In Haiti, an unelected government struggles to maintain order with an inadequate and corrupt police force, as gang violence spreads across the country. Is peace possible?
The places that were free of violence seemed to have been pacified by force. People in the capital were talking about a government prosecutor, Jean Ernest Muscadin, who had “solved” the gang problem in Nippes, a rural province west of Port-au-Prince, using what they referred to half admiringly as “tough methods.” Muscadin’s reputation had grown swiftly after a video circulated of him shooting a gang suspect to death.
In office, Duvalier had himself declared President for Life. After a furtive coup tried to force him out, he formed a paramilitary force known as the Tonton Macoutes, a name borrowed from a bogeyman figure of Haitian myth. The Tonton Macoutes, heavily armed and backed by vodou priests, kidnapped political rivals and terrorized the populace with murders and rapes. The country’s democratic institutions never recovered.
Gangs tend to flourish when the state is weak, and the state was weakened profoundly in 2010, when an earthquake devastated Haiti. A large section of Port-au-Prince was destroyed, and more than two hundred thousand people were killed. Even the Presidential Palace collapsed. In the chaos that ensued, the police dispatched death squads to pursue prisoners who had escaped from the city’s jail. In some cases, civilians struck out at looters, and at others who seemed like a threat.
Ariel Henry, a former neurosurgeon who is now Haiti’s unelected leader, confesses that he has no solution to the security problems. “Haitians are very resourceful,” he says. “Maybe they will invent something.”One evening during my visit, Martelly gave a raucous outdoor concert, delighting the crowd by pantomiming a giant phallus and teasingly asking if he should take off his pants. In mid-set, he paused to introduce his chosen successor, Jovenel Moïse. The two men were unlikely allies.
Barbecue lives in the central district of Delmas, a commercial strip that runs about a hundred blocks from the center of Port-au-Prince up into the surrounding hills. He was born and raised there, amid a warren of houses cobbled together from brick, concrete, and tin. Now in his mid-forties, he claims to have acquired his nickname as a child, when his mother sold chicken on the street, though a persistent rumor maintains that the name derives from his treatment of enemies.
For several minutes, Barbecue studiously ignored me, apparently absorbed by his iPad. I asked him what he was reading. “I read the news,” he said, looking up briefly. Any particular kind? “Nothing special,” he said. “Everything.”
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