Top Republican shares horrifying stories of gang rule in Haiti

Walls full of bullet holes and police in “full armor” were among the sights that greeted a group of U.S.House lawmakers who recently traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a city that has been ravaged by gang rule since the July 2021 assassination of its former president.“The gangs will essentially block the streets with rubble, with debris, they’ll dig giant ditches in the road, and so these military and police units can’t traverse,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital.

“Some of these areas are like Afghanistan, and it is probably the poorest place I’ve ever been through in my life.”Mast led a group of bipartisan members of Congress on a trip to Venezuela and Haiti recently, which he said was the first congressional delegation in either country in a decade.In Haiti, they were hosted by the country’s prime minister, whose palace “a year ago, would have been a war zone,” Mast said.“They have been actively working to take back land across the breadth of Port-au-Prince.”But while he saw signs of slow improvement thanks to an international coalition of forces as well as a U.S.

paramilitary group run by Erik Prince, Mast said the realities of gang violence were ever-present.A video he was shown, for example, depicted Haitian gang torture of a heavy machinery operator helping police clear gang-made blockages in the city streets.“They took this guy who was this equipment operator, and for working with the police, they kidnapped his family.And then they told him they’ll trade his family for him.

He turned himself over,” Mast said.“They brutally killed him.I mean it’s all on video.

They cut off his ears, fed him his own ears… Then they hacked at him for probably at least five minutes with machetes.His limbs looked like a Christmas tree afterwards, with just bone and skin and other things coming off of him, until ultimately they killed him.

That is who these gangs are.”And it’s not j...