At least 70 people — including 10 women and three infants — were killed in a gang attack in central Haiti on Thursday that sent hundreds of people running for their lives, posing another challenge for the international security force that has been deployed in Haiti since June, according to the United Nations.
The attack took place at about 3 a.m. in Pont-Sondé, roughly 60 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The town is in the Artibonite department, a key agricultural region that has seen a surge in gang violence.
Gangs that the international security force has been sent to confront are mostly concentrated in Port-au-Prince, but the Artibonite region has also seen a rise in violence.
At least 50 more people were injured, according to the Haitian Health Ministry. A spokesman for the multinational security force deployed to Haiti said that they had confirmed 17 victims.
“This attack comes amid an upsurge in violence in the region, exacerbating an already extremely precarious security situation,” the health ministry said in a statement. “This violence disrupts the daily lives of residents, limiting their access to basic services, particularly health care. Persistent insecurity also prevents humanitarian interventions in certain localities, making the situation increasingly critical.”
While the ministry was attempting to use United Nations resources to respond by air, “direct intervention capacities are severely limited, due to the almost impossible access to the affected area,” the ministry said.
A spokesman for the Haitian National Police did not respond to requests for comment.
The Multinational Security Support mission, a deployment of 410 officers from Kenya, Jamaica and Belize that arrived in late June, said it would also respond. The mission is based in Port-au-Prince and has no presence in the rural Artibonite region.
The force and the Haitian National Police deployed officers “by road and air” to “pacify and bring sanity to the area,” said Jack Ombaka, a spokesman for the international force.
Haiti has been in awash in extreme violence in the more than three years since the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.
Gang killings and kidnappings spiked earlier this year when several rival armed groups joined forces to attack police stations, prisons and hospitals. They succeeded in forcing the resignation of the prime minister, who was out of the country and unable to return after the airport closed for two months because of gang violence.
Some areas of Port-au-Prince have seen a return to normalcy, but more than 700,000 people who fled their homes after gang attacks on their communities are still unable to return. More than 100,000 people are living in squalid camps, while others have dispersed to homes of friends and family throughout the country.
The Artibonite area is known to be home to the Gran Grif gang. Last week the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned its leader, Luckson Elan, as well as a local legislator who helped fuel his rise.
When a person involved in gangs, violation of human rights or widespread corruption is sanctioned by the Treasury Department, U.S. banks are prohibited from doing business with them, and they can no longer travel to the United States.
In August, even the country’s former president, Michel Martelly, was sanctioned for allegedly participating in drug trafficking and “sponsoring” gangs.
Mr. Elan was responsible for serious human rights abuses including kidnapping, murder, beating, and the rape of women and children, as well as looting, destruction, extortion, hijacking, and stealing crops and livestock, the Treasury Department said in a statement.
“The situation is especially devastating for his child victims who have been subjected to forced recruitment and sexual violence,” the statement said.
Artibonite is the rice growing area of central Haiti that sits between the capital and the main city in the north, Cap-Haitien. The country’s main road runs right through it — making it a source of revenue for gangs who set up kidnap ambushes on the road, taking people off buses en masse. Gangs in the Artibonite have also increasingly invaded farmland there.
More than 20 criminal groups operate in the area, according to a report by Global Initiative, an organized crime research organization in Geneva. From January 2022 until October 2023, more than 1,690 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in the Artibonite. At one point, the region represented more than a quarter of the victims of violence in Haiti, the report said.
David C. Adams contributed reporting.