Haitian gang coalition storms prison
April 1, 2025
Members of Haiti’s powerful gang coalition, Viv Ansanm, stormed a prison yesterday, releasing more than 500 inmates after setting fire to a police substation in the town of Mirebalais, near the border with the Dominican Republic. The attacks caused a day of panic that sent residents, patients and staff at the University Hospital of Mirebalais fleeing, reports the Miami Herald. (See also Haiti Libre.)
Of the inmates in the targeted prison, only 65 had been before a judge and sentenced. The rest, including 27 women, 410 men and 14 juveniles, were in pre-trial detention, meaning they had not yet been before a judge.
Armed gangs are in control of almost all of Port-au-Prince, but this latest attack seems to suggest that they are increasingly targeting towns in other areas of the country, reports the BBC.
More Haiti
Violence in Haiti is fueled by smuggled weapons — gangs are far better armed than police. “The United Nations imposed an arms embargo on Haiti three years ago, yet most weapons on Haiti’s streets are from the United States,” reports the New York Times. “As Haiti’s capital grapples with a violent crisis that threatens its very existence, questions remain about whether Haiti and other nations — including the United States — are doing enough to control the tide of weapons.”
A steady stream of illegal weapons smuggled into Haiti is fueling an increase in gang violence and leading to severe human rights abuses, according to a U.N. report released last week. (Associated Press)
Two Kenyan police officers in Haiti have been seriously injured in clashes with gangs over the past week — the international security support mission's list of casualties is growing as it’s troops comes under increasingly frequent attack, reports Reuters.
Regional Relations
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Moscow and China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing, next month, reports the Associated Press. The announcement, yesterday, comes as the world braces for new U.S. tariffs to come into force tomorrow.
Latin Americans are broadly worried about US tariffs but have mixed feelings about how their leaders should respond to the expected barrage of U.S. trade levies, reports Bloomberg.
Concessions to Donald Trump in Latin America may give the impression that his bullying foreign policy is working, but “many countries in the Western Hemisphere are shrewdly hedging their bets—neither turning away from the United States completely nor closing themselves off to U.S. competitors. China, in particular, has made significant inroads in Latin America, where it is often seen as a reliable source of the kinds of investment and diplomatic engagement that the United States no longer consistently provides,” writes Matias Spektor in Foreign Affairs.
Deportations
The 17 people the U.S. sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador on Sunday — Salvadoran and Venezuelan nationals the Trump administration alleges they are tied to transnational gangs —were sent there from immigration detention at Guantánamo Bay, reports the Guardian.
A group of U.S. senators who visited the country’s military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, criticized the Trump administration’s migrant mission there as a waste of resources — the Pentagon estimated that the operation had cost $40 million in its first month in which it has received fewer than 400 men, most for short periods of time, reports the New York Times.
“Immigration and civil rights advocates have challenged the Trump administration’s deportations of people to countries other than their own, saying they first need to be given the opportunity to say whether they fear persecution or torture there,” reports the Associated Press.
A court filing accuses the Trump administration of erroneously deporting a Salvadoran man in March this month, after a judge's ruling prohibited the man's removal to his home country. Lawyers for Kilmer Abrego-Garcia disputed U.S. government allegations that he was a member of the MS-13 gang and demanded his immediate return to the U.S. The government, however, said it did not have the legal authority to bring him back from El Salvador, reports Reuters.
A U.S. federal judge blocked the Trump administration from sharply curtailing a special immigration status that protects 600,000 Venezuelans living in the U.S. from deportation, reports Politico.
Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro has announced that his regime will send a plane to Mexico on Thursday to retrieve 300 Venezuelan migrants, most of them women and children, who he claims fled the United States fearing persecution, reports the Miami Herald.
Brazil
Brazil’s government said yesterday that its intelligence agency spied on Paraguayan authorities during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. The statement from Brazil’s foreign ministry came hours after a report by news website UOL accused Lula’s administration of spying on Paraguay, reports the Associated Press. The ministry did not detail the specific Paraguayan officials targeted but said the surveillance stopped “as soon as the current administration became aware of the fact.”
Brazil saw a nearly 70% rise in religious discrimination and attacks last year —driven largely by Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal evangelical movements, African-origin religions like Umbanda and Candomblé were the primary targets, reports AFP.
Colombia
In an interview with Jacobin, Colombia’s former energy minister outlines President Gustavo Petro’s plan to make the rich nations that profit from the extractive economy help pay for its green transition.
Ecuador
Leftist presidential candidate Luisa González is narrowly in the lead to win the April 13 runoff race against incumbent President Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, reports Reuters. (See yesterday’s post.)
Argentina
Argentina’s poverty rate dropped to 38.1% in libertarian President Javier Milei ‘s first year in office, according to official statistics released yesterday. Poverty was 41.7% when he took office, and shot up past 50 percent shortly after. But economists warn that yesterday’s positive figure “fails to capture the reality of ordinary people struggling to cope with the most radical austerity program in Argentina’s recent history,” reports the Associated Press.
Milei attended private dinners with business executives for a cash fee of $20,000 while he held office as a Congressman, in 2023. Though the events could be considered consulting work, which is not illegal, it is against the law to receive money without documentation that shows the source of the payments and the services that were rendered, and the nature of the meetings raises potential conflicts of interest, notes Bloomberg.
Culinary Corner
Argentina’s thick, spongey pizza is not really celebrated in culinary circles — but the country has one of the world’s biggest pizza cultures, and this year it has mounted a campaign for global recognition, reports the Financial Times.