Haiti’s gangs use TikTok, Instagram, Twitter to recruit and terrorize
(washingtonpost.com)
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The man wears a balaclava with a wide, toothy grin on the front — a stark contrast to the angry, threat-laden rant he’s delivering.
If anyone in territory controlled by his 5 Segonn gang is killed, the amateur rapper known as “Izo” warns, he’ll slaughter 30 people in revenge. He repeats the message for his “soldiers.”
“You don’t have to wait for my orders,” Izo says in a video posted this month to tens of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram. He won’t show his gun on camera, he says — or his video might be reported to the platforms’ moderators.
The violent armed gangs that control much of Haiti are using social media to expand their reach and tighten their grip on the beleaguered Caribbean nation. Posts aimed at energizing recruits, intimidating rivals and terrorizing the population are challenging the ability of the platforms to police the problematic content. Some here are calling for tighter controls.
“The bandits would never have been as powerful as they are in Haiti without social media,” said Yvens Rumbold of Policité, a policy think tank here. “We always had bandits in Haiti, but without these platforms, they would not be as famous.”
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Jimmy Cherizier is a former police officer on whom the United States hasimposed sanctions for allegedly leading armed groups in “coordinated, brutal attacks in Port-au-Prince neighborhoods,” the U.S. Treasury said in a release, including a five-day attack in May 2020 in which civilians were slain and houses burned. When Cherizier united warring gangs here into the G9 Family and Allies, he announced the alliance on YouTube. In a Twitter post, an account purporting to belong to him urged backers to “ransack everything.”
As violence between gangs in Port-au-Prince escalated in recent months, gang members posted photos of corpses on WhatsApp, human rights groups say. Izo uses several platforms to threaten and mock rivals, police officers and journalists.
Gangs use social media to promote themselves, push narratives, show their strength, delegitimize state institutions and recruit members. In some posts, gang leaders flash cash, gold chains and blinged-out watches, signifiers of a lifestyle that is far out of reach for the great majority in this impoverished nation.
“Social media is responsible for a lot of the insecurity climate that we have here,” said James Boyard, a political scientist at the State University of Haiti. “Social media has a huge responsibility … to vet their users, to analyze the images on the accounts and to censure them in some instances. They need to do more, frankly.”
Cherizier, in an interview with a sympathizer on YouTube, is asked specifically about the utility of social media.
“I’m thanking those who create these technologies,” he says. “Tech today gives us an opportunity to sell ourselves to the public. I’m not selling lies. I’m who I say I am. I do not do 99 percent of what they said I’ve done. … Technologies gave me an opportunity to defend myself.”
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The development troubles some officials here.
In October, Frantz Louis Juste, then Port-au-Prince’s top prosecutor, wrote a letter asking several platforms to “block or delete” the accounts of several individuals, including Cherizier, who he claimed were associated with criminal groups.
“These gangs instill a reign of terror in society,” he told The Washington Post. “They need less widespread publicity.”
The letter was made public but wasn’t sent to the companies that it named.
TikTok’s rules bar terrorist and criminal organizations from using the app. The company removed Izo’s account after The Post asked about it. It said it was reviewing others.
“There’s no place for violent extremism or promotion of violence on TikTok,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “We will remove content and ban accounts that violate our policies as we work to foster a safe and welcoming environment.”
Twitter said it was reviewing accounts and tweets “in line with our rules.” The company has reported receiving one legal request from Haiti to remove content. That was in 2016.
After being questioned by The Post, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, removed from Izo’s Facebook and Instagram accounts the video in which he threatens to kill 30 people. It did not remove his profiles, and the same video appeared on another Instagram account with his name.
“We regularly review organizations to determine if they violate our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy and ban them from our platforms if they do,” the company said in a statement. “We use technology to detect violations and deploy global teams, which include native Creole speakers, to review content.”
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
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Gangs have long had a presence in Haiti, but their power has grown in recent years amid a broader deterioration of democratic institutions and security conditions. Analysts estimate that they control 60 percent of the country and are on the brink of becoming, collectively, a “proto state.”
In recent years, gang kidnappings for ransom have skyrocketed. No one has been immune — victims have included American missionaries, French clergy and Haitians of all ages and backgrounds.
Haiti’s Center for Analysis and Research on Human Rights counted 225 kidnappings in the first quarter of 2022 — up nearly 60 percent from the same period last year.
Since April, armed violence in the capital between 400 Mawozo, the gang implicated in the kidnapping last year of 17 American and Canadian missionaries with an Ohio-based charity, and Chen Mechan, a rival gang, has escalated. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights has called the level of violence “unimaginable and intolerable.”
