Every few years the Caribbean nation of Haiti reminds us of its existence with an earthquake, epidemic, revolt, coup d’etat or assassination. The three-week captivity of Irish lay missionary Gena Heraty was one more event in a litany of bad news.
Heraty has spent the last 32 years in Haiti, where she runs an orphanage south of the capital, Port-au-Prince. She was taken on August 3rd, along with seven other people including a three-year-old child. Negotiations with the gang responsible for her abduction led to their liberation last week.
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Heraty was reportedly held by the Viv Ansanm (“Live Together” in Creole) coalition of gangs, which is led by former policeman Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier. In interviews with western media, Chérizier has compared himself to Martin Luther King jnr, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro and Robin Hood.
Chérizier says his nickname refers to the fact that his mother sold fried chicken from a stand. His enemies say it’s because his men burned people alive.
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Last year, the gang leader forced Haiti’s then prime minister to resign by threatening “civil war that leads to genocide” if he returned from a trip to Puerto Rico.
Viv Ansanm and other Haitian gangs have amassed fortunes from kidnapping for ransom and trafficking in drugs, weapons and probably human organs. Yet their social media posts promise peace, prosperity and equality for all Haitians.
Citizens of western nations make the most valuable hostages and are typically held for several weeks. Two French priests were among 10 people kidnapped by the 400 Mawozo gang in April 2021. They were held for three weeks. The same gang seized 17 American and Canadian missionaries that autumn and freed them after two months.
The circumstances of Heraty’s liberation are not known. Governments do not admit to paying ransom, because to do so might invite further abductions. London and Washington refused to negotiate with the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Syria. British and US hostages were beheaded. French hostages were bought out.
Once the jewel of French colonies, “the pearl of the Antilles”, Haiti has become a byword for misery and devastation. Toussaint Louverture led the first and only successful slave revolt in modern history. It established the first independent black state in the New World at the beginning of the 19th century. US and European powers feared Haiti’s example and did their utmost to thwart it.
In exchange for recognising Haitian independence, France demanded 150 million gold francs to compensate sugar and coffee plantation owners. Haiti continued to pay off the debt well into the 20th century. US president Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines to Haiti to restore order after the assassination of a Haitian president in 1915. They stayed nearly 20 years.
The US tolerated the 1957-1986 Duvalier dynasty because Washington saw the Duvaliers as a counterweight to communist Cuba. When I first reported from Haiti in 1983, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, the half-witted son of the dictator known as ‘Papa Doc’, was still in power, supported by the evil Tontons Macoutes militia. Historians say the macoutes killed at least 30,000 people. They were the precursors of today’s gangs.
In Cité Simone, the notorious slum named after Baby Doc’s mother, I saw naked children with bellies distended from malnutrition living outdoors in squalor. Cité Simone was renamed Cité Soleil when Duvalier was driven out and replaced by a former Salesian priest who in due course created his own militia.
Haiti remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Two-thirds of its 11.7 million people live on the equivalent of just €3 a day, according to the World Bank. The UN says 5,600 Haitians died in gang violence last year. That record is set to be surpassed this year, with at least 3,141 people killed in the first six months of 2025.
On January 12th, 2010, up to 300,000 Haitians were killed by an earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, which I covered for The Irish Times, there were bodies rotting in the streets. I watched Cuban doctors saw off the broken, gangrened arm of a six-year-old girl called Faimy Lamy, without anaesthesia.
The suffering I saw in four reporting trips, a few months in total, is the tiniest fraction of the horror witnessed by Heraty during her 32 years there. In an article for this newspaper in 2007, she mentioned the brutality of her chosen homeland. “We can’t change Haiti,” she wrote with a lucidity that makes her sacrifice all the more profound.
Early in Heraty’s captivity, her cousin Bridie O’Malley in Co Mayo called the kidnapped missionary “a shining light in all our lives”. It’s true.
Altruism, self-abnegation and solidarity are desperately needed in an increasingly barbarous world where the most powerful men have abandoned all semblance of morality.
Gena Heraty’s selflessness gives us hope. Her liberation is good news in a dark time.
