(Français)
On the afternoon of Jan. 1, Haiti’s Independence Day, a large crowd of musicians, their fans, and excited young people from the neighborhood gathered in an intersection along Rue Saint Martin, a dusty, Godforsaken street running east off of Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines in downtown Port-au-Prince. They were there for the launching of Party Cool (Pati Koul), one of the largest, oldest, and most popular Rara street bands which circulate around the capital every Carnaval season.
Among the festive crowd was Mario “C.B.S.” Augustin, 50, a drummer and the vice-president of Party Cool. He had recently returned to Haiti from New York, where he had traveled under the CHNV Parole Program, what Haitians called the “Biden visa.” New York didn’t suit him, however, so he returned to Haiti after only six months, despite the economic hardship and political turmoil there. His life revolved around Party Cool, his friends and relatives said.
“The band was beginning to gather, they held a ceremony, the music was beginning, people were getting ready to march, and then ‘Boom!’ there was an explosion,” explained a woman who lived with Mario. “I lost consciousness, I don’t know for how long. I didn’t know where I was when I woke up.”
The blast came from an explosive drone or drones flown by mercenaries working for Erik Prince’s Vectus International, the latest soldier-of-fortune enterprise by the founder of Blackwater. Haiti’s de facto prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, hired Prince’s outfit last year under a multimillion dollar 10-year contract, apparently believing that Haiti’s 15,000-officer Haitian National Police (PNH) force was not up to the task of defeating the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) coalition of armed neighborhood groups, which control most of the capital region.
According to people in the neighborhood, 30 people were killed in the drone attack, which came at about 6 p.m., including Mario C.B.S., as most people know him. He died at about midnight, on the way to the hospital, from lack of blood. He was the father of five children, the youngest ages 2 and 10.
A week later, on Jan. 7, Jean Max “Papouche” Saint-Louis, 46, was sitting on a large rock in front of his house in the Delmas 8 neighborhood. Everyone around him knew Papouche to be a little off, a bit of a half-wit. That is what explains why he was sitting under the hot sun at midday and why he didn’t run into his house, as most people do, when he heard the giant armored vehicle approaching. Armed mercenaries got out of the tank and immediately shot him dead. They exited the way they had come, leaving his dead body lying in the street.
Later that day, another armored vehicle, or perhaps the same one, drove up to a small house, again on Rue Saint Martin. White mercenaries, speaking Spanish, got out of the vehicle and went into the house of a local DJ, Jean Beliotte Milord.
“The DJ didn’t have anything to do with gangs or guns,” explained Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the president and spokesman for Viv Ansanm, which has now constituted itself as a Haitian political party. “When those [mercenaries] come into a neighborhood like that, they have informants with them. That DJ could not play in Pétionville or Delmas. He only played in the ghettos. He would play for my birthday or [another Viv Ansanm leader] Krisla’s birthday. He would play for the birthday of any Viv Ansanm guy. Because the mercenaries knew that he was a DJ who would play for the Viv Ansanm leaders, when they went into his house, the informant said that the guy is a bandit.
But the guy spoke with them. He said: ‘I’m not a bandit. I’m a DJ. Here’s my father. Here’s my little sister. Here’s my equipment. There is nowhere for me to go. How could I be a bandit? Look at this little house I’m living in.’ They said ‘You don’t need to explain that. If you’re living here, you’re a bandit.’ And then ‘bow, they shot his father in the head, ‘bow,’ they shot his little brother in the head, ‘bow’ they shot his little sister in the head, ‘bow’ they shot him in the head.”
Those killed were Reginald Milord, 53, Jean Beliotte Milord, 32, Reginald Fils Milord, 21, and Milienne Milord, 14.
After killing the family in cold blood, the mercenaries went one step further. “There was a crew working with cement nearby,” Cherizier explained. “They ripped open a bag of cement, emptied it on [Jean Beliotte Milord], then they poured water on it, and it hardened. They buried him in cement.”
These are just some of the horrors being visited on Haiti’s poorest neighborhoods, a slaughter which almost none of Haiti’s bourgeoisie-paid-or-owned media reports on.
“What’s happening in the popular neighborhoods… is a class battle”
“What’s happening in the popular neighborhoods… is a class battle,” Cherizier explained in a Jan. 11 interview. “The bourgeoisie is in power, and they have a plan to kill as many poor people as possible. This is in no way a police operation to uproot bandits. They are carrying out a massacre in the popular neighborhoods until Feb. 7 so they can continue to hold power. Those guy are just attacking and destroying the homes of all the people in the ghetto. They are trying to make the people flee the capital’s downtown and attack them with drones in the ghetto. The majority of the people you see dying are killed by drones. But the mercenaries don’t come on the ground to fight with us [the Viv Ansanm soldiers].”
Asked if the mercenaries who killed the Milord family or Papouche were perhaps Salvadoran or Guatemalan soldiers from the U.S.-assembled Gang Suppression Force (GSF), Cherizier said no. “The guys who came are Erik Prince’s mercenaries. Even if they speak Spanish, his mercenaries don’t have to be American… It’s Erik Prince’s mercenaries going out… It’s Blackwater.”
He said that the PNH and GSF were relegated to a back-up role of destroying houses.
“Those [mercenaries] are carrying out a massacre in the popular neighborhoods, but they are not killing armed men. Everybody that those guys kill in the poor neighborhoods are impoverished men and women. They fight from the air, sending drones. What is the police’s role? To serve the people and protect their property. So how can the police come into a neighborhood and bulldoze the peoples’ homes? Go around destroying and destroying and destroying people’s houses? Those people you just made homeless, they have to live somewhere, what are you going to do with them? And once you’ve removed all the gangs, you have to move them again. Where are you going to put them? So you’ve eradicated all the gangs, you’ve destroyed all the peoples’ homes, What are you going to do now? You will give the excuse that you will not let the gangs return there again, and the big shots will take all that land to set up their businesses on it.”
So you think the bourgeoisie wants to build something new, the same thing that Trump wants to do in Gaza? Cherizier was asked.
“That is what’s happening here,” he replied. “People who don’t understand say that [the PNH is] carrying out an operation to uproot gangs… Up until now, if 20 people are killed in an operation, 19 of them are innocent civilians. They are just regular people who don’t have anything to do with bandits or guns.”
“And the type of bullets these guys are using in Haiti are not conventional,” Cherizier added. “Even in warfare, they prohibit the use of this kind of ammunition.” Cherizier sent pictures of the very large caliber bullet casings.
The indiscriminate attacks of shanty town residents is indeed a clear parallel with the Israeli army’s on-going genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. None of the Haitians killed in the events of Jan. 1 or Jan. 7 were in any way part of the Viv Ansanm armed groups. They just lived near them. One sometimes would DJ a party for them.
In the days ahead, we will report more on the terrible toll the U.S.-backed mercenary war in Haiti is taking.
