According to the United Nations, heavily armed gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, where they rape, kidnap and kill with impunity. Haiti does not manufacture firearms and the UN prohibits their importation, but this poses no problem for criminals. When they go shopping, the United States is their arms store. The semi-automatic rifles that unleashed human carnage from an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., to a Walmart in El Paso are also being used to threaten the Haitian government and terrorize the population.
U.S. authorities seized some of the weapons in the Mawozo 400 plot before they could be smuggled in, and Joly, St. Louis and two others pleaded guilty to federal arms trafficking conspiracy charges. The gang would soon gain notoriety for the kidnapping of 17 American and Canadian missionaries.
Other guns, purchased in part through ransom, entered Haiti undetected. That’s the most common outcome, analysts say, because of access to the United States, corruption in Haiti and insufficient oversight in both countries.
William O’Neill, the independent U.N. expert on human rights in Haiti, called conditions here “cataclysmic.” The presidency is vacant; the Prime Minister announced his intention to resign; the National Assembly returned home. Security forces are overtaken by criminals, who have gained power since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
O’Neill said last week it was “unbelievable” that “guns and bullets continue to flow into gangs, mainly from the United States.”
“Everyone needs to enforce the arms embargo much more vigorously, but certainly by the United States,” he said, “because if the gangs don’t have weapons or bullets, they lose their power.”
The flow of American weapons to criminals is a growing problem in the Caribbean.
Nearly 85% of weapons found at crime scenes in Haiti and submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available, came from the United States. In the Bahamas, in 2022, this figure was 98 percent.
Last year, exasperated Caribbean leaders declared the flood of US arms a “direct threat to our democracy” and urged Washington to join their “war on arms”.
“The right to bear arms remains the subject of a raging debate in the United States,” said Philip Davis, Prime Minister of the Bahamas. “We have no intention of getting involved,” but “their right to bear arms (…) should not give them the right to traffic in them.”
U.S. officials say they are trying to disrupt what they describe as a relatively new flow.
Anthony Salisbury heads the Miami Office of Homeland Security Investigations. Historically, he said, the largest shipments and most powerful weapons moving through South Florida were destined for Central and South America.
But in recent years, Salisbury said, authorities have noted a “slight increase” in the number and size of weapons smuggled into Haiti. When they seized .50-caliber sniper rifles, a belt-fed machine gun and a cache of other high-powered weapons bound for Haiti in 2022, he said, “It hit us over the head with a hammer “.
Traffickers take advantage of Miami’s break-bulk port, a miles-long stretch of the Miami River lined with cargo ships that transport goods broken into individual items rather than transported in containers. Haitians in Florida use them to send rice, beans and other supplies to loved ones.
When cargo ships are loaded, Salisbury said, they look like a “giant, floating thrift store” — and are notoriously difficult to search.
“We were able to get very solid investigative information that there was a shipment of weapons on a Haitian cargo ship,” he said. “It would take us weeks to unpack it and look for it, and we still wouldn’t find it.”
In recent weeks, as gangs have unleashed the worst violence this country has seen in decades, shutting down the Port-au-Prince airport, destroying open prisons and pressuring embattled Prime Minister Ariel Henry to he resigned, leaders from the United States, Haiti and the Caribbean came together to find a solution.
They announced the creation of a “transitional presidential council” to appoint an interim replacement for Henry and lead the country to elections.
But stability is unlikely, says sociologist Roberson Édouard, as long as the United States does not redouble its efforts to combat arms trafficking.
“Gangs have a destructive and murderous power that relies on infrastructures located outside Haiti,” said Édouard, author of “Violence and Social Order in Haiti.” “In all the discussions, there is no question of measures aimed at cutting off the sources which fuel the gangs’ murderous capacity: access to weapons and ammunition. This problem comes from the United States.
By some estimates, there are half a million unauthorized firearms in the country of 11 million people, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported this year. The Haitian National Police reported 38,000 authorized weapons in 2015.
Some weapons arrive in Haiti via the country’s porous land border with the Dominican Republic. The UN has also identified 11 “clandestine” airstrips here that are “rarely patrolled”.
But many arrive by sea. They are dismantled into parts and hidden among legitimate goods, wrapped in foil or trash bags, hidden in cars or multi-gallon barrels, buried under clothing or items toilet.
In the poorest country in the hemisphere, heavily dependent on imports, it is impossible to search all the goods that arrive. The same goes for patrols along its 1,100 miles of coastline.
Coast Guard divisional inspector Gilbert Guichard said the agency lost about a quarter of its nearly 220 employees to the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program. Just three of them the boats are operational, he said, “and even then they barely work.”
To add to the challenge, some Haitian authorities are in cahoots with smugglers.
Garry Jean Baptiste, advisor to the Haitian National Police Union, said the coast guard, understaffed and underequipped, can go months without patrolling the waters. But uncontrolled seas, he warns, “could lead us to catastrophe.”
“The weapons that cause insecurity in Haiti are American-made,” Jean Baptiste said. “We want to understand why the United States cannot prevent these weapons from entering Haiti, thus poisoning the lives of the population. »
Guns trafficked to Haiti are often purchased by straw buyers in states like Florida, where gun laws are permissive and there are large Haitian communities. A .50-caliber sniper rifle that sells for $10,000 in the United States can fetch $80,000 in Haiti, Salisbury said.
The Biden administration and Congress agreed in 2022 to increase penalties for straw purchases and gun trafficking. The Justice Department last year appointed a coordinator for gun-related prosecutions in the Caribbean.
U.S. and Haitian officials agreed in February to create a joint investigative unit aimed at strengthening the ability of both countries to prosecute such crimes.
But a Justice Department official said Haitian police are so overwhelmed by the security crisis that they are not focusing on gun tracing — a key tool for U.S. investigators. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.
William Kullman, former ATF deputy chief of international affairs, visited Haiti before the devastating 2010 earthquake. Even then, he says, the police academy was “dysfunctional.” Some police officers collected weapons from crime scenes and kept them for themselves because they were very poorly equipped.
“It was very frustrating trying to strengthen the capacity of nations to combat arms trafficking, while considering our own contributions to the problem,” he said. “Even if we had minimal export controls, a lot of these things wouldn’t happen.”
Samuel Oakford in Washington contributed to this report.
washingtonpost
