180 Elderly Haitians Slain in Voodoo Massacre

More than 180 people were killed in Haiti’s capital as a powerful warlord ordered the slaying of elderly slum residents he suspected of giving his son a severe illness through witchcraft, the United Nations and Haitian human-rights groups said Monday.

Gang boss Monel Felix directed his followers to kill residents with guns, knives and machetes after he was advised by a voodoo priest that elderly people practicing sorcery had caused his son to be stricken with a fatal sickness, the National Human Rights Defense Network, a Haitian rights group, said in a report. The ill child died Saturday as Felix’s gang carried out the killings, the group said.

The violence in Port-au-Prince over the weekend highlights the chaos that has engulfed Haiti, where a U.S.-backed, Kenyan-led multinational police force deployed earlier this year has struggled to fight back gangs that control most of the Caribbean nation’s capital.

Warlords have ransacked everything from police stations to hospitals while the country’s fragile government has been mired in infighting. The World Food Program estimates that half of Haiti’s 12 million people face acute hunger.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, said 127 of the 184 people killed in the latest attacks were elderly men and women. About 5,000 people have been killed by gang violence in Haiti in 2024, according to the U.N.

Haiti’s interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé called the killings “a barbaric act of unbearable cruelty,” and pledge…  d to deploy police against the gang. “A red line has been crossed, and the state will mobilize all its forces to track down and destroy these criminals,” Fils-Aimé said.

With the government in disarray, police have faced mass desertions. Security analysts and U.N. officials say crime bosses like Felix have thrived in the power vacuum, gobbling up territory around Port-au-Prince’s main shipping and fuel terminals to facilitate their main businesses, which include extortion, kidnappings and drug and weapons smuggling. Rights organizations accuse gangs of rampant killings, rape and recruiting children as foot soldiers to assert their control over the city’s sprawling slums.