Prince Port-Au, Haiti- Jean-Jacques Asperges once enjoyed returning home after a long day working at a radio station in one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists.
I had a roof and four walls for protection, but gang violence He forced him and his family to flee from his house twice.
Now, Asperges, 58, his wife and two children are forced to sleep on the floor of a dirty improvised and crowded shelter with Thousands of other Haitians also left homeless for gang violence.
“The bullets fall here all the time,” he said.
Having lost all your work team, Asperges is based solely on his phone, but remains unchanged as dozens of other journalists in Haiti who are under attack like never before. They are avoiding bullets, challenging censorship and leaving personal struggles aside while documenting the fall of the capital of Haiti and The increase in violence guilty of powerful gangs That 85% control of Prince Port-Au.
Heavily armed gangs attacked at least three television and radio stations in March. Two of the buildings were already abandoned due to previous violence, but the gunmen stole equipment that had been left behind.
“It’s a message: you don’t operate without our permission, and you don’t operate at all in our grass,” said David C. Adams, an expert in press freedom in Haiti.
Gangs sent an even more deadly message on Christmas Eve, when They opened fire against journalists Covering the failed reopening of the largest public hospital in Haiti, saying that they had not authorized their reopening.
Two journalists They were killed and at least seven others were injuredIncluding Asperges, who was shot in the stomach. It was the worst attack against reporters in Haiti in recent history.
“Everyone is threatened. Everyone is under pressure,” said Max Chauvet, director of Operations at Le Nouveliste, the oldest independent newspaper in Haiti.
Having a bulletproof vest with “press” is now a dangerous movement in Haiti. What used to serve as a symbolic and physical shield has become a goal.
At least 10 journalists who cover an important March protest were attacked, including Jephte Bazil, a cameraman who runs his own media company, Machann Zen Haïti.
He made his way through a protest in the Canapé-Verter neighborhood of Port-Au Prince when three men dressed in black and with his covered face called him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Bazil remembered them asking.
They looked for their bag, they took their cell phone and demanded multiple forms of identification. Bazil gave only his passport, maintaining his hidden identification card because he declared that it was Martissant, a community that the gangs seized several years ago. I was too scared to show it and possibly be accused of being a member of a gang or sympathizer.
“I think I could have been killed,” Bazil said.
After an interrogation that lasted at least half an hour, Bazil said the men released him. While moving away, one followed him with a machete to see if he headed to where he said.
Once he reached his destination, Bazil said that the man said: “If you had made any other shift, I would have cut my head.”
It was not the first time that Bazil feared for his life. He was injured in the hospital attack in December and, in February, while he covered a confrontation between the police and the gangs, his motorcycle was shot but was saved.
“Journalists are now objective, whether police or gangs,” he said.
Haitians increasingly distrust the media, accusing local journalists to work for gangs. Meanwhile, gang members have resorted to social networks to threaten journalists. A gang leader said he would kidnap the radio reporters and make sure that they will never speak in a microphone again, while another threatened with a presenter of an interview program based in the place of Haiti, saying that if he ever stepped on the country, it would be the last time he would.
As a result, the Haiti online media collective has reported that journalists do not cover incidents involving armed groups.
“Not only journalists are victims, it is the freedom of the press itself,” said Obest Dimanche, the collective spokesman.
But given the persistent attacks of strongly armed gangs in the capital and beyond, most journalists ignore that advice.
They travel in packages and approach the motorcycles through the mountainous neighborhoods of Port-Au Prince, crouching in unison when they shoot. At the end of the day, they register each other to ensure that everyone will return home safely. Those who lost their homes due to gang violence like Asperges return to a shelter, while others sleep on their media company floor.
“You feel in danger doing your work today,” said Jean Daniel Sénat, a journalist at the LE Nouveliste and Magik9 Radio Station.
He regretted how journalists no longer have access to many neighborhoods in the capital due to gang violence: “If you can’t talk to people … you can’t inform.”
Violence has also forced media companies to close, fire journalists or stop printing, as was the case with Le Nouvelliste when the gunmen attacked and occupied their offices last year. Since then, the newspaper has operated only online.
On March 13, Haiti’s prime minister condemned the attack on the building that once housed Radio Et Télévision Caraïbes, the oldest radio station in the country, and promised to protect media institutions.
Located in the Rue Chavannes, the former headquarters of the station was considered a “patrimonial monument,” said journalist Richecarde Céstin, who works for the station.
Founded in 1949, the station has reported on the tumultuous Haiti story: its coup d’etat, dictatorships and the first democratic elections.
Considered one of Haiti’s most influential radio stations, it was a blow to see smoke and calls out of the building.
“Each employee has a story with space,” said journalist Délon Sainton, who described the former headquarters as the “soul” of Radio Et Télévision Caraïbes, who has been forced to move twice due to the violence of the gangs.
He also attacked that weekend was the Radio Mélodie FM station and the TV Pluriel television station.
“What we are seeing now, a kind of wholesale orientation of the media, is different,” said Adams, the press release expert in Haiti. “In the old days, individual journalists were attacked.”
According to UNESCO, at least 21 journalists were reported murdered from 2000 to 2022 in Haiti, with nine killed in 2022, the most fatal year for Haitian journalism in recent history.
The New York -based journalists committee reported that a journalist killed in 2023 and Two more in 2024.
The research journalist Gardy Saint-Louis recently told Télégramme360, an online news site, which planned to hide. Saint-Louis was summoned by saying that he began receiving anonymous calls in September 2024, and that death threats became an attack in February, when armed men opened fire against their home.
Other journalists have fled from Haiti, where attacks and murders are rarely resolved.
Haiti According to a 2024 CPJ report, the country is more likely to allow journalists’ murders to be unpunished, according to a CPJ report of 2024. Since 2019, seven murders remain unsolved, including Garry Tesse, a radio presenter whose mutilated body appeared six days after it disappeared in 2022. Shortly before his death, he accused a powerful prosecutor kill him.
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