At least 110 people were killed in Haiti's Cité Soleil over the weekend after a gang leader ordered a massacre against elderly residents he believed had used witchcraft against his child, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network.
The rights group said Monel "Mikano" Felix, who leads the Wharf Jérémie gang and is linked to the Viv Ansanm network, triggered the killings after his child fell ill and a voudou priest blamed elderly people in the area for the sickness. The group said gang members killed about 60 people on Friday and 50 on Saturday, using machetes and knives, and that all of the victims were over 60.
The details are shocking, but the setting is not unfamiliar. Cité Soleil, near the port of Port-au-Prince, is one of Haiti's poorest and most violent neighbourhoods. Gang control there is so tight that residents often struggle to report what is happening in real time, and the report said restrictions on mobile phone use helped limit information about the killings while they were under way.
That information blackout matters because it shows how violence in Haiti often spreads through fear before it is counted by institutions. When gangs control streets, communications and movement, the first public record of a massacre may come only after the bodies are already being counted. In this case, the rights group's estimate became the clearest early accounting of what had happened.
The killing also reflects how deeply gang power, social collapse and belief systems can intersect in Haiti's current emergency. A claim of witchcraft would normally remain a private accusation or a local dispute. Here it became the trigger for mass murder. The report suggests that Felix acted after seeking advice from a voudou priest, turning a family illness into a pretext for collective punishment.
Felix, who heads the Wharf Jérémie gang, was already banned from entering the Dominican Republic in 2022. But the weekend massacre shows how little regional pressure has restrained him inside Haiti. The report did not say when security forces reached the area or whether they were able to intervene while the killings were taking place. What it did show was the scale of the collapse: a slum, an armed gang and at least 110 dead elderly people in two days.
The massacre also underlines how fragile any protection mechanism has become in Haiti. When gangs can seal off a neighbourhood, restrict phones and turn a rumor into execution orders, the state loses not only territory but the ability to count the dead in real time. That is why the rights group's estimate matters so much: it is a rare early attempt to name the scale of a crime in a place where ordinary reporting channels have been strangled.
The longer-term question is whether anyone can prevent a repeat. Cité Soleil's gangs have shown they can kill at scale, and the state has struggled to respond fast enough to stop them. Until institutions regain control of movement, communications and security, reports like this one will keep arriving as grim counts after the fact rather than as warnings that violence can still be averted.
