In a rare positive development for accountability in Haiti, a judge sent 30 individuals to trial in late July 2024 for their alleged involvement in the 2018 La Saline massacre — including Jimmy Chérizier, the former police officer turned gang leader whose G9 alliance had been central to Haiti’s security crisis. The La Saline massacre had killed over 70 people, raped nearly a dozen women and girls, and vandalized or burned more than 150 homes in what investigators described as a coordinated attack on a community perceived as opposing the gang’s expansion.
The referral to trial was remarkable given the environment of near-total impunity in which gang violence occurred in Haiti. Most documented massacres — La Saline, Bel Air, Cité Soleil, Carrefour-Feuilles, Nan Brooklyn — had produced investigations that stalled without prosecutions. That the La Saline case had progressed to a trial referral represented years of persistence by human rights lawyers, survivor advocates, and the judicial personnel who continued to work on the case despite threats.
The prospects for the trial actually proceeding and producing convictions were complicated by the security environment. Witnesses who had agreed to testify faced significant risks. Judges and prosecutors who would conduct the trial needed protection that the current environment made difficult to guarantee. And Chérizier himself remained at large, continuing to lead gang operations while charges against him were pending.
The La Saline trial referral was nonetheless significant as a marker of what justice could look like in Haiti if the security conditions existed to support judicial processes. It demonstrated that evidence had been gathered, legal arguments had been made, and that at least one Haitian judge had been willing to take the accountability step of sending gang perpetrators to trial.