Haiti’s criminal gangs on Thursday set fire to the premises of historic Radio Télévision Caraibes, leaving the multistory building of the popular radio and television station charred by black smoke in a week marked by repeated assaults by a powerful gang alliance in neighborhoods around downtown Port-au-Prince.
Members of the Viv Ansanm — Living Together — alliance, which has already destroyed dozens of schools since the start of this years, according to a tally by the United Nations, have been escalating their attacks since a Haitian government task force earlier this month began dropping explosive drones in gangs’ strongholds. The operation, which has yet to take out any of the well-known gang leaders, has had a positive psychological effect in the population, but it has also made an already deteriorating and unpredictable security landscape even more menacing.
Gangs, for example, attacked the capital from several angles two nights ago. At one point, they raided the courtyard of the famed Hotel Oloffson, putting in danger the lives of dozens of young girls who live nearby and the Roman Catholic nuns who care for them, before police and a neighborhood self-defense brigade managed to push them back. Once a favorite haunt of celebrities, including the novelist Graham Greene, who authored the 1966 classic “The Comedians,” the Oloffson, like other institutions in downtown Port-au-Prince, has become a no man’s land because of the escalating gang assaults.
On Thursday, Caraibes became the latest victim of the ongoing siege. At about 5:30 a.m. clouds of black smoke were seen coming from the radio station’s building on Ruelle Chavannes and covering its transmitting antenna, according to videos and photographs shared with the Miami Herald by owner Patrick Moussignac. In one video, the remnants of a burned-out vehicle was observed in the middle of the road.
The extent of the damage to the building and its audio, photos and film archives detailing more than 50 years of Haitian history, and once stored in its basement, remain unclear. Since last year, the station’s owners had been forced to relocate staff and broadcast from elsewhere in Port-au-Prince because of the attacks in downtown Port-au-Prince that have even shuttered the country’s biggest public hospital.
“The guys set fire to the radio station. It’s going up in flames,” a voice said in a whisper to Moussignac as he explained he was secretly recording the video and feared they would open fire on him if he were detected. “Do you see the windows? All have burned.”
Radio Télévision Caraibes, which has been located in downtown Port-au-Prince since the 1960s, is considered the first radio station to cultivate a widespread and popular audience in Haiti, where journalists have long come under attack and continue to lose their lives in the course of their work.
The radio station is not just a go-to for news, but it has also been the go-to-station for desperate Haitians seeking financial help with medical bills, ransom payments to kidnappers and to get a temperature of the politics. For years, the station led the country’s political debate and the shaping of public opinion with its popular political talk show “Ranmase,” where movers and shakers who make the news engaged in a verbal free-for-all every Saturday. The station has also caught flak in the past for allowing unpopular political figures from using its airwaves to defend their positions.
On Thursday, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said “the levels of displacement are reaching new heights amid escalating violence in the country.”
“According to the International Organization for Migration in just three weeks, between the 14th of February and March 5th, more than 40,000 human beings were displaced in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. This is the highest number of people uprooted and recorded in such a short period since 2021, when the displacements due to gang violence began to be tracked,” Dujarric said.
Humanitarian groups, he said, also continue to face major access challenges due to the security risks and resources constraints. Funding shortages are leading to rapidly deteriorating conditions in displacement sites across Port-au-Prince, with many of those who have been displaced living dangerously close to areas with active fighting. Last week, stray bullets led to the death of at least one person in a displacement camp and others being injured.
This is the second time in 11 months that Haiti’s media outlets have lost a symbol of the nation’s hard-fought press freedom. Last April, armed gangs set fire to the premises of the country’s oldest newspaper and the hemisphere’s oldest French-language daily, Le Nouvelliste. The building and its presses were vandalized and looted, leading to a huge financial blow.
“The press continues to take hits,” Frantz Duval, the editor-in-chief of Le Nouvelliste said on Thursday while live on the newspaper’s Magik9 radio station as images of a burning Radio Caraibes circulated. He noted that prior to the latest attack, the radio station had already been forced to abandon its building and change its address because it was no longer safe for its employees.
“However, the building had remained as an institution,” Duval said. Day after day, Duval said, parts of Port-au-Prince are being forced to be abandoned.
“The cancer is advancing on Port-au-Prince; more and more areas, more and more neighborhoods, more and more streets, more and more homes, people are being forced to flee, and more and more institutions that are disappearing with their histories, with all that they represent in the history of the country.”
Whether it’s the family albums that the more than one million who are displaced were unable to retrieve or official or media archives that have gone up in flames amid the gang attacks, it’s the same, Duval said.
“It’s memories we are losing; it’s humanity we are losing,” he said. “It’s our history we are losing.”
