SUMMARY
Many of the security problems in Haiti have been said to originate in the dictatorial Duvalier era and its leadership’s misuse of the state security apparatus to violently repress the citizenry – and subsequent administrations have to varying degrees upheld that legacy. The post-Duvalier Haitian administration which most blatantly committed one-sided violence was the military junta led by Raoul Cédras. Upon Cédras’ successful 1991 toppling of Jean-Bertrande Aristide, who still enjoyed a great deal of popular support among the urban poor, the military junta began a round of systematic repression of suspected Aristide supporters in an attempt to stifle opposition.
Besides tasking its police and soldiers to carry out one-sided violence, the Cédras regime relied upon paramilitary groups or attaches. The largest and most feared among the attaches was FRAPH (Front pour l'Avancement et le Progrès Haitien, Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti). It was officially a youth organization headed by Emmanuel Constant, but it served as a front for a paramilitary force designed to perpetrate Cedras’ worst human rights abuses. To provide the Cédras regime plausible deniability, FRAPH and other attache groups claimed to be independent, but in reality, they were mere extensions of the official, uniformed state security apparatus that carried out their operations in tandem with the police and army.
When attacking civilians the official and unofficial security personnel of the Government of Haiti primarily used heavy automatic-weapon shooting, the lobbing of grenades and fire to burn victims to death. In the early days of the military rule, thhere were attempts to conceal the magnitude of the killings and there are accounts of soldiers harassing family members trying to claim the bodies of their deceased relatives. Many of the corpses were instead dumped in a landfill located at Ti Tanyen, ten miles north of the capital. However, scholars note that the Cédras regime got bolder with its abuses over the years of power. Instead of hiding the bodies of the victims, they were disfigured and mutilated and demonstratively thrown in the streets as a warning to would-be opponents. The actual killings occurred primarily in the shantytowns of the capital Port-au-Prince, known to have strong Aristide leanings.
Administrations after Cédras' have also perpetrated one-sided violence; particularly in the context of the power- and security vacuum following Aristide’s second ouster in 2004, there was a rise of armed groups of Aristide supporters who sought to spread chaos and fear in hopes that the failure of the 2004-2006 transitional government to stop the violence would lead to Aristide’s return. Thus, on the watch of the transitional administration, the police aided by vigilantes, took on civilians, often supposed Aristide supporters with the result of civilian casualties in Port-au-Prince. The police justified their actions by claiming that the victims were criminals.
Such attacks continued during President Jovenel Moïse’s administration, with instances of one-sided violence targeting the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince that were known for supporting different opposition parties. In 2017, allegedly as part of an anti-gang raid in the Grand Ravine area of Port-au-Prince, the police forces killed nine civilians accusing them of being in collusion with the gangs, but without any proof. The following year in November, the La Saline neighborhood (known for opposing the government of Moïse) was attacked by several armed gangs following the orders of high-ranking members of Moïse’s administration. The gang members executed victims, including children, then dragged their bodies into the streets to be burned, dismembered, and fed to animals in an attempt to leave no trace of the massacre. Many of the gangs involved in this event formed a coalition named G9 an Fanmi e Allie and went on to perpetrate more massacres, raising fears that they continued to act under the orders of the Government of Haiti.
The Government of Haiti first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1991, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in October that year following Raoul Cédras’ successful coup on 30 September. Most of the killings occurred in the immediate aftermath of the coup as the new military regime of Cédras began to target residents of neighborhoods suspected of supporting Aristide.
