Caribbean leaders have called an emergency meeting today with the United States, Canada, and France in an effort to stop the worsening gang violence in Haiti.
Armed gangs have launched large-scale coordinated assaults against multiple government buildings and the presidential palace, after attacking prisons last week and freeing close to 5,000 inmates.
Street battles between the gangs and police have crippled Haiti's fragile economy with United Nations officials saying half of the country's more than 11 million inhabitants don't have enough to eat, and 1.5 million are starving.
Canadian citizen Richard Phillips could hear gunshots from his hotel, and said, "The country just deteriorated really, really quickly. The real fear is that if the police force collapses in Haiti, you become very vulnerable as a hostage, quite frankly."
The man behind it all is Haiti's most notorious gang leader, a former police officer named Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier. He says the first step is to overthrow Prime Minister Henri and then what he calls "the corrupt oligarchs and politicians."
Dr. David Vanderpool, who heads a ministry to Haiti called LiveBeyond, said, "This is sort of the culmination of gangs running the country for the last three or four years. The government has collapsed. The president was assassinated in '21. The judiciary was also terminated as well as parliament. So there's not been an effective government in place since 2021 and the gangs have had full run of the country. "
Vanderpool says only foreign military intervention will bring the chaos to an end.
"We need to pray for the safety of the individuals, especially the vulnerable population and pregnant women and children, older people, and we need to pray that we're able to get food and medicine into Haiti," Vanderpool said.
The violence has caused thousands of Haitians to cross into the neighboring Dominican Republic, and it could drive a new surge of migrants toward the U.S. border.
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