A massacre in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in late 2023 killed dozens of civilians as gang networks targeted a community that had been a stronghold of the Bwa Kale anti-gang movement. The attack was widely understood as a retaliatory strike by criminal networks against a community that had organized resistance to gang control, and it demonstrated the lethal consequences that organized community resistance could attract.
Carrefour-Feuilles, a hillside neighborhood overlooking the capital with a history of community organization and political engagement, had been one of the more active centers of the Bwa Kale movement. Its residents had organized patrols, identified and targeted suspected gang members, and maintained a degree of territorial independence that had frustrated criminal networks seeking to extend their control.
The massacre sent a clear message: communities that organized against gang control would face extreme violence in retaliation. The attack on Carrefour-Feuilles, one of the more organized and resilient communities in Port-au-Prince, signaled that no neighborhood was safe from gang retribution and that the Bwa Kale movement’s successes would be met with escalating criminal violence.
Human rights organizations called for urgent investigation and accountability for the massacre, while acknowledging that in Haiti’s current environment, the prospect of justice through any available legal channel was essentially nonexistent. The UN human rights monitoring operation documented the incident and added it to the list of unaddressed mass atrocities that were accumulating in Haiti without accountability. No investigation was completed as of the end of 2023.