The night before, Jimmy Boursicot, a carpenter who lives nearby, heard two gunshots. He looked carefully out his window, checked his watch—it was 8:24 p.m.—and saw two men driving away, leaving the body behind them, not far from the university administration office and one of Haiti's largest telecommunications companies. He added that a few hours later, the men returned and burned the remains.
The smell of the dead wafts through the streets of Port-au-Prince.
It is a horrific new sign of violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million. In the absence of an effective state, violent armed gangs controlled more than 80 percent of the capital, according to United Nations estimates. The sounds of gunfire are getting louder at all times. Residents who dare to leave their homes find bodies left where they fell.
The temperature in Port-au-Prince reached 92 degrees on Friday. Human rights activists say the smell of decomposing bodies has prompted some people to leave their homes. Others took it upon themselves to transport or burn the bodies. Because who would do that?
Even before last week, public services in the city were severely limited. Garbage piled up in its slums. Cholera has resurfaced. Gangs terrorized the population with systematic rape, random kidnapping and mass murder, all with impunity.
Then attacks on two of the city's largest prisons last weekend led to the release of thousands of prisoners, including some of the country's most notorious criminals. Now the gangs, backed by returning comrades, attacked the city's airport and main port. They burned at least a dozen police stations. Hospitals are closed. It is difficult to reach security forces. The Prime Minister, who is traveling abroad to rally support for an international police force, was unable to return to the country this week.
Gangs take control.
One morgue manager said he received 20 calls in the past week from residents asking him to pick up bodies. Lionel Melfort said four calls came in on Friday. He rejected them all.
With gangs barricading the streets, getting out has become impossible, Melfort said. He added that other morgues had been attacked, and that he did not want to risk the lives of his employees.
Melfort has been in the business since 2002. Violence has forced him to halt operations before, for a day or two — but never for a full week, he said.
“What I am witnessing today is unprecedented. It has been a very long time.” “It is heartbreaking to walk around and see corpses being eaten by dogs and see corpses covered with blankets.”
Romain Le Coeur, a political scientist who has conducted research in Port-au-Prince in recent weeks, said the unrecovered bodies reflected “extremely high levels of violence, extreme pressure on the population and a sense of hopelessness and abandonment.”
Le Coeur, a senior expert at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, described the violence and instability as among the worst Haiti has suffered in decades. The 2010 earthquake left 220,000 people dead, but there was a national and international response to give Haitians a sense that the crisis had been met with action, Le Coeur said.
“Right now, the terrible thing is the feeling of abandonment,” he said. “You have no one to turn to,” he said. Prime Minister Ariel Henry remained silent. The Haitians don’t even know where he is; and with the airport under attack as he tried to return from Kenya, he instead flew in on Tuesday to Puerto Rico.
“You gotta do what you gotta do,” Le Coeur said. “But you have to do it alone.”
“The person who talks the most in Haiti right now is ‘Barbecue’ Jimmy Scherizer,” he said, “and that’s crazy.” The former police officer, now the country’s most powerful gang leader, issued an ultimatum to Henry: resign or face civil war.
The presidency has remained vacant since the still-unsolved 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moise; The National Assembly has remained empty since the term of the last legislators ended last year. This leaves Henry, unelected and unpopular, to lead the remainder of the government.
Over the past year, US officials have pressured the 74-year-old neurosurgeon to work with a transitional council to help conduct the election, a senior State Department official told The Washington Post, but he showed “an unwillingness to cede real power.” Last week, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and CARICOM leaders again urged Henry to make concessions.
The official said that at the end of the meeting, a statement was issued that “gave Haitians the false impression that the international community supports Henry remaining in power until 2025, which may have exacerbated other factors and contributed to the emergence of the out-of-control gang.” The violence we see today.”
The official said that since this week's violence had become “indefensible,” the United States and the Caribbean had proposed a rapid transition of power in which a transitional council would appoint an interim prime minister and Henry would step down. The official said Henry would not participate in organizing that body, a major change in the American position toward him.
Henry has not yet publicly accepted the proposal. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under State Department rules, said talks with him were continuing.
While the prime minister remained in Puerto Rico, people here began leaving their homes again on Friday in search of food and fuel. Cars and minibuses returned to the streets. The few gas stations that were open saw lines stretching several blocks long. In one of the markets, a man wearing a police uniform can be seen exchanging gas with a resident, a clear sign of the emergence of a black market for fuel. The only other police officers were guarding the closed airport.
Late Sunday morning, Jonathan Lindor passed three bodies lying side by side in the road. The 27-year-old said they were men and about the same age as him. All of them were bleeding, apparently from gunshot wounds.
They were all barefoot. In Haiti, it is not uncommon for a killer to remove his victims' shoes after shooting them.
“I didn’t eat meat for the rest of the day,” Lindor said.
He returned to the area on Wednesday. The neighbors could not bear the stench, so they burned the remains. Another witness said the group eventually placed the remains in a ravine.
“The smell is indefensible,” Lindor said. “We don’t know who could pick it up, so people have no other choice but to burn it.”
Lindor said the residents were part of a neighborhood vigilante group, a mix of off-duty police officers and civilians, often armed with machetes or knives, who took turns watching the neighborhood.
Lindor had seen burned bodies on the streets of his city before, including during the Boa Kale movement last year, when large groups of vigilantes hunted down and killed alleged gang members. But he had never seen conditions so bad before, as the absent government left citizens to clean the streets of bodies themselves.
“You can't sleep peacefully,” Lindor said.
