Haiti

A fact-finding mission from the Organization of American States concluded its visit on Wednesday to a politically volatile Haiti with two messages, and a proposal to help bring those implicated in a Venezuela PetroCaribe aid corruption scandal to justice.

Thousands of angry Haitians marched in protest in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, decrying corruption and stepping up calls for the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, who has been implicated in two government audits on the misuse of billions of dollars in Venezuelan aid meant to help the country’s poor.

Months prior to Haiti’s deeply flawed October 2016 presidential vote, the man who would become president, Jovenel Moïse, received millions of dollars for questionable road rehabilitation projects that a panel of Haitian government auditors say were part of embezzlement schemes that defrauded the country’s poor out of billions of dollars in Venezuelan aid meant to improve their lives.

It is one of Haiti’s most violent and impoverished neighborhoods, a no-go zone next to the Haitian Parliament that has become ground zero in a resurgence of gang-related and possibly politically motivated violence.

Now six months after dozens of people were tortured and killed in the worst massacre in Haiti in more than a decade, an internal Haiti police investigation report obtained by the Miami Herald provides the first official account of some of the atrocities that occurred in Port-au-Prince’s La Saline neighborhood during four days of carnage in mid-November.

COMMENTARY

As a U.S. correspondent who covers Latin America and the Caribbean from South Florida, I chafe watching my country acquire traits of the developing nations I write about. Obscene wealth disparities. Zero-sum tribal politics. Mass incarceration.

And now, extremist attacks on abortion rights.

At least 14 Haitians are dead after a twin-engine outboard boat smuggling migrants to the Turks and Caicos capsized in shark-infested waters, the islands’ police force confirm.

Takara Bain, a spokeswoman with the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police, said 14 individuals were rescued before the search-and-rescue operation was suspended late Sunday until daybreak Monday.

Another Haiti government has been ousted.

Haiti’s Lower Chamber of Deputies fired Prime Minister Jean Henry Céant and his government on Monday, deepening uncertainty amid a political and economic crisis that led to violent protests last month and the U.S. and Canada warning citizens not to travel to the country.

Haiti is running out of fuel — again.

Gas stations are stockpiling and rationing gasoline. The poor are running out of kerosene to cook. Private power suppliers, out of diesel for the past 11 days, are reducing or ceasing production — taking Haiti’s already desperate electricity issues from bad to worse.