“This shooting is symptomatic of the state’s inability to protect its citizens,” said Gedeon Jean, executive director of the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights (CARDH), a Haiti-based activist group.
Jean said the death toll could be considerably higher than the seven reported so far. Some local media sources reported at least ten fatalities from the shooting.
The attack occurred when about a hundred people marched through an area on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince called Canaan. The community was founded by refugees from the powerful earthquake in 2010, which leveled countless buildings and killed about 220,000 people. Canaan began as a squatter’s camp, but today it is considered a reasonably functional suburb of Port-au-Prince, or perhaps even a city in its own right – the “accidental city,” as NASA dubbed it while measuring its growth with satellite photos. READ MORE