(Français)
In the predawn hours of Dec. 18, three explosive drones blew up the depot of the National Center for Equipment (CNE) located just west of Port-au-Prince’s international airport and just east of Cité Soleil, the capital’s largest slum.
The CNE, which stored and operated the Haitian state’s bulldozers, graders, backhoes, cranes, and other infrastructure equipment, was officially closed on Sep. 2, 2024 by the government of de facto Prime Minister Garry Conille and the Transitional Presidential Council (CPT). Its machinery was supposedly transferred to the custody of the Haiti’s Armed Forces (FAd’H), but most of it never moved from its depot.
Although the CNE was located in an area controlled by the Viv Ansanm (Live Together), a coalition-turned-party of Haiti’s poor neighborhood armed groups, it was never overrun, vandalized, attacked, or robbed by them.
So it seemed stupid, and even inconceivable, that Haiti’s government would lay waste to its own equipment, essential to the rebuilding, maintenance, and improvement of the nation’s meager and crumbling infrastructure.
However, there was one possible explanation. Since 2023, the CNE’s workers’ union and others have accused and complained about massive corruption in the agency’s administration. Many of those in the current de facto government were among those accused of and responsible for that alleged corruption. Last week, the union held a press conference to speak out against corruption at the CNE.
“There are many cases of corruption in the CNE that its union is denouncing,” explained Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, Viv Ansanm’s president and spokesman, in a Dec. 22 video statement. “Here is a state company located in Viv Ansanm’s territory, which Viv Ansanm never burned. So why did the state send three drones to blow up the CNE’s offices and set them on fire? And this happened after the CNE’s workers union had just denounced corruption there.”
The current de facto prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, has hired, for millions of dollars, a so-called “Task Force” of foreign mercenaries employed by Erik Prince’s Vectus International to carry out, since March 2025, dozens of drone attacks, which have killed hundreds of innocent Haitian civilians.
Last month, Prince’s mercenaries, along with the Haitian National Police (PNH) and FAd’H mounted a major operation in Croix-des-Bouquets, where they dropped bombs from three of Prince’s helicopters on a drug production factory owned by the Apaid family. The local Viv Ansanm groups, who had the week before raided and revealed the factory’s illegal existence, shot down one of the helicopters and captured five mercenaries. The Viv Ansanm, along with many observers, charged that the mercenaries were trying to destroy evidence of illegal operations in the factory, just as they may have been doing when they bombed the CNE.
Later on Dec. 18, the PNH, FAd’H, and “Task Force,” along with troops from the U.S.-assembled Gang Suppression Force (GSF), carried out a major operation, with phalanxes of armored vehicles, in the areas of Pernier, Torcelle, Tabarre, and Croix-des-Bouquets, on the capital’s outskirts. They said they were targeting the Viv Ansanm affiliate group of Kraze Barye (Break Down the Walls) led by Vitel’homme Innocent, on whom Washington has placed a $2 million bounty.
