Thread: Looters swarm in Haiti

On Fox I saw where looters swarmed and stole goods being dropped from helicopters. The looters are a big part of the reason relief goods are not getting to the people who need it.


PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - The United States was sending more troops on Monday to help protect a huge relief operation in Haiti from marauding looters as tens of thousands of earthquake survivors waited desperately for promised food and medical care.


Gangs of looters still prowled demolished streets of downtown Port-au-Prince filching goods from destroyed shops with little police presence, but some signs of normality returned as street sellers emerged with fruit and vegetables.

"We do not have the capacity to fix this situation. Haiti needs help ... the Americans are welcome here. But where are they? We need them here on the street with us," said policeman Dorsainvil Robenson, as he chased looters.

Some 2,200 Marines with heavy earth-moving equipment, medical aid and helicopters were arriving on Monday, said the U.S. Southern Command, which aims to have 10,000 U.S. troops in the area for the rescue operation.

World leaders have promised massive amounts of assistance to rebuild Haiti since Tuesday's quake killed as many as 200,000 people and left its capital, Port-au-Prince, in ruins.

European Union institutions and member states have offered more than 400 million euros ($575.6 million) in emergency and longer-term assistance to Haiti, which even before the disaster was already the poorest state in the Western Hemisphere.

Aid workers struggled to get food and medical assistance to the survivors, many of them injured, hungry and thirsty and living in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.

"The situation is very tough on the ground, including for agencies and countries rushing to help. Minimal survival even for staff there is an issue," the head of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan, said in Geneva.

Nearly a week into the crisis, international aid was only just starting to get through to those in need, delayed by logistical logjams and security concerns.

SECURITY CRITICAL, DONORS MEET

Haitian President Rene Preval said on Sunday U.S. troops will help U.N. peacekeepers keep order on Haiti's increasingly lawless streets, where overstretched police and U.N. peacekeepers have been unable to provide full security.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," the commander of the U.S. military operation in Haiti, Lieutenant General Ken Keen said: "We are here principally for a humanitarian assistance operation, but security is a critical component. ... We are going to have to address the situation, the security."

In an indication of the sensitivity of U.S. soldiers operating in a Caribbean state where they have intervened in the past, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused Washington of "occupying Haiti undercover."

Canada will host a meeting of foreign ministers in Montreal on January 25 to look at Haiti's needs, the Canadian government said.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, meanwhile, proposed that African nations offer Haitian survivors the chance to resettle in Africa "the land of their ancestors".

"Africa should offer Haitians the chance to return home. It is their right," Wade said on his website. Local media quoted Senegalese officials as saying the West African country was ready to offer parcels of fertile land to Haitians.

The president of the Inter-American Development Bank, Luis Alberto Moreno, will visit Haiti on Monday and attend a donors meeting in the Dominican Republic to start discussing Haiti's reconstruction needs, a bank spokesman said.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, was due to meet on Monday with Preval, whose cabinet met outside police headquarters on Sunday in a circle of white plastic chairs due to the collapse of the presidential palace.

Clinton was to bring aid supplies and determine more about what Haiti needs.

POLICE PURSUE LOOTERS

Streets piled with debris slowed the delivery of medical and food supplies, but there were signs of progress as international medical teams took over damaged hospitals where seriously injured people had lain untreated for days.

Rescue teams also raced against time to find people alive under the rubble of collapsed buildings, with more successful rescues of survivors reported on Sunday.

Trucks piled with corpses were ferrying bodies to hurriedly excavated mass graves outside the city, but tens of thousands of victims are still believed buried under the rubble.

With people turning more desperate by the day, looters have swarmed smashed shops in downtown Port-au-Prince, fighting each other with knives, hammers, ice-picks and rocks while police tried to disperse them with gunfire. At least two suspected looters were shot dead on Sunday, witnesses said.

Heavily armed gang members have returned to the Cite Soleil shantytown since breaking out from prison after the quake.

"Whether things explode is all down to whether help gets through from the international community," said police commander Ralph Jean-Brice, in charge of Haiti's West Department, whose force is down by half due to the quake.

Local mayors, businessmen and bankers told Preval that restoring law and order was essential for reviving at least some commercial activity.

FOOD FROM THE AIR

The U.S. military said it was doing its best to get as many planes as possible into Port-au-Prince, after aid agencies complained shipments of aid had not been allowed to land at the U.S.-controlled airport.

The airport's control tower was knocked out by the quake and U.S. military air controllers were operating from a radio post on the airfield grass, said Colonel Buck Elton, commander of the U.S. military directing flights at Haiti's airport.

More than 30 countries have rushed rescue teams, doctors, field hospitals, food, medicine and other supplies to Haiti since Tuesday's quake, choking the airspace and the ramp at the small airfield.

Although a few street markets had begun selling vegetables, charcoal, chicken and pork, tens of thousands of earthquake survivors across the city were still clamoring for help.

There were jostling scrums for food and water as U.N. trucks distributed food packets and U.S. military helicopters swooped down to throw out boxes of water bottles and rations.

"We haven't moved for four days, only God knows how long we can survive like this, but there are no jobs and no houses," said Marie Gracieuse Baptiste, a single mother with four children, sheltering at one improvised survivors' camps.

A crude sign at the camp's entrance read: "People needs water, food."

(Additional reporting by Tom Brown, Joseph Guyler Delva and Carlos Rawlins in Port-au-Prince, Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations, Frank Jack Daniel in Caracas, Mark John and Diadie Ba in Dakar, and David Brunnstrom in Brussels, writing by Anthony Boadle and Pascal Fletcher, editing by Sandra Maler)


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6 ... ews&rpc=76

You can bet the thousands of prisoners that escaped are a big part of the looting and crime taking place.



