Haiti’s government has announced a three-month state of emergency in several parts of the country as it battles surging gang violence.
The measure will cover the West, Centre and Artibonite departments, the latter of which is known as Haiti’s “rice basket” and has experienced an increase in attacks by armed groups in recent months.
In a statement on Saturday, the government said the state of emergency would allow the Haitian authorities to “continue the fight against insecurity and respond to the agricultural and food crisis”.
“Insecurity has negative effect both on the lives of citizens and on the country’s different sectors of activity. Given the scale of this crisis, it is imperative to decree a major mobilisation of the state’s resources and institutional means to address it,” it said.
Haiti has reeled from years of violence as powerful armed groups, often with ties to the country’s political and business leaders, have vied for influence and control of territory.
But the situation worsened dramatically after the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, which created a power vacuum.
Nearly 1.3 million people have been displaced across the country, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in June, while the United Nations estimates that 4,864 people were killed from October 2024 to June of this year.
Efforts to stem the deadly gang attacks, including the deployment of a UN-backed, Kenya-led police mission, have so far failed to restore stability.
While much of the focus has been on Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where up to 90 percent of the city is under the control of armed groups, the violence has also been spreading to other parts of the country.
Between October 2024 and the end of June, more than 1,000 Haitians were killed and 620 were kidnapped in the Artibonite and Centre departments, according to the UN’s human rights office.
In late April, dozens of people waded and swam across the Artibonite River, which cuts through the region, in a desperate attempt to flee the gangs.
Meanwhile, the government on Friday appointed Andre Jonas Vladimir Paraison as interim director of Haiti’s National Police, which has been working with Kenyan police officers leading the UN-backed mission to help quell the violence.
“We, the police, will not sleep,” Paraison said during his inauguration ceremony. “We will provide security across every corner of the country.”
Paraison previously served as head of security of Haiti’s National Palace and was on duty as a police officer when Moise was killed at his private residence in July 2021.
He replaced Normil Rameau, whose tenure of just more than a year was marked by tensions with a faction of the Transitional Presidential Council, notably Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime.
Rameau had repeatedly warned about the police force’s severe underfunding.
The change comes as Laurent Saint-Cyr, a wealthy businessman, also took over this week as president of the Transitional Presidential Council, which is charged with holding elections by February 2026.
