Madame, madame. They are putting fire everywhere. I just heard it on the radio.” It was late morning last Thursday and Monique Clesca’s gardener, Calixte, had come dashing into her home in the mountains above Haiti’s capital with hair-raising news. “He was in shock,” said the 71-year-old political activist and author. “I knew something was wrong even before he spoke.”
All afternoon, Clesca flicked between Port-au-Prince’s plethora of FM stations, trying to fathom the mayhem unfolding outside. Their progressively alarming broadcasts told of gang members with machine guns marauding through town, sending residents scattering for cover.
One group of fighters was seen advancing on the international airport. Another mob had stormed a university, shooting a student in the ear. Police stations had been sprayed with bullets and burned.
By the time Radio Métropole’s 6pm evening news came on air, Clesca had no doubt what had transpired. “The gangs had taken over the city,” the writer said.
Over the next seven days, members of Haiti’s ruthless, politically connected gangs would launch an unremitting wave of attacks across the capital, leaving in their wake what the country’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, called “a cortege of fire, blood, corpses, incalculable damage and fear”.