More than 100 mourners gathered Wednesday inside a church in Kenscoff, in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, to bury two brothers and three of their cousins after gangs executed more than 30 people in an attack that tore through the community. The funerals came after the night of Aug. 23, when gangs attacked the once-peaceful farming area, killed 47 people and kidnapped more than 50 others. It was one of the largest mass kidnappings in Haiti in recent years. The dead and missing were not statistics to the people inside that church. They were family.
Who Pays for the Rule of Force
Marta Hurtado, a spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Office, said some 150 heavily armed gang members took part in the attack. She said they first killed 13 people who tried to flee, then pursued 50 others who had sought refuge inside the church where the funerals were held Thursday. Gang members executed 22 Haitians in the church courtyard and 12 others behind the church, she said. The violence turned a place of mourning into another site of slaughter. That’s what domination looks like when armed men decide who gets to live, who gets to run, and who gets cornered.
Several days after the abductions, a gang leader agreed to release six children and seven women following an intervention by community leaders and UNICEF. That detail matters. People at the bottom had to negotiate for the return of children and women after the armed groups had already taken them. The release came not from any grand promise of protection, but from community leaders and UNICEF stepping in after the damage was done.
Patrique Saint-Hilaire, an official with Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency in Kenscoff, said the government plans to help support the families who lost loved ones. So far, 17 of the 47 people killed have been buried. The state arrives after the bodies do. It speaks in the language of support once the killing has already happened, while families are left to carry the dead and the missing.
What People Did Without Permission
Friends and family of those killed organized protests and vigils, blaming police for the attack. That’s the clearest response in the story: people gathering, grieving, and naming the police as part of the problem. Haiti’s National Police has said it is investigating the attack and whether it was due to complicity or negligence. The official response is an investigation into whether the force failed or helped. Either way, the people who were attacked are the ones left to wait.
Mourners declined to talk to journalists on Thursday as anger over the killings persisted. After the service, some people attacked a couple of journalists, including an AP photographer who received medical care. The grief in Kenscoff wasn’t neat, and it wasn’t made for public relations. It was raw enough to spill over onto anyone nearby.
A Country Under Siege
The latest attack comes as Haiti prepares for the first general elections in more than a decade. That’s the official clock ticking in the background while gangs control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and swaths of land in Haiti’s central region and beyond, and are also seeking to seize territory in Kenscoff. Elections are being prepared in a country where armed groups already control huge stretches of territory and where ordinary people are forced to live under whoever holds the guns that week.
Gang violence has displaced a record of nearly 1.5 million people across Haiti, where more than 3,050 people were reported killed from January to June, according to the U.N. Those numbers sit behind every funeral, every vigil, every family trying to bury its dead while the armed takeover keeps spreading. In Kenscoff, the church filled with mourners, but the power that made the funerals necessary was still outside, armed and in control.