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
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