Heavily armed gangs attacked Haiti’s central region over the weekend, killing men, women and children, setting homes on fire and forcing survivors to flee into the darkness.
Police made an emergency call for backup, claiming that 50% of the Artibonite area had come under gang control after mass attacks targeting cities including Bercy and Pont-Sonde.
“The population cannot live, cannot work, cannot move,” SPNH-17, one of Haiti’s police unions, said on Sunday X.
Most of Haiti’s police force and Kenyan officials leading a U.N.-backed mission to help repel the gangs are in the capital, Port-au-Prince, which is itself largely controlled by the gangs.
Guerbi Simias, an official in Pont-Sonde, said on Monday that they had confirmed about a dozen deaths, including a mother and her child and a local government employee.
“The gangs are still in Pont-Sonde,” he said, noting that no additional police have arrived.
Many survivors fled to the coastal city of Saint-Marc, where hundreds of angry people gathered on Monday to demand that the government take action against gangs that have repeatedly attacked Haiti’s central region.
“Give me the guns! I’m going to fight the gangs!” said René Charles, who survived the attack. “We must stand up and fight!”
The crowd tried to break into the mayor’s office and an unidentified man told the Associated Press that they would no longer trust the government: “We’re going to take justice into our own hands!”
Charlesma Jean Marcos, a political activist, said the gang had announced last week that they were going to invade the area, and they alerted authorities but to no avail.
“Right now, the only people really fighting (the gangs) are self-defense groups,” he said. “No country can run like this.”
Marcos urged all survivors sleeping on the street and in public parks to sleep inside police stations and government offices until the government withdrew from Artibonite.
“A lot of people are going to go hungry,” he warned. “We can support you today, we can support you tomorrow, but we won’t be able to support you forever.”
More than half of Haiti’s population already faces crisis levels of hunger or worse, with gangs blocking main roads and ongoing violence that has displaced a record 1.4 million people.
The attacks in central Haiti began late Friday and late Saturday, with gang members broadcasting them live on social media.
The attacks were blamed on the Gran Grief gang, which is active in the region and was responsible for an attack on Pont-Sonde in October 2024 that killed at least 100 people, one of the largest massacres in Haiti’s recent history.
“I heard heavy shooting, so much shooting,” said one man who said he was trapped inside his home all weekend. “Why don’t they send any drones to Artibonite? They only use drones in Port-au-Prince. I think this gang is special. They don’t want to destroy this gang.”
A spokesman for Haiti’s national police did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The Gran Griff is considered one of the most brutal gangs in Haiti. Its leader Luxon Elan was recently banned by the United Nations Security Council and the US government. Sanctions were also imposed on former lawmaker Profane Victor, whom the UN accused of arming youth in the Artibonite region.
The UN has said killings have increased dramatically in Haiti’s Artibonite and Center departments this year, with 1,303 victims reported from January to August, compared with 419 deaths during the same period in 2024.
A recent UN report said, “These attacks underscore the gang’s ability to consolidate control over a corridor from the center to Artibonite amid limited law enforcement presence and military constraints.”
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