Louisseul François, a resident of Haiti, vividly recalls the horrific event by saying that he sprang out of bed at around three in the morning of the event on October 5, 2024, when he heard the first gunshots of the gang invasion and joined other members of “the coalition,” a local vigilante organization, at the town entrance. Its members, despite their best efforts to band together, quickly found they were outmatched. They ran into the hills around it, where the terrified, bleary-eyed inhabitants cowered.
François, 41, who lost six friends and family members in the early morning assault, stated, “The gangs shot at anything that moved – even dogs … They came to wipe out the whole area. It was a premeditated massacre.”
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When François went to the scene later that morning with police, the invaders having been driven back, he recalled the horrors he saw, his voice quivering with sorrow.
The attackers had broken into houses and killed anybody they could locate. François came and saw four dead next to a burning home at one intersection. Ahead, there had been arson at a medical facility and a school. Nineteen corpses were strewn across a single roadway.
“Men, women, and a three-year-old child,” remarked the father of three, Francois.
Even while those sights were horrific, they only showed a small portion of the carnage; the actual death toll wasn’t known until over a week after the incident.
When gang members stormed Pont-Sondé in apparent retaliation for the market town’s failure to bow to their control, at least 115 individuals are now thought to have been shot or stabbed to death. It was said that elderly people and infants were among the victims.
François spotted the body of his cousin, the first person he had come across, in a pool of blood, among the many found dead, “His head had been shattered by bullets and his chest sliced open with a machete.”
François expressed, “In such a small community, it’s impossible to process all of this.”
Experts have referred to the October 3rd rampage as one of the deadliest mass murders in Haiti in decades, surpassing the massacre of over 70 residents in the La Saline neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in 2018.
According to William O’Neill, the United Nations’ principal specialist on human rights in the Caribbean nation, “Unfortunately, there are many massacres in Haitian history … But [in terms of recent years] this is way up there … It was really off the charts.”
O’Neill, a seasoned human rights attorney with experience in South Sudan and Rwanda, claimed to have observed a pattern in the gang’s “concerted, intentional” annihilation of human life in Pont-Sondé.
He thought the slaughter was intended to serve a greater purpose than just taking human lives; it was meant to serve as a message to the UN-backed international security force and Haiti’s recently established interim government, which are both working to bring order back to the country after months of turmoil.
O’Neil shared, “‘We control this. Don’t mess with us. Stay out …’ That was their message – and they delivered it loud and clear.”
Haiti’s new prime minister, Garry Conille, had a message of his own for gang leaders he accused of holding 12 million Haitians hostage when the first members of the Kenya-led multinational police mission arrived in the country in June, following months of unrest that overthrew the government, paralyzed the capital, and claimed hundreds of lives.
Conille stated, “We ask the bandits to lay down their guns and recognize the authority of the state.”
Conille’s request has not yet been answered by the criminal organization. However, some gangs did seem to momentarily retreat in recent months, maybe in an effort to hide while they assessed the impact of the foreign force.
The unsatisfactory halt in violence has created the impression of “a precarious peace,” according to security analyst Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, who visited Port-au-Prince last month.
Most of Haiti’s capital was still controlled by gangs, and there were still occasional fighting sprees within and surrounding the city, including a fatal attack on the village of Ganthier in August. However, with the presence of hundreds of Kenyan police, some marketplaces and schools reopened. With the establishment of a transitional administration charged with holding the new elections needed following President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in 2021, a semblance of stability had been attained.
According to Le Cour Grandmaison, a civil society employee of Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a Geneva-based organization, “You feel like you have people in charge.”
This tenuous progress has been called into question by the Pont-Sondé massacre, which has revealed how politically linked gangs still control not just a significant portion of Haiti’s capital but also the Artibonite Valley, one of the country’s most significant agricultural centers.
The mayor of Saint-Marc, a municipality close to the murder site where hundreds of displaced people of Pont-Sondé have fled, Myriam Fièvre, stated, “We live in constant fear.”
One of the most infamous Artibonite gangs, Gran Grif, has been held accountable for the slaughter. The gang controls a significant portion of the Route Nationale 1 highway, which connects the capital to Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second city.
“Murder, rape, robbery, destruction of property, hijacking of trucks and goods, violence against civilian population [and] kidnapping” are listed as the gang’s primary criminal acts in a UN report from 2023. The UN and US imposed sanctions in late September on Gran Grif’s commander, Luckson Elan, also known as General Luckson, and a local politician who was charged with providing funding and arms to the group’s adolescent foot soldiers.
Regarding the killings at Pont-Sondé, Le Cour Grandmaison remarked, “Less than a week after that, [Elan] commits one of the most awful massacres in Haiti’s recent history … That’s the magnitude of the massacre,” Le Cour Grandmaison said of the murders in Pont-Sondé.”
Grandmaison added, “It shows that there’s a sense of absolute power, impunity, and a blatant show of force that the gangs wanted to use at this very specific time.”
Fièvre, of Saint-Marc, stated that because of a string of bloody revolutions and coups, people in Port-au-Prince may have been used to hearing explosions and gunshots in recent years. She went on, “But now it’s happening here in Artibonite.”
She then added, “The people aren’t used to this – they just want to go about their daily lives … It’s as if we no longer live in our own country.”
In his visit to Port-au-Prince last month, UN Secretary-General Joseph E. O’Neill urged the international community to step up support for the inadequately financed, ill-equipped, and outnumbered multinational security force before Haiti’s gangs became emboldened by its lack of progress and returned to the warpath. Of the estimated £450 million ($588 million) that the mission needs, so far it has received about £65 million ($84 million).
In its current situation, O’Neill compared the mission to a physician attempting to operate on a patient for heart surgery without the assistance of an anesthesiologist, an unstable heart monitor, a crumbling operating table, and a tray full of rusting equipment. He said, “What do you think your chances are of success for that procedure?”
Fièvre stated that security in Pont-Sondé was progressively improving two weeks after the massacre as a result of the presence of Kenyan and Haitian police. However, she bemoaned how the Artibonite region had devolved into “a bloodbath” and predicted that gangs would soon attempt to seize Saint-Marc, one of Haiti’s major cities located around 55 miles (89 km) to the northwest of the country’s capital.
“We need help, and we need it fast,” Fièvre expressed. “When we sleep now, we feel our fate is in God’s hands.”
