Haitian prime minister forced to flee official ceremony after armed gangs appear
Source: The Guardian
Haitian prime minister forced to flee official ceremony after armed gangs appear
The incident highlights the deteriorating security conditions in Haiti’s capital
Peter Beaumont
Mon 18 Oct 2021 16.50 BST
The deteriorating security situation in Haiti was starkly underlined on Sunday when the country’s prime minister and his security detail were forced to flee an official commemoration in the capital by heavily armed gang members who then paraded in the delegation’s place.
A day after a dozen US missionaries and their children were kidnapped in a brazen attack to the east of the capital Port-au-Prince, video circulating on social media and reports in the Haitian media showed the country’s most notorious crime boss, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, officiating at the ceremony to commemorate the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of Haiti’s revolutionary founding fathers.
The annual ceremony in the Pont Rouge area of Port-au-Prince marks where Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 after defeating a Napoleonic army and abolishing slavery in the new Black republic.
On Sunday, the prime minister, Ariel Henry, and his security detail reportedly tried to reach Pont Rouge to lay a floral wreath but were driven back by armed gang members firing their weapons.
Video from the event showed several official SUVs apparently leaving Pont Rouge amid the crackle of gunfire as other figures fled the scene on foot.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/18/haiti-prime-minister-flee-official-ceremony-armed-gangs
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This video shows life in Haiti as an unbearable nightmare. It also mentions, as it is written elsewhere, that Cherizier is a former cop, who has been involved with massacres before now:
The next video, from March of 2021, mentions, as everyone who has followed Haiti news has already known, Moise himself was a wildly brutal person, as well.