WASHINGTON: Weeks before the latest violence broke out in Haiti, the self-described "king" of a Haitian gang was in a US court pleading guilty to smuggling AK47s and a .50 caliber rifle to the Caribbean nation. "The Justice Department will aggressively pursue every tool at its disposal to hold accountable those who would smuggle US-origin weapons and other controlled goods for the benefit of malicious actors," prosecutors said at the time.

But as conflict rages between Haiti's gangs and police, the guilty plea of Joly Germine, 31, in late January for smuggling some two dozen weapons has proved hardly enough to make a dent in the country's violence. Haiti has long been awash with guns smuggled in illegally from abroad, with the US likely a significant point of origin, according to experts. The total number is hard to pin down, though authorities have noted that only a fraction of the estimated hundreds of thousands of arms in the country are legally owned. "The principal source of firearms and munitions in Haiti is in the US, and in particular, Florida," according to a 2023 UN Office on Drugs and Crime report.

Weapons purchased legally in states with loose gun laws are often "hidden inside consumer products, electronic equipment, garment linings, frozen food items or even the hulls of freighters," it added. Haiti has no firearms or ammunition manufacturing capabilities and has laws restricting legal ownership.

Yet those laws, as well as UN restrictions on importing arms into Haiti, have proved insufficient in the face of US smugglers and Haitian gangs targeting the ports. "Would the gangs in Haiti acquire them from somewhere else if weapons in the US were not available? Probably," Matt Schroeder, of the research group Small Arms Survey, told AFP. "Would it be as easy? Probably not."

Demand for rifles

Gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier, whose attacks have helped force Prime Minister Ariel Henry to promise to step down, has been seen alongside associates with weapons that appear to be Galil rifles and M16- or AR-pattern rifles, according to experts who viewed AFP photos of Cherizier.

It's unclear if Cherizier, a former police officer, got them from illegal or legal channels, though the UN report noted that "higher-powered rifles such as AK47s, AR15s and Galils are typically in higher demand from gangs." "Seizure rates indicate that the percentage of illicit weapons in circulation (in Haiti) that are rifles are much higher than in the rest of the Caribbean," Schroeder told AFP.

"And that is in part reflective of the demand and the desired capacity of the illicit end-users," he said, while cautioning that hard data — both on the number of guns and their countries of origin — remains hard to pin down because of the weapons' illegal nature.

Germine's shipment of weapons was actually one of the larger smuggling attempts — highlighting how difficult cracking down on smugglers is when they're often simply individuals making a quick buck by slipping a single or a few guns being into otherwise normal cargo shipments, Schroeder said. As of Friday morning, residents in Port-au-Prince had put up barricades in the streets — in part to protest the armed gangs that control 80 percent of the capital, but also for their own protection. — AFP