Skip to content We are in Port-au-Prince, patrolling with a group of foreign soldiers. They were sent here to hunt down thousands of gang members who now rule the Haitian capital. In just five years, violence has claimed more than 22,000 lives here. Now, a new UN security mission known as the Gang Suppression Force, or GSF, promises to change all that. But just months after her deployment, success was hard to come by. Since Haiti’s president was assassinated in 2021, gangs have overwhelmed the country with kidnapping, extortion and murder, posting hundreds of videos online of their violence. Most gang members joined because they were forced by other gang members and because they had no other options. Half of them are under 18. You can see bullet holes in some of these buildings. They look abandoned. Haiti sees the GSF as its last chance to bring peace to the country. But they are also outnumbered by the gangs, who are heavily armed and hide well among the civilian population. They were keen to show us a school they had recently liberated from the gangs they used as a base to launch attacks. I don’t speak French, but I can make out a bit of the sign. This was a fourth grade class: geometry, vocabulary, grammar. And now there is hardly anything left. It is still not safe for children to come. Doesn’t it feel like “OK, what did we just do here?” The problem is, Haiti has not had a functional government or police force in five years. This has left entire communities vulnerable to horrific violence, which has not stopped since the GSF arrived. In August, gangs killed 47 people here in Kenscoff, a mountain retreat near most of Haiti’s diplomatic missions and many of the country’s remaining operational hotels. When we met Mayor Jean Massillon last month, he told us that he had been warning the police and central government officials for almost two years that an attack was coming. No one listened until it was too late, and the Gang Suppression Force never came. Yvener Metellus’ 79-year-old father was one of the dozens killed during the gang massacre. “Is this the room your father was imprisoned in?” “What about the Gang Suppression Force? Have you seen them here?” We visited this area where a terrible, terrible tragedy took place. Why did the GSF not respond? “At the time the massacre happened, we simply didn’t have the manpower to deploy. We didn’t have the supply chains. We didn’t have the intelligence networks to deploy. This is the main reason why we couldn’t deploy as quickly and as effectively as we would have liked at this point.” Six months later, the GSF is still operating with a fraction of the committed 5,500 troops. His commanders say more are coming but that every roadblock they dismantle, every school they liberate brings them one step closer to the peace they promised. “What is the greatest achievement?” “Not yet. OK.”
