OMM Newsroom
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Each morning, hundreds of civilians walk through the abandoned downtown area of Port-au-Prince, crossing gang-controlled territory to reach the parts of the city still accessible to them. They return along the same route at dusk. The area once had waterfront villas, a cathedral and a busy market visited by tourists.
Years of political turmoil, corruption and the rise of a deadly gang coalition have left Haiti’s capital struggling to function. After repeated attempts by the United States and the international community to restore order, Haiti’s interim government has turned to US private security entrepreneur Erik Prince, according to CNN.
Prince’s company, “Vectus Global”, was hired by Haiti’s interim government last year. Its operation, known as the “Task Force,” works alongside elite Haitian police in a fragmented security environment that also includes the Haitian National Police, the UN-mandated Gang Suppression Force, Haiti’s army and armed vigilante groups.
Prince’s security teams previously held US government contracts during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His former company, “Blackwater,” became notorious after its employees opened fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Four contractors were convicted in the United States and later pardoned by President Donald Trump.
In Haiti, the Task Force has used drones in more than 2,000 strikes since it began operating last March. Video reviewed by CNN showed a small drone flying into what appeared to be a rooftop water tank, followed by a fire. A Task Force source said the target was a gang facility used to make Molotov cocktails.
“Insurgencies are not defeated by taking out just leadership,” Prince told CNN in an interview in Port-au-Prince last month. “I know there’s been obsession of that in the United States, but wars are won by taking significant numbers of enemy manpower off the battlefield.”
“They are evil criminals and the best place for them is in the ground,” he said.
Critics say the approach challenges international law and due process. For Haitians exhausted by years of gang violence, the central question is whether it is working.
Key roads remain under gang control
Prince has promoted the Haiti operation on social media as a model for other states facing security crises. He said that when the Task Force began, a police truck was attacked, burned or ambushed and its occupants killed every week. That no longer happens, he said, citing faster responses and air support, including drones.
Some of the milestones Prince promised have not been reached. When his contract was announced early last year, he said he aimed to reopen key roads within a year, including the route between the northern port city of Cap Haitien and Port-au-Prince. Eighteen months later, gang checkpoints still block the vital route.
International flights to Port-au-Prince have been suspended because of the risk of aircraft being shot at over gang territory. General elections scheduled for December have been postponed indefinitely.
The United Nations said in September that security operations had helped halt gang expansion in Port-au-Prince and cleared some areas of gang control, including parts of downtown. The assessment was based on the UN’s quarterly monitoring of the situation.
The death toll remains high. More than half of the 5,700 people killed or injured in 2026 were casualties around security operations, UN human rights chief Volker Türk said in early October.
Gangs have also expanded into other parts of the country, including farming communities that supply food to the nation. UNICEF estimates that forcible recruitment of children has tripled over the past year, and that minors now make up between 30% and 50% of gang members.
A police commander told CNN that when gangs come under attack, they leave their youngest members behind and order them to fight to the end.
Operations in Kenscoff and civilian casualties
CNN observed a Task Force operation in the steep hills south of Port-au-Prince, where helicopters crewed by foreign contractors attacked gang positions and drones detonated amid gunfire.
Earlier this summer, a gang killed at least 47 residents and kidnapped dozens more in Kenscoff, on the main southern route out of the capital. The gang leader later threatened in a video to kill hostages if drones attacked his fighters, in what appeared to be an attempt to pressure the Task Force.
The gang eventually released the hostages and entrenched itself in the nearby hamlet of Bois D’Avril. In September, foreign former special forces personnel working with Prince flew into the area and fought the gang for several hours.
Footage obtained by CNN showed the Haitian National Police SWAT unit entering the village as gunfire sounded and explosions could be heard in the distance. It also showed some of Prince’s contractors speaking with a SWAT officer, who said he had heard a lot about them. One contractor, speaking with what appeared to be an Australian accent, pointed out a hillside building as a useful security position and said the team would remain nearby for the next few days to help.
Residents cheered the operation and rushed to burn gang barricades after police declared the area clear. It remains too dangerous for residents to return. More than 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Haiti, about a tenth of the country’s population.
“I’ve been left with nothing,” said Luckson Alfrezin, a refugee from Kenscoff living in a crowded encampment in the capital. He said the gang had killed his uncles, cousins and aunts, as well as his livestock.
“It’s like being a car with no lights on. You’re living but you don’t see why. You are already dead,” he said.
A key challenge is how Haiti’s patchwork of security forces will hold and defend areas retaken from gangs, such as Kenscoff. That task falls outside the role for which Prince’s small force was designed, while coordination with the growing Gang Suppression Force and the Haitian National Police is still developing.
Prince declined to disclose the annual fee his company receives for the Task Force, saying only that it is a “fraction” of the cost of the short-lived Multinational Security Support mission. The US-backed initiative, which received financial and logistical support from Washington, had once envisaged deploying 5,500 foreign police officers in Port-au-Prince.
“Our cost is one-sixth of what their annual camp cost was,” Prince said. The sum is likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
Prince’s income is also set to be supplemented by a 10-year deal to help control Haiti’s porous border with the Dominican Republic. Under the arrangement, he is to receive 10% of any new customs revenue collected. The long-term contract has drawn local criticism of how interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé is using his mandate.
Human rights lawyer Rosy Auguste Ducena, who advocates for victims of violence, said Haitians were frustrated by the slow pace of change. She said the biggest problem remained the “absence and inaction” of all the security forces operating in Haiti, noting that no major gang leader had been killed in years.
Ducena described Vectus contractors as “useless” in the public’s view, saying people do not see them or the results of their work, despite the cost being covered by taxpayers. She called for greater accountability from all security forces operating in the country.
Armed groups continue to operate with “relative impunity,” Ducena said. Gang members regularly post on social media about their money, weapons and freedom of movement, as well as videos of torture and kidnappings.
Drone strikes have also killed civilians. A CNN tally of UN reporting found that 85 civilians had died in drone strikes across Haiti, with the UN directly attributing the deaths to a “private military contractor.” Records are incomplete, and rights workers say some deaths may go unreported because they have difficulty reaching areas controlled by gangs.
The most prominent case was a failed strike on a gang leader’s birthday party in September last year. At least eight children were among a dozen or more people killed when a drone’s explosive hit the wrong location.
“Everybody started running and screaming. A drone had fallen behind the square where the gang leader was having a party, at the soccer field,” a woman whose six-year-old daughter died told CNN. “When I rushed to see, I found my child dead, face on the ground.”
Prince said accidents were “not impossible” but declined to comment on specific cases. His team, he said, conducts “dozens of hours of surveillance in an area before we do anything there — a patrol, a raid, or certainly a drone strike.”
The strikes have also forced gangs to take notice. CNN spoke with several gang members in downtown Bel Air, where armed men openly patrol the streets. They did not react to armored police vehicles passing by but said they were wary of drones.
One man, who gave his name as Etienne, told CNN that “drones are pushing us out of the area.”
A gang lieutenant, Julio, called Prince’s force the biggest threat and said its departure would create a need for peace and dialogue with Haiti’s National Police.
“We armed men need peace too. Imagine, I have a wife and kids,” he said, wearing a camouflage balaclava as subordinates stood nearby holding batons and guns.
