The United States and Canada announced that they had delivered Saturday, October 15 of the “equipmentof maintaining order for the police of Haiti, following the call for help from the Caribbean country plunged into a spiral of health and security crises.
“US and Canadian military aircraft arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to transport essential security equipment, purchased by the Haitian government, to the director general of the Haitian National Police(PNH), the US and Canadian governments announced in a joint statement. “This equipment will help the PNH in its fight against criminal agents who are fomenting violence and disrupting the flow of vital humanitarian aid, thus harming efforts to stop the cholera epidemic in Haiti“, they added.
Read alsoHaiti: thousands of demonstrators in the streets against the call for foreign aid
Last week, and faced with a nascent cholera epidemic parallel to the terror exercised by gangs, the government of Port-au-Prince asked the international community to send a “armed specialized force“, a call relayed by the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres. On Wednesday, the United States declared itself ready to strengthen its humanitarian and security aid, while remaining reserved on the dispatch of ground troops.
Protests and looting have been occurring in the country since 9/11, when the government announced a fuel price hike. And since mid-September, the Varreux terminal – the largest in the country for importing fuel – has been controlled by powerful armed bands. According to a UN report published on Friday, gangs control up to 60% of the capital, and use rape and sexual violence to “spread fearand extend their control over a country already plagued by insecurity.
Last week, the United Nations also warned of a possible explosion of cholera cases in Haiti after the first cases of this disease were revealed on the island in three years, with 32 confirmed cases and 224 suspected cases as of October 8. , according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Nearly 10,000 people succumbed to cholera in Haiti between 2010 and 2019.
In addition, some 19,000 people have fallen into the most acute food emergency, having to make do with a single meal a day made of poor quality food, alerted Friday the director of the World Food Program (WFP) for Haiti, Jean-Martin Bauer.