As criminal organizations extend their control over Haiti, kidnappings have continued to terrorize the country’s residents, with Catholic priests and other missionaries becoming a number of the most typical targets. In 2024 alone, not less than 14 priests and spiritual brothers and sisters are being held.
Over the past three years, since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated and criminal gangs began to take over the capital city, Port-au-Prince, kidnappers have focused on the country’s few higher-income professionals and people they consider will have the ability to secure large ransoms. In impoverished Haiti, that features clergy and spiritual.
A nun who was abducted together with two other sisters in early March told Religion News Service that the gang requested a ransom of $2 million. “It was completely not possible to boost that type of money,” said the nun, who asked to stay anonymous for safety reasons.
The bandits ended up freeing the nuns after at some point without receiving any money, coming away only with two cars that they had stolen to move their victims.
“The ransom requested by kidnappers is normally too high,” said the Rev. Gilbert Peltrop, secretary general of the Conference of Religious of Haiti. “They ask for a whole lot of hundreds, at times hundreds of thousands, of dollars.”
Peltrop has been negotiating with kidnappers on behalf of Catholic priests, nuns and brothers for the past three years, becoming something of an accidental expert in the right way to hold out until a less incongruous amount is agreed upon between the criminals and the church.
The trauma of being held captive is not any less, those that have been abducted say, because they’re serving as missionaries. “We cannot speak about ‘good treatment’ within the hands of the abductors. Some victims are bitten up. Others are kept without food and water for as much as two days. They commonly must remain several days without having a shower,” Peltrop said.
The Rev. Jean Nicaisse Milien was taken in 2021 by greater than a dozen armed men on his option to a fellow minister’s installation in a close-by parish. “I used to be taken by armed men together with nine other people. There were five priests, two nuns and three lay Catholics,” he said.
He and his fellow victims were kept in a small house where they slept on the bottom and got only small portions of rice and bread to eat. In the times before his release three weeks later, Milien got almost nothing to eat or drink.
The kidnappers, a part of the main Haitian gang the 400 Mawozo, confiscated their captives’ cellphones and got in contact with their families, demanding a ransom of $1 million per person.
The sister who was abducted last month said she was working at her congregation’s school when the criminals climbed up the wall and took control of the place.
“Three of us were taken, while two others were spared in order that they could maintain the youngsters,” she said. “They gave us only one meal, and we had to separate one liter of water among the many three of us during almost two days,” she said.
They were released by about 6 p.m. on the following day. She’s still attempting to get better from the experience. Though they didn’t suffer physical violence, “the emotional shock was there,” she explained.
Peltrop said that the majority criminals think that the clergy are wealthy because many Catholic schools are upscale institutions that own houses and cars. “They do not know that giant institutions have high costs,” he said, or that their apparent wealth comes from donations from international Catholic charities, like Adveniat, he added.
Hérold Toussaint, a psychologist, theologian and sociologist on the State University of Haiti, says kidnappers can also abduct church missionaries for other reasons besides the financial ones, pointing to the Catholic Church’s long relationship with the Haitian state: the federal government signed a concordat with the Vatican in 1860.
During the Duvalier family dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from the Fifties to the Nineteen Eighties, the church has mostly kept silent within the face of the crimes perpetrated by the state. Despite changes in Haitian Catholicism over the past few a long time that brought the church closer to the poor, many Haitians still see it as a part of the facility structure within the country, Toussaint explained.
In his opinion, the church should adopt a more “prophetic” tone, refusing to play a task in mediating the crisis and taking more concrete steps to assist the neediest in society.
The Rev. Jean Nicaisse Milien, a priest within the Diocese of Campinas, in Brazil, said Haiti’s Latin American neighbors should do more for the country. He emphasized that the safety crisis combines with other aspects, similar to Haiti’s extreme poverty, deep unemployment, lack of infrastructure and natural catastrophes, to feed the immigration crisis that has effects on your entire region in addition to its northern neighbors.
Haitians are amongst essentially the most significant groups currently crossing the Darien Gap, a highly dangerous rainforest zone between Colombia and Panama, to achieve the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Other Latin American countries have their very own needs and limitations, but they may help Haiti within the struggle against its multiple crises,” Milien said.
He thinks that economic and technical cooperation, including an exchange of scientists and students, would cut back criminality in the long term.
© Religion News Service