In the middle of the terrible tragedy that struck Haiti this week in the form of a 7.5 earthquake, one that basically leveled the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, millions of people are now homeless, injured, trapped under the mountains of rubble, or dead. Another large group of people affected by the natural disaster are the inmates held in the 19 prisons across that island nation, to include the over 4,000 that were held in Haiti’s National Penitentiary in the capital city.


Constructed in 1918 by U.S. Marines, the Haitian National Penitentiary was built to hold 800, although it had at least 4,000 prisoners at the time of the earthquake. Witnesses have indicated that the walls of the prison, as well as the prison itself, have been reduced to piles of broken concrete and prisoners not killed or trapped in the rubble were running helter-skelter from the prison. One witness described seening escaping prisones being fired upon by guards as they ran from their former prison home.
Haitian prisons not only house convicted criminals, but also hold many political prisoners arrested after the 2004 coup d’etat that saw the overthrow of then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

By some reports upwards of 80% of the prisoners in Haiti’s prisons have not been convicted of a crime, and the criminal justice system in that country grinds so slow that some have been held since Aristride’s overthrow without seeing the inside of a courtroom, much less having been charged with a crime more serious than “associating with miscreants.â€

CITE SOLEIL, Haiti (Reuters) - Heavily armed gang members who once ran Haiti's largest slum like warlords have returned with a vengeance since Tuesday's earthquake damaged the National Penitentiary allowing 3,000 inmates to break out.

The pacification of Cite Soleil had been one of President Rene Prevail's few undisputed achievements since taking office in 2006, until the quake devastated Port-au-Prince.

"It's only natural that they would come back here. This has always been their stronghold," said a Haitian police officer in the teeming warren of shacks, alleys and open sewers that is home to more than 300,000 people.

He and other policemen, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about the volatile situation in Cite Soleil, said notorious armed gangs had been making their presence felt here since the quake.

If large-scale violence erupts here amid the chaos and looting that has grown by the hour in Port-au-Prince since the temblor, it could pose a major challenge to efforts to reestablish law and order throughout the Haitian capital.

C
Mounted on motorcycles, and brandishing assault rifles and guns thought to have been stripped from prison guards during the quake, the gang members include one stone-cold killer known only by the street name "Blade."

ite Sole's gang leaders are larger-than-life criminals. The stuff of urban legend and popular Haitian rap songs, they are now seen as a breed apart from other Haitians in that they alone benefited from the Tuesday's disaster.


Word on the street is that they swept down on the rubble of Haiti's collapsed Justice Ministry on Saturday morning and set it ablaze to destroy any records of their incarceration or criminal history.

When Reuters reporters clambered through broken bars to tour the cavernous National Penitentiary on Friday, there were few if any remaining records of inmates housed there. Many may have been burned in a small and windowless cell. It was still brick-oven hot days after the temblor.

ROBBING AND SHOOTING

Whatever actually happened inside the prison, it did not appear to have been seriously damaged by the quake. There were no bodies inside and the only sign of life came from two lame dogs holed up in a cell packed with old mattresses.

Of the 3,000 inmates who escaped on Tuesday, overpowering an unknown number of guards, many were violent criminals with past links to Cite Soleil, a seaside slum that has long been a potent social symbol of the poorest country in the Americas.

"They got out of prison and now they're going around trying to rob people," said Cite Soleil resident Elgin St. Louis, 34. "Last night they spent the whole night shooting," she added.

"We dread their return," said another resident, a younger man who gave his name as Forrestal Champlain. "They're armed, they have no morals and they could do anything."

Despite such vocal opposition to the gangs, resentment against the government still runs high in Cite Soleil, which was a bastion of support for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist champion of the poor.

The mostly cinder-block homes are still pockmarked from pitched battles between gangs and U.N. peacekeepers, who have been in Haiti since June 2004 and were used by Preval to establish control over Cite Soleil after he took office.

But as one resident put it on Saturday: "Preval's not in charge here. No one's in charge except the (gang) bosses."

Haiti's National Police Chief Mario Andresol had a different opinion, even as he acknowledged the escaped gang members posed a serious security risk.

"My message to all those armed bandits that are trying to take advantage of this situation is that we will arrest them just as we did in the past," Andresol told Reuters.

"We are in the process of taking appropriate measures to hunt down these criminals," he said.

(Writing by Tom Brown; editing by Anthony Boadle and Todd Eastham)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60G0CO20100117

There are also gang members with ties to Haitian gangs in Florida are partaking in this looting. Some of them are part of those who fled the jail.
This is the reason why Hiati is so poor. Even before the earthquake alot of the aid that was sent by other countries or by relatives did not get to those it was intended for. I know a woman in my condo who is Haitian and a lawyer and she flies over there on a regular basis with clothing and money to help her family. That is the only way she can guarantee her relatives get it. She told me the wealthy take food intended for the poor or it sits rotting in the heat on the docks.

Originally Posted by swatchick

There are also gang members with ties to Haitian gangs in Florida are partaking in this looting. Some of them are part of those who fled the jail.
This is the reason why Hiati is so poor. Even before the earthquake alot of the aid that was sent by other countries or by relatives did not get to those it was intended for. I know a woman in my condo who is Haitian and a lawyer and she flies over there on a regular basis with clothing and money to help her family. That is the only way she can guarantee her relatives get it. She told me the wealthy take food intended for the poor or it sits rotting in the heat on the docks.

Wow thanks for the insight swatchick, how sad.