Nearly 17,000 Haitians have been displaced by the clashes, according to the United Nations, and at least 200 have been killed — almost half of them civilians. Deepening insecurity is one factor fueling an exodus of Haitians on rickety boats bound for the United States and elsewhere on sometimes deadly voyages.
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Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network reported last month that gang members in the recent battles had raped women and girls, mutilated bodies and taken photos of these “macabre scenes” to post on social media to “maintain terror among the population.”
The nongovernmental group showed photos to The Post that it said were sharedby gang members in WhatsApp groups. The images of scattered body parts, decapitated heads and mutilated corpses were forwarded many times on the Meta-owned messaging service.
Analysts said messages from gang members often appear on WhatsApp first and are then spread on other platforms or by mainstream media organizations. WhatsApp’s encrypted chats scramble messages so only the sender and receiver can read them, making it more difficult to detect harmful content unless a user reports it.
Twitter and TikTok said their human content moderators and other tools that detect harmful content cover several languages, but they did not say whether Haitian Creole was among them.
“These social media [companies] need resources affiliated to specific regions and countries,” Rumbold said.
Still, some users are adept at slipping around efforts to block them.
After TikTok removed Izo’s account recently, he posted several Instagram stories to share the news and express his displeasure.
One Instagram story showed a TikTok page — with several of the videos from the deleted one.
“God forbid I had another account,” said the text of the story, with several flexed biceps emoji.
FEAST OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY (June 12th, 2022)
Prov. 8, 22-31; Ps. 8; Rom. 5, 1-5; Jn. 16, 12-15
Msgr. Pierre Andre Pierre
In this celebration of the Holy Trinity, we may wonder how and to what extent we can understand this one God with three faces, the Trinity. Our human mind is too small to encompass this great mystery. But the Bible, already in the Old Testament, shows us that wisdom is not mere knowledge, but the art of life, understanding with the heart by reflecting on our vital experience (cf. Prov. 8, 22-31; and Ps. 8). And that experience tells us: God is love, and he comes to us in many ways, with paternal and maternal concern and care, with forgiveness and with the life that Jesus brought us, with courage and joy, hope and light shed on us by the Holy Spirit. May we deepen this experience during every Eucharist.
The Church calls us today to reverently contemplate the awesome mystery of God. Who is He in the reality of his nature, this great “One Whose Mighty Deeds Are Clearly Seen?”
When falling on our knees, we search the Scriptures, especially the texts of the New Testament our understanding of the mystery of God reaches new heights. Jesus himself is described as the Word Made Flesh. And the Word is said to be God himself. Jesus, therefore, is completely God (cf. John 1,1-18).
Jesus, in turn, sends upon us His Spirit, also described as the Spirit of the Most High yet that Spirit is shown as standing as a distinct person. The divinity is not broken down into three parts! The Word and the Spirit possess in full the divinity of the Father. We marvel, therefore at a God at once Three and One” This is what we call the Trinity, three persons equally sharing in Love their very selves: One nature; three persons! We marvel at a Relationship of Love at its Supreme Stage.
These revealed truths open our minds to the vision of a Supreme Father who is not Isolated, closed upon Himself but a Being involved in an overwhelming Love Relationship with the Word. That mutual relationship intense as a flaming fire IS the Holy Spirit who is poured upon us. Our God is a furnace of Love and of Light and of Being embracing all things including ourselves.
The genuine worshiper of this overwhelming Being of Consuming Love is called to be a witness and a promotor of Light, Love, and Truth in this created world. How glorious is our God!
U.S. focuses on U.N. presence in Haiti as it seeks to help troubled country
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES AND NORA GÁMEZ TORRES
UPDATED JUNE 10, 2022 8:30 PM
As Haiti grapples with an unprecedented wave of kidnappings and killings by armed gangs, a top State Department diplomat for Latin America and the Caribbean said Friday the U.S. is actively engaged in discussions about Haiti’s mounting security challenges and what the presence of a United Nations mission in the country should look like. “We’re looking at what the structure of that mission would be going forward and making sure that it is properly equipped to deal with the security issues in Haiti,” Assistant Secretary of State Brian A. Nichols told the Miami Herald in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the Ninth Summit of the Americas. Nichols’ comments are the first public acknowledgment that the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti, known by its French acronym, BINUH, has not worked. The small mission was put in place in October 2019 after the closure of the United Nations Peacekeeping Operation after 15 years.
