Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti are fleeing rampant gang violence and have abandoned their homes, in a worsening humanitarian crisis that the United Nations describes as “cataclysmic.”
Masses of homeless families dodging gang members who burned their homes and killed their neighbors have taken over dozens of schools, churches and even government buildings. Many places do not have running water, flushing toilets or garbage collection.
The lucky ones sleep on a friend’s couch.
“There are children in my camp who don’t have parents,” said Agenithe Jean, 39, who left her home in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in August to go to a makeshift camp on a vacant lot. about six kilometers away. “We need latrines. “We need somewhere to go.”
At least 360,000 people (more than half of them in the capital or surrounding neighborhoods) have fled their homes in Haiti over the past year, and in the coming months that number of internally displaced people is expected to exceed 400,000, according to the Organization United Nations International. Immigration Office.
Hundreds of them are unaccompanied children, including orphans and others separated from their parents in the chaos.
As hurricane season approaches, humanitarian groups and Haiti’s disaster response office are racing to figure out how to address the growing crowds living in makeshift shelters in a capital overrun by gangs and with a national government that it barely works.
About 90,000 people live in those sites, and about the same number left Port-au-Prince in March, according to the United Nations and aid groups, many of them bound for other parts of Haiti, an exodus that affects safer cities and poor prepared for an increase. demand for water, food and schools.
A United Nations campaign to raise $674 million to address Haiti’s growing list of basic needs has raised just 16 percent of the goal. The United States contributed 69.5 million dollars of the 107 million raised so far.
Competition for attention and resources may be overshadowed by crises around the world, including in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, aid groups said. The response has paled in comparison to the huge international effort that followed the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake, when countries and aid organizations sent billions in aid.
“All of us are looking for practically the same donors,” said Abdoulaye Sawadogo, head of the UN office in charge of humanitarian assistance in Haiti.
The Haitian government agency whose job it is to help refugees typically focuses on natural disasters, not a disaster caused by widespread gang violence.
“You can track the cyclone. After an earthquake, you can find shelter,” said Emmanuel Pierre, director of operations for the Directorate of Civil Protection, Haiti’s emergency management agency. “Now the problem is a social danger.”
In the three years since the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, Haitian gangs have expanded their territory and increased their violence.
The gang leaders achieved one main goal: the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, and now they say they want to end poverty and a corrupt system run by elites. But they also want amnesty for their crimes and to prevent the deployment of an international security force led by Kenya.
In the first three months of this year, around 2,500 people were killed or injured as a result of gang violence, a 53 percent increase compared to the previous three months, according to the United Nations.
Things took a terrible turn in late February when, in an attempt to overthrow the prime minister, rival gangs joined forces to attack police stations, prisons and the airport. Entire neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince emptied as gangs took control.
People who found safe spaces were repeatedly expelled because again and again they were in danger of death.
In some ways, Jean was lucky that August day when a gang took over his Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood amid a reign of gunfire. When he ran to his rented house in search of his family, passing dead bodies on the floor and wounded people covered in blood, he ran into his four children. The five came out with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.
Since that day in August, Jean has lived in a makeshift camp, which he shares with a few dozen other people, in the Croix Desprez neighborhood. He can’t work because the conditions are too dangerous, but with his children safe with relatives in the countryside, he showers at friends’ houses and has received cash and food from humanitarian groups.
“I don’t think I can ever go back,” he said. “In Port-au-Prince, no place is safe.”
The U.N. International Migration Office began tracking internally displaced people in November and found that about 70 percent were staying with friends or family. Now 60 percent are in one of 86 homeless sites as people are left without safe places to shelter, said Daniele Febei, head of emergency operations for the U.N. migration office in Haiti.
More than 180,000 (about half of the homeless) are children, he said. Nearly three dozen schools in the Port-au-Prince area were forced to close to accommodate the displaced. Gangs forced people from their homes so they could use neighborhoods as bases of operations to hide kidnapping victims, she said.
About half of homeless people receive services, U.N. agencies said, although the United Nations Children’s Fund, which focuses on the needs of children in developing countries, has suspended water supplies for some. days because it was too dangerous to cross the streets.
While millions of liters of water have been delivered, some 30,000 people living in homeless areas receive nothing, mainly due to a lack of funding, UNICEF said. Instead, they have to buy small bags and buckets of often unhealthy water.
“The response has not been the best,” Febei said, noting that the violence drove out many nonprofit aid organizations. “Let’s say 40 percent of the sites have a system for collecting waste. What does that mean? “Sixty percent don’t.”
Much of the assistance the organizations provide, including hundreds of thousands of meals from the World Food Program, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has allocated about $171 million in humanitarian aid since October, including a $58 million allocation in March.
“That’s not enough,” said Marcia Wong, a senior official in the agency’s Office of Humanitarian Assistance. “Obviously.”
“A certain percentage of people in Haiti are not being reached as they deserve,” he added. “The scale of services and response is not what it needs to be.”
Many organizations are shifting gears to offer cash payments to heads of households and those hosting displaced people, as it becomes more difficult to provide direct services, particularly to those on the move.
“A lot of people live in small, different tents,” said Laurent Uwumuremyi, Haiti director for Mercy Corps, a U.S.-funded aid organization, which helped The New York Times arrange phone interviews with internal refugees. “If we look at the current situation and how it has been evolving since the end of February, there is no hope that the situation will change anytime soon.”
Many people have dispersed across the country into rural communities from which they originally came, he said.
The tension is felt in southern cities, where busloads of Port-au-Prince residents arrive regularly. In February and March, about 40,000 people arrived in Haiti’s Southern Department, which includes Les Cayes and Jacmel, said Pierre Marie Boutin, representative of the civil protection agency in Les Cayes.
“They arrived on public transportation with all their belongings, like everything you find in a house: beds, mattresses, household furniture,” Boutin said, adding that the agency’s offices and storage warehouses have been looted by gangs. .
“In a month it will be hurricane season and we are not prepared,” he said. “In the event of a catastrophe, we are at zero. “We have nothing and we will really be in serious trouble.”
Yvon Latigue, 42, who has two daughters, left Carrefour-Feuilles at the end of last year when a neighbor’s house was set on fire by gangs, who also burned his house.
“We didn’t have time to save anything,” he said. “We were saving our lives.”
The family of four slept at first in a church and then stayed with their in-laws in Mirebalais, a town about 40 kilometers north of the capital, but the imposition caused tension and they returned to Port-au-Prince. They make do in a makeshift tent where their home once stood.
Children cannot attend the local school because gang violence led it to close.
“One of them, when she talks to me, tells me: ‘Dad, I’m scared. I’m scared because of all these gunshots,’” she said. “And the other one, sometimes she asks me: ‘Daddy, when am I going back to school?’”
Tuesday, he tells her.
“After a few days, she’ll say, ‘Dad, is it Tuesday yet?’ I say no,” Latigue said. “I do not have any other option. “I have to lie to him.”
André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti and David Adams of Miami.