The Vodou kingpin behind Haiti’s latest massacre

For a politician known for his ability to shock, Donald Trump managed to outdo himself with his baseless claim during last year’s presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing, butchering and eating household pets. Regardless of this racist lie – new Haitian immigrants to Ohio do not eat people’s pets and are in the main perfectly respectable – Haiti itself is a mess and a good place to flee. The country’s extreme problems can’t be denied, although the US is doing a good job of ignoring them.

Dictators assume guilt by association: if one old person is against you, they may all be killed

Since the devastating earthquake of 2010, criminal gangs have grown larger and more powerful. Last month, Micanor Altes (known also as King Micanor), a gang leader in Cité Soleil, the biggest of Port-au-Prince’s many shantytowns, ordered his acolytes to gun down all old or grey-haired residents, mostly people over 60, because he decided they might have been involved in casting spells that, he thought, killed his young son. More than 200 people were massacred.

This was not the first atrocity Micanor allegedly masterminded, though it was his largest. He is a key figure in a Vodou congregation in the shantytown, where he is said to lead ceremonies on the weekend that have frequently devolved into violence.

Vodou has a complicated history in Haiti. It’s deeply entwined with the whole national concept. Folklorically, and probably with a basis in fact, the Haitian revolution of 1791 was ignited at a large Vodou gathering of the enslaved. There is a monument to this uprising in the caves and fields in the mountains behind the old plantations of the north where the revolution exploded, killing masters, overseers and entire plantation-owning families as it proceeded.