The two images are as stark as what they represent: the cause and effect of Haiti’s increasing woes. In one, a masked and armed gangster keeps lookout on a Port-au-Prince rooftop, just a few blocks from the presidential palace. In the other, a family recently displaced by gang violence takes shelter in a school that now houses dozens of families, a stone’s throw from their homes.
“Port-au-Prince is almost entirely controlled by gangs, and we wanted to show the efforts of people that are running businesses to survive,” says Rodrigo Abd, 45, an Argentinian staff photographer with the Associated Press who took the images. “But I was also trying to show another side to Haiti, to avoid the stereotypes that we always repeat, to show the violent without the violence, or the poor without the poverty.”
Haiti is beset by overlapping crises. The country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in early July in circumstances that remain mysterious. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake wrecked the country’s rural south in August. In September, thousands of Haitian migrants that had been living across South America were deported from Texas after years away from their homeland.
Meanwhile, in the political vacuum, local rights groups estimate that as many as 165 gangs continue to terrorise residents, throwing up roadblocks and kidnapping rich and poor alike for ransom. Aid deliveries to the quake-struck south are often turned back by militiamen, who in October kidnapped a group of 17 US and Canadian missionary workers and their families. Over 600 people have been kidnapped in Haiti this year, over triple last year’s total. Fuel shortages have added to the woes, especially in a country without a reliable electrical grid.
“You can feel an aggressive landscape, that it is a place that could explode very easily and at any time, because the situation is so bad,” says Abd, who has photographed war zones around the world.
Abd has worked several times in Haiti, travelling to the Caribbean country first in 2004, just before the coup that removed then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in another wave of instability.
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