The closure came amid growing political and security challenges that have many observers believing that Haiti is far worse today than it was in 2004 when the international community agreed to send troops to stabilize the country after its then-president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled into exile amid a bloody coup. That reality has led some to agitate for a military presence to help the country’s beleaguered police force take on heavily armed gangs that now control large swaths of the capital and are helping fuel the largest exodus of Haitian boat refugees since 2004. But the U.S., which has framed the country’s current security woes as a policing and not military matter, has resisted any request for outside military assistance for Haiti. U.S. sources at the National Security Council and the U.S. mission at the United Nations told the Herald that there are no active discussions over any plans to send a new peacekeeping force to Haiti. That leaves the current U.N. political mission, which has struggled to help Haiti as it plunges deeper into political instability, human rights abuses and banditry. In October, the U.N. Security Council agreed to extend the U.N. mission by nine months. The decision came after the U.S., which wanted a one-year extension, struck an 11th-hour compromise with China. The Chinese, along with Russia, have been vocal critics of the international community’s presence in Haiti, and had sought to limit the extension to six months. As part of the compromise, the Security Council agreed to an assessment of the U.N. mission. That assessment has been circulated among council members of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, whose office on Friday also shared its latest report on the situation in Haiti ahead of its meeting in a few weeks to discuss the mission’s future. “Obviously, whatever we do in the international community, it has to support Haitian efforts to build security and to find a negotiated solution and a way forward to re-establish full democracy in Haiti,” Nichols said. Nichols insisted that the U.S. and other partners in the international partners are providing “robust assistance” to the Haiti National Police, particularly in the areas of training and equipping an anti-gang task force and special weapons and tactics units. In meetings with interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry on the sidelines of the summit in Los Angeles, U.S. officials also committed to providing additional police support and to work toward relaxing weapons and arms requirements. Haiti is subjected to a U.S. arms embargo that has not prevented gangs from being heavily armed, but has prevented the police from being properly equipped to confront them.
Read Next: As desperate Haitians take to the sea, they turn to Vodou to help guide their journeys So far, however, the United States’ offerings have yet to bear fruit, leaving the population to struggle under a wave of unabated kidnappings. U.N. agencies recently reported that in May alone there were at least 200 kidnappings and in recent days, a number of foreign citizens have been kidnapped, including three U.N. employees. One of the employees has been identified by several sources as driver for the head of the U.N. office, Helen La Lime.
Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for Guterres, told the Herald Friday that the U.N. staffer who was taken hostage May 23 “was released in good health” Thursday. “The United Nations remains mobilized with the support of the national authorities for the resolution of two further cases,” he said, without offering details. Two Belgium citizens were also grabbed in front of a building in Petionville where foreign diplomats also live. All of this has created anxiety and helplessness among other foreign citizens and Haitian nationals, and fueled a sense of exasperation among an increasingly frustrated foreign diplomatic corps. With no higher travel warning than No. 4, which is “Do Not Travel,” both the U.S. and France last year told their citizens living in Haiti to leave. France did so after the still unsolved assassination of the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, and the U.S. did so after gangs blocked the entrance to ports that hold fuel and brought the country to a halt. “We recognize that the situation for average Haitians, it is deeply worrisome with regard to security, and kidnapping and crime remains at alarming levels,” Nichols said. “And we in the international community have to do more and better to support the Haitian people.”
Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry speaks during a plenary session at the Summit of the Americas, Friday, June 10, 2022, in Los Angeles. Marcio Jose Sanchez AP On Thursday, Nichols met with interim Prime Minister Henry. On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined the foreign ministers of Canada and Mexico to discuss the situation in Haiti. There will also soon be another donors meeting — the fourth in less than a year — on Haiti, Nichols said.
“We’re not going to stop until we give the Haitian people the better future that they deserve,” he said. But how the U.S. should go about that has been a point of contention. Members of civil society in Haiti known as the Montana Group and their supporters in the U.S. Congress have been urging the Biden administration to end its support for Henry and allow a new group of mostly non-political actors to take charge of the country. Instead, the U.S. has asked both sides to reach an agreement to come up with “a Haitian-led solution.” With neither Henry nor the Montana Group, named after an accord it signed at the Montana Hotel, seemingly willing to share power, both sides have remained at loggerheads as the international community pushes for dialogue. The political paralysis, coupled with the social tensions and deepening sense of despair, have all led to large migration flows of Haitians throughout the hemisphere. Nichols Friday continued to insist on the need for a compromise, saying that the U.S. has encouraged Henry and civil society groups, “particularly the Montana group, to come together and select counselors as a way to prepare for elections so that the international community can support with technical assistance, financial resources, and make sure that preparations can take place in a secure environment and candidates can compete without fear and that voters can go to the polls in a peaceful way.”
McClatchy Senior National Security Correspondent Michael Wilner contributed to this report. This story was originally published June 10, 2022 7:22 PM.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article262402162.html