INSIDE HAITI: Where women are raped on the street and gangs rule.
Beatrice was wearing her school uniform the day she disappeared: a yellow blouse and blue trousers. Her mother, Roseline, had dropped her off at the bus stop that morning and waved goodbye. When she got home she realised that Beatrice had forgotten her dinner money and called the head teacher to ask him to let her get lunch from the canteen on credit. He told her Beatrice hadn’t come to school.
She had been taken by the gangs that control almost all of their home city, the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince: teenage boys and young men who sit on broken sofas at intersections, leaning assault rifles against their knees, ruling the place after they pushed out the government a year and a half ago. Beatrice was 15 years old, her favourite subject was maths — and she was gone.
Roseline called her friends, looked around the neighbourhood. She found out that the bus had broken down on the way to school. Beatrice had been waiting by the side of the road with the other passengers when masked men came and took her and two of the others: a young woman and a young man. “I was looking everywhere, asking everyone,” Roseline, 39, told me at a women’s shelter in Port-au-Prince.
Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Caribbean and Latin America. It has a similar GDP per capita to Bangladesh. Half the population do not have enough to eat. Hundreds of thousands of children are malnourished.
In the capital there is no accountability, no one in charge, no one who can fix things when they go wrong. In most of Port-au-Prince and its suburbs, where about a quarter of Haiti’s 12 million population live, the gangs are the only law. Police are scattered through the 10 per cent of the capital still controlled by the government, where they park their armoured cars at intersections and fire at people they think are gang members. There’s only one place you can go to find a missing person — your local “chef”, the gang leader who controls your area. Roseline was terrified, but went anyway. He said he’d do what he could.
Local “chef” could be taken quite literally in this case: There Is No Cannibalism in Haiti — Or Perhaps at Least Some.
In any case, I wonder if Conan O’Brien reads the London Times?
