On May 5, a gang led by a justice of the peace in Haiti invaded Patrick Benoît’s 48 acres in the mostly residential Vivy Mitchell suburb of Port-au-Prince, savagely beat him, tied his hands and feet behind him with a rope like a crab, then refused to take him to a hospital for medical attention. Courtesy of Le Nouvelliste newspaper
Every couple of years, they try to take his land. This time, it turned bloody and the perpetrators were heavily armed off-duty Haitian National Police officers and a justice of the peace.
On Tuesday, the group invaded Patrick Benoît’s 48 acres in the mostly residential Vivy Mitchell suburb of Port-au-Prince, savagely beat him, tied his hands and feet behind him with a rope like a crab, then refused to take him to a hospital for medical attention.
The incident, partly captured on video filmed by the perpetrators as his wife also came under attack, has triggered outrage in some quarters of Haiti and its diaspora, while raising questions about the depths of impunity and corruption in a country that some worry is increasingly moving toward becoming a rogue state.
It has also brought into focus a problem that’s 216 years in the making where an archaic land titling system, subject to manipulation, offers no guarantee of property rights, and has increasingly left property owners at the behest of a land-stealing mafia. Continue reading…
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article242616541.html