A siege of the Nan Brooklyn neighborhood of Cité Soleil that began in early 2023 culminated in a massacre that killed 145 people, making it one of the deadliest single episodes of gang violence in Haiti’s recent history. The siege, conducted by a gang network seeking to eliminate a rival faction and take control of the strategic waterfront neighborhood, trapped civilians for months before the final assault that left the streets littered with bodies.
Residents who survived described months of living in a war zone, unable to leave their homes safely, running out of food and water, watching neighbors killed as they attempted to flee or find supplies. The humanitarian organizations that would normally have provided assistance could not safely enter the area during the siege. Medical care for the wounded was essentially unavailable. Families buried their dead where they could.
The UN human rights monitoring operation documented the massacre and described it as potentially constituting crimes against humanity — the systematic killing of civilians in the context of gang territorial conquest. The documentation was thorough and the legal characterization was carefully considered. But the accountability it was designed to support remained entirely theoretical in an environment where prosecutions of gang leaders were essentially impossible through Haitian courts.
The Cité Soleil massacre added to the accumulating catalogue of mass atrocities in Haiti that had been documented without resulting in any accountability. La Saline in 2018, Bel Air in 2019, Cité Soleil in 2022, Carrefour-Feuilles and Nan Brooklyn in 2023 — each massacre was documented, condemned, and forgotten by the international community while gang perpetrators continued to operate with total impunity.