A video that was widely circulating on the Internet recently showed a Haitian gang leader, Joseph Wilson, shirtless, joyfully showing 0.50 caliber munitions, saying in a mocking way that he used the piercing balls to prepare his hair.
“We have enough combs for our hair to last a year,” he joked.
So how did he get them?
Firearms are not made in Haiti, and it is illegal to ship it, but gangs terrorizing the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, never seem to be short-or ammunition.
Experts estimate that there are about 20 armed groups operating in Port-au-Prince, some who wear AR-15 assault rifles and Galil, hunting rifles and glocck handguns. The UN estimates that between 270,000 and 500,000 firearms illegally circulate in Haiti, most weapons in the hands of the gangs.
Their superior fire power overwhelmed the thin rows of the poorly equipped with Haiti and contributed to an astonishing assessment of more than 5,600 homicide victims, a leap of more than 1000 compared to the previous year.
The United Nations imposed an embargo on arms in Haiti three years ago, but most weapons in the streets of Haiti are from the United States, where they are bought by straw buyers and were introduced as a smuggling in the country by the sea or sometimes on the ground through the Dominican Republic, according to the United Nations.
The question has become so serious that the government of Haiti limited imports along its land border with the Dominican Republic. Only the goods produced there are authorized; All products that are not from DR must enter through maritime ports infested with Haiti gangs.
While the capital of Haiti is struggling with a violent crisis which threatens its very existence, questions remain on the question of whether Haiti and other nations – including the United States – are enough to control the wave of arms.
“If you stop the flow of firearms and bullets, the gangs eventually run out of ammunition,” said Bill O’Neill, independent UN human rights expert in Haiti. “It is a faster, faster and safer way to dismantle them.”
Where do we come from arms?
In short, Florida.
The southern Florida, including the ports of Miami and Fort Lauderdale, was the point of origin for 90% of the expeditions of illicit firearms linked to the Caribbean denounced between 2016 and 2023, according to the United Nations on drugs and crime.
The gangs sometimes acquire firearms and ammunition by attacking police stations in Haiti or by welding local police to provide weapons. Nearly 1,000 police cannons have been diverted in the past four years, said the UN this week, and police sold them on the black market.
But weapons are more generally introduced as a smuggling in shipping containers and on board cargos leaving southern Florida, hidden from bicycle, cars, electricity, clothing and food jubs.
Private United Nations and Safety Experts have declared that traffickers have changed their tactics in recent months to avoid increased inspections on the Miami river, a five -thousand navigable path that crosses the city of Miami and has long been a home for smuggling.
The smugglers have expanded their operations to new roads between Florida and the Dominican Republic, in particular Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, a large cruise ship and a freight installation, the UN said in a recent report.
What weapons are introduced in smuggling?
So far this year, Dominican officials have made two major attacks of armchair in the port of Haina, near the capital, Santo Domingo.
In February, Dominican customs officers have done what they described as the greatest weapon seizure in the country intended for Haiti.
Nearly two dozen firearms, including a semi-automatic Caliber Barrett .50 caliber rifle and AK-47 style assault rifles, as well as 36,000 laps were inside a container on the Sara Express, a 35-year-old cargo cargo that takes a regular route between Miami and the Dominican Republic.
The owner of the Miami company registered on the Bill of Lading was arrested in the Dominican Republic.
A second expedition to New York seized in January in the same Dominican port can also be linked to Haiti, investigators said. This expedition included 37 cannons and several Kalashnikov style rifles with labels showing that they were made in Vermont and Georgia.
In November, the Dominican authorities arrested several Dominican police officers accused of passing nearly a million bullets of ammunition of a police deposit. At least one of the buyers was from Haiti, according to the Dominican judicial archives.
Have the police were successful?
In response to A September letter Of several members of the congress who asked more to face the smuggling of arms in Haiti, the US trade department, which regulates exports of firearms, said in December that none of its 11 export control agents abroad had been displayed in the Caribbean due to a lack of funds.
However, the agency said that during the Biden administration, nine investigations related to Haiti had led to convictions.
More recently, other federal law enforcement organizations have continued several weapons affairs in Haiti.
Last month, a 31 -year -old police officer in St. Cloud, Florida, pleaded guilty to the purchase and resale of at least 58 firearms as part of a program that sent hundreds of weapons to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Haiti.
In January, a 34-year-old without papers of Guatemala, Ricardo Sune-Girón, pleaded guilty to firearm traffic in Tampa. According to a advocacy agreement, Mr. Sune -Girón recruited straw buyers to illegally buy 900 firearms – including assault rifles – which he then transported from Florida to the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
A former security officer of the Haiti police chief was arrested in Florida in December after the investigators linked him to nearly 90 firearms.
How do the police attack the problem?
Haiti has few resources such as scanners and border guards to tackle the problem of smuggling firearms at its borders and ports, while experts say that the United States has a limited capacity to seek goods exported to national ports and generally only carry out random freight inspections.
Navigating ships in Haiti from the United States are often blocked with matching cargoes, used clothing to household appliances, bikes and cars, which facilitates smuggling.
In a case, the dismantled cannons discovered aboard a cargo cargo on the Miami river to Haiti were hidden in expeditions which included tennis rackets, fruit juice, rice and clothes.
“We are coming to an unexpectedly,” said Anthony Hernandez, a customs and border protection agent who testified during the federal trial in Miami in January of an accused smuggler. “We do our best to get there as much as possible.”
Haiti police authorities did not respond to the requests for repeated comments.
What about the Dominican Republic?
In the Dominican Republic, the United States supports a special unit of 30 local customs agents, and 20 others are currently verified to work on cases related to the United States.
The authorities have tightened the controls, in particular by adding eight new X -ray scanners in the main ports, where all the cargoes intended for Haiti are examined, said the Dominican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Dominican customs officials follow all suspicious expeditions to catch and prosecute traffickers, a representative of the United States Embassy who was not allowed to speak publicly, wondering if the Dominican Republic was an important source of illegal firearms in Haiti.
Dominican customs authorities have referred questions to prosecutors, who refused to comment.
So what can we do to stop him?
Critics say that not enough is to regulate the sale of weapons in the United States to straw buyers, an illegal practice in which people buy firearms on behalf of another person, including traffickers. The practice is responsible for a large number of arms which are used in crimes in Mexico and throughout Latin America.
Concessionaires often ignore the purchasing models easily detectable by firearm traffickers who pretended to be legitimate customers and buy several weapons several times, according to experts.
“This is where you can stop this,” said Jonathan Lowy, founder of Global Action on Gun Violence. “It is very difficult to stop once the guns are in the hands of the trafficker. They can be broken down and put in a box of breakfast cereals or fruit juices. ”
