Haiti’s gangs began an offensive to topple the government on 29 February, storming and ransacking police stations, prisons and hospitals and laying siege to strategic locations, including the port and airport.
The prime minister, Ariel Henry, who was out of the country when the rebellion began, has found himself stranded in Puerto Rico, with one US official warning last week that his unpopular government could fall “at any time”.
The gang insurrection intensified late on Friday as dozens of criminals converged on Champ de Mars, a palm-dotted downtown area of Port-au-Prince that is home to government ministries, embassies, consulates, banks and hotels, as well as Haiti’s supreme court and official presidential residence.
Gang members reportedly torched the interior ministry, which was built after the 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of the capital, and opened fire on the presidential palace before being pushed back by troops.
“If the Champ de Mars falls … it’s the end,” one police officer warned in an interview with the AyiboPost news website.
Things are at a massive tipping point. Haiti is about to lose what little government they have left. All the gangs care about is power. It will be total anarchy.
What makes this a “gang insurrection” instead of e.g. a “civil war?”
I’m guessing because there are lots of different factions with different ideologies, they just all share the goal of toppling the government.
Sounds like we’re about to lose any sort of order and control in Haiti. Definitely good to get the non-essential folks out.
But you’d think even Haitian gangs aren’t quite so dumb as to actually attack Americans and the embassy. I bet there’s enough weapons and ammunition on site to take over the entire country if need be. And the US is not exactly known to be chill about people attacking their personnel. I’d steer well clear of that embassy if I was them.
Your description of US embassies sounds more based on movies than anything else. In Benghazi the ambassador was killed by supposedly an angry mob. Nothing much was ever done about it. Those places are not heavily stocked with weapons and ammo. They are meant to be evacuated, not defended. And in the case of Haiti, what are they going to do after the fact. These are gangs, they would have to take over and occupy the whole country to do much.
It depends on the embassy and the country. America has dozens of gigantic, pretty defensible embassies around the world. This is one of the newest ones
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/12/middleeast/massive-us-embassy-middle-east-mime-intl/index.html
The average embassy in a safe country probably doesn’t have much in terms of weapons, if any. But as the article points out, they’ve actively sent additional US forces to bolster embassy security.
It’s safe to assume they’re armed with a bit more than harsh language.
Benghazi was not in a safe country. They were likely armed roughly the same. But the point is the US didn’t do anything after the fact either. So these gangs have no reason to steer clear.
Well, all the more reason for the US to not make that mistake twice, right?
Benghazi was denied reinforcement and air support. Haiti has already been reinforced. The two are not the same.
The US didn’t forget about Benghazi. One leader of that mess is already sitting in Federal prison after forcible extraction from Libya by special forces. The US will AND HAS pursued terrorists for literal decades.
The article’s headline is less important than the part I quoted, which is that the government is about to topple and the entire nation will become totally lawless. I also wonder if it will spill over the border into the Dominican Republic, but I don’t know enough about the situation there. Maybe someone else does.
Even with fucking machine guns, you can only kill so many people, you could mow them down in full massacre, and there would still be more people.
