Haiti Death Toll Soars After Gang Massacre Leaves 184 Dead
Haiti’s spiraling violence reached a horrifying new peak this weekend, with a gang-ordered massacre leaving at least 184 dead in Port-au-Prince, Blooomberg reports, citing the United Nations.
This brings the country’s staggering death toll for the year to an estimated 5,000, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk announced on Monday.
Turk stated that a powerful gang leader, identified as Monel “Micanord” Felix, ordered the killings in the Cite Soleil area. The Committee for Peace and Development, a Haitian human rights group, reported that the massacre occurred Friday and Saturday, allegedly sparked by the illness of Felix’s child. The group claims Felix blamed residents for his son’s ailment and unleashed a brutal attack targeting the elderly and voodoo practitioners, whom he accused of witchcraft.
Haiti has been engulfed in escalating violence since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021. Gangs have seized control of vast swathes of the capital, disrupting essential services, attacking commercial airlines, and forcing over 700,000 people from their homes. The violence has pushed nearly half of Haiti’s 11.7 million population into hunger.
Despite the deployment of a multinational security force led by Kenya earlier this year, the violence continues unabated. The Committee for Peace and Development highlighted that Felix’s targeting of voodoo practitioners is not a new phenomenon; he was previously accused of executing 12 elderly people in 2012 under similar accusations of witchcraft.
