Haiti ramps up the fight against gangs in the capital, but violence spreads elsewhere

The killings in Kenscoff began late Sunday, when armed men descended on the farming community in the hills overlooking Haiti’s capital, setting homes ablaze and attacking residents. By Monday, bodies lay in the streets and survivors were searching for missing relatives.

At least 47 people were killed and 22 wounded in the raid, according to news reports, in one of the deadliest recent attacks on the once relatively peaceful area, which has increasingly become a target for armed groups seeking to expand beyond Port-au-Prince.

The massacre offered a grim coda to a new UN report released Tuesday documenting how Haiti’s gang violence is spreading geographically even as the authorities’ anti-gang campaign intensifies in Port-au-Prince.

At least 1,408 people were killed and 656 injured from April through June, according to the UN Integrated Office in Haiti, known by its French acronym, BINUH. That was about 14 per cent fewer casualties than during the first three months of the year, a modest decline masking starkly different realities across the country. More than half of the casualties were attributed to gangs, while about 40 per cent occurred during security operations against them and 5 per cent were linked to self-defense groups and vigilantes.

“These figures show that the population continues to bear an unacceptable toll from violence,” Carlos Ruiz Massieu, the head of BINUH and the UN’s top representative in Haiti, said in a statement accompanying the report.

Security operations have constrained gang activity in parts of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, including Delmas and Tabarre. But the pressure appears in some cases to have displaced violence rather than suppressed it.