Evens Sanon

The U.N. says gangs are invading Haiti’s rural central region and suffocating a once peaceful area that served as the country’s food basket but that is now plagued by kidnappings, killings and rapes.

Fontaine Hospital Center in the Cite Soleil slum has been considered an oasis in a community overrun by gangs that have unleashed increasingly violent attacks against each other and civilians.

Haiti’s government has banned all charter flights to Nicaragua that migrants fleeing poverty and violence had been increasingly using in their quest to reach the United States.

Vigilante killings are surging across Haiti’s capital and beyond. Another five men were slain and set on fire Tuesday by a crowd that left one of the bodies near a police station in an upscale community.

Police and witnesses say the mob in the Port-au-Prince beat and burned the men to death with gasoline-soaked tires after pulling them from police custody at a traffic stop.

Hundreds of Haitians are flocking daily to the sole immigration office in Port-au-Prince to secure a passport in hopes they will soon be chosen to live legally in the U.S. under a new immigration plan.

The United States and Mexico said Monday they are preparing a U.N. resolution that would authorize an international mission to help improve security in Haiti, whose government issued a “distress call” for the people of the crisis-wracked nation.

Haitians take to the streets to protest over the increasing insecurity, turning violent in places like the southern city of Les Cayes, where people stormed the local airport and attacked a small plane owned by a U.S. missionary group.

Haiti's chief prosecutor on Tuesday asked a judge to charge Prime Minister Ariel Henry in the slaying of the president and asked officials to bar him from leaving the country.

A squad of gunmen assassinated Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and wounded his wife in an overnight raid on their home Wednesday, with police killing four suspects and arresting two others hours later amid growing chaos in a country already enduring gang violence and protests of his increasingly authoritarian rule.