don’t have any more money to buy vegetable oil and spices, and that’s what happened to me last week,” said Robert, from his outdoor workshop. “Now the rice is gone and I have to find another piece of furniture to sell at a low price – and also I need a customer.”
Robert has a wife and two children, a 7 year old boy and a 15 year old girl. He also avoids looking at the large wardrobe that he built in December and which he was unable to sell.
“The day I have no more furniture to sell,” he said, “I will be hungry.”
