The thin line between normal life and gang warfare on Haiti’s streets

A gangster in a leather cowboy hat, with a pistol on his hip, takes a teenage girl by the hand. They are from the same neighbourhood in Port-au-Prince. Teasingly, he tells her to join him on the front lines of a gun battle. She resists. No, no, no. The other gang will shoot me.

Daily life goes on in Haiti, deformed by the gang warfare that has killed or injured an estimated 2,500 people in the first three months of this year alone. Amidst anarchic violence, food insecurity and state collapse, Haitians struggle to maintain some semblance of normality.

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The usual sermons are delivered at the Baptist churches, only sometimes mentioning the crisis. An art show opens in the capital, featuring sculptures of armed gang members. Women run their errands shadowed by police toting body armour and semi-automatic weapons.

“Every day we wake up not knowing what the day’s going to bring,” said Lorraine Silvera, a restaurateur and entrepreneur.

A long-planned deployment of 1,000 Kenyan police officers, backed by the United Nations and largely paid for by the United States, began arriving in Port-au-Prince on June 25. In the days leading up to the Kenyans’ arrival, some Haitians reported hearing fewer gunshots in the capital city at night, and a growing sense of business as usual.

“I wouldn’t call it security, because we’re all walking on eggshells, but I would say less insecurity,” Ms. Silvera said. “We are in many ways living in a war zone. … But when you’re living it and navigating it, it’s not as crazy as when you read about it.”

Security conditions vary wildly according to social class. In the relatively prosperous hills above the capital, it’s still possible to play tennis on manicured clay courts, albeit behind walls topped with barbed wire. Wealthy Haitians get around in bulletproof Toyota trucks known colloquially as “tet bef,” or bulls’ heads.

Mathias Pierre – a cabinet minister in the government of Jovenel Moïse before the president was assassinated in 2021 – acknowledged that for residents of more comfortable neighbourhoods such as Pétion-Ville, a suburb in the hills, it is almost possible to tune out the violence.

“For certain people who live up high, if we don’t listen to the news … we have the impression that life continues, that it’s normality,” he said.

In the estimated 90 per cent of Port-au-Prince controlled by gangs, meanwhile, life is far from normal. Some 600,000 people have had to flee their homes; many now live in the shells of schools and other public buildings.

In one image captured by The Globe and Mail’s Goran Tomasevic, a man sits in the ruins of the National Theatre, destroyed in the country’s 2010 earthquake. Graffiti on the pink concrete walls reads, in Haitian Creole, “We’re more fragile.”

Mercy Corps is one of the NGOs helping to keep the country’s internally displaced people alive. Laurent Uwumuremyi, the organization’s director for Haiti, said cash transfers have helped internal refugees buy clothes and water, but many are living on one meal a day. The UN estimates that nearly half the country’s population is struggling to feed themselves.

Education is on hold for a large but unknown share of Haitian children, because their schools have been turned into camps or because their neighbourhoods are controlled by gangs. In a report Tuesday, the UN’s children’s agency said the violence has displaced more than 300,000 children since March.

A large number of Haitian women, in particular, are living with the scars of trauma. A UN report in 2022 estimated that 30 per cent of women aged 15 to 30 in the country had been victims of sexual violence. That share is likely to have grown with the power of Haiti’s gangs, who routinely use rape as a weapon of war.

Crime of all kinds has turned life on its head for countless ordinary Haitians. Pierre-Xavier Desroches, a father of two and second pastor at a Baptist church, was driven from his home last year when gangs invaded his neighbourhood.

In a familiar pattern, 10 or 15 men armed with high-calibre rifles stormed into the area, beating people and looting. They stole everything Mr. Desroches owned, he said, down to his bed. Then they set fire to the neighbourhood.

Now he and his family live with his sister. He was earning a living by driving passengers in a kind of van between the neighbourhoods of Delmas and Pétion-Ville. Last week, however, the vehicle was stolen. Mr. Desroches reported the theft to police, not because he hoped the beleaguered force could retrieve it, but so he wouldn’t be implicated if the thieves used the van to commit other crimes.

He doesn’t know how he will pay for the schooling of his daughters – one in Grade 8, the other studying diplomacy at college. Prayer is “like food” to him now, he says. He goes to church three times a week, but the sermons are rarely about the chaos surrounding them.

“Sometimes we talk about it, but other times we have to fix our message on Jesus Christ,” he said. “Everyone already knows what’s happening in the country.”