Fear is at every corner'

Surging gang violence has led to political collapse followed by port blockades - displacing hundred of thousands of people and cutting supplies in a country where chronic malnutrition is already rife

- Dan Collyns DAJABÓN

Hundreds of Haitian women lined the road at the border with Dominican Republic, each one with a brightly coloured headscarf and a bulky package balanced on her head. Some seemed far too old to be carrying such loads, others were raw-boned girls barely into their teens, all waiting in a long queue to cross back into their country.

Wiry porters pushed red-rusted wheelbarrows with loads of soft drinks or yams so high they could barely peer over them. Younger men on motorised rickshaws revved impatiently, eager to deliver their loads and rush back for more before the border closed.

The people coming and going from the market in Dajabón were in a race against the clock to cart as much food and other merchandise back to the Haitian city of Ouanaminthe amid tight new border restrictions limiting them to just two market days a week.

“Every Haitian who enters here buys merchandise to take back home so that people have something to eat,” said Noudy Dolisca, 49, a Haitian money-changer who lives in Dajabón.

The cross-border trade has long offered a commercial lifeline for families scratching a living in the parched hinterland. Four million people in the country face “acute food insecurity” and close to a million are on the brink of famine , according to the UN’s world food programme director in Haiti, Jean-Martin Bauer.

And after two weeks of surging gang violence , which on 11 March forced the resignation of prime minister Ariel Henry, the humanitarian crisis seems likely to grow more acute, especially if – as many fear – the Dominican government moves to seal the frontier.