A LAND HELD HOSTAGE

Overrun by gangs and neglected by rich allies, Haiti tries to save itself.

- JON LEE ANDERSON

Last September, Ralph Senecal, the owner of a private ambulance company in Port-au-Prince, drove a friend who needed kidney dialysis to the Dominican Republic, where the hospitals are better than they are on the Haitian side of the border. On the way home, as he passed through the town of Croix-des-Bouquets, a few miles east of the capital, a group of men with guns blocked the road and forced him to pull over. The men belonged to a gang called 400 Mawozo—in Haitian Creole, the 400 Simpletons.

Senecal was taken to a brick building in the countryside, where he was held captive, sharing two rooms with some thirty other hostages. The structure had a metal roof, which seemed to concentrate the sun. “It was the kind of heat that gets you sweating at eight in the morning,” Senecal told me. His hands and feet were kept tied. He was released only to relieve himself in a pit outside and, every three or four days, to bathe in a bucket of water.

A fit, ebullient man of sixty-two, Senecal splits his time between Haiti and the United States and previously served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. Once his abductors learned of his military experience, they kept him under closer watch, worried that he might try to overpower them, or to escape. Senecal suspected that the gang members were connected to Haitian politicians. They had M16s, which he felt sure they could not otherwise have afforded, and they carried hand grenades. The leader was known as Lanmò San Jou—Death Without Warning. They were part of the same group that made headlines in 2021, when it abducted sixteen American missionaries and held them for two months.