 A young child in the Haitian Cite Soleil tries hard to get someone to tend to her younger sibling. As adults scramble to find food, children are often left on their own. (THANE BURNETT/QMI Agency)
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CITE SOLEIL, Haiti — The thugs want a return to yesterday in Haiti’s slum of slums.
The locals, so far, have defiantly stood in their way.
This shantytown, one of the most violent and poorest communities in the western hemisphere, was largely spared the devastation of the Jan. 12 earthquake. But in these days after, a vacuum of authority and rule is being violently fought over.
When convicts escaped from Port-au-Prince’s central prison during the height of the natural disaster, many of the worst offenders returned to these dirty streets.
For decades, before United Nations troops moved to take back control in 2004, the gangs ruled the maze of side streets like dark lords. They would take command of buses, drive them deep into the bowels of the slum, then rob and rape the passengers. If you were kidnapped in Haiti, this is where they would take you.
Now, with law and order rare commodities, the gangs see a return to their rule.
Two notorious members — "Belony" and "Bled" — reportedly tried to orchestrate a brief war of control after the earthquake. It apparently led to three deaths and an unknown number of rapes.
The bad guys have even charged the grieving if they look to dig out family members from the rubble.
But so far, the better people who make up the 200,000 residents packed into Cite Soleil, have fought back bravely.
“The big gang leader came here (after the prison break) to put pressure on us,” Jean Maurice Edourd, the chief administrator of the Cite Soleil hospital, told QMI Agency on Tuesday. “But the community rallied ... to get out.”
Police here — in a community where it’s dangerous to even stand in front of their central station — have openly called on residents of the slum to kill the criminals.
And the residents have responded, one official said, by lynching gang members themselves.
But defiance comes with a price. The streets are tense at all hours, but particularly threatening at night. The weak become victims, if they are not near machete armed community night patrols.
Hunkered down together, families count on one another for safety. Elderly resident Sorrel Benito, whose knees hurt her from sleeping on the ground, is afraid of the bandits, but equally afraid that aid is too slow to reach here.
There is no sliding scale of which is worse — starving or being preyed on.
If you follow bloody footprints into the district’s hospital, you find the casualties of the struggle for rule. While many patients were maimed in the earthquake, a good number of others have seen violent glimpses of a return to the bad old days.
There’s no shortage of bullet wounds and machete cuts inside.
On a dirty beige sheet, wearing a bright pink shirt, 38-year-old Antoine Leconte lapses in and out of consciousness. He was shot on Saturday night.
His wife, Ernice, said he was just standing outside their home.
“He’s a decent man,” she added.
Doctors here don’t ask who is innocent and who may have found themselves judged by street justice. They just tend to the tally in the slum of slums.
