The city of Machala is dotted with posters of Ecuador’s two presidential candidates, their smiling faces looking out over shuttered businesses and streets that empty out after 6 p.m. because of rival gangs that torment the city. Machala, a port city south of Guayaquil, is a microcosm of the challenges …
Soon after he took up his post in El Salvador, U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson forged an unusually close relationship with the country’s president. President Trump had nominated Mr. Johnson in 2019 as his ambassador to the country shortly after the White House declared war on El Salvador’s notoriously violent gangs, …
A video that circulated widely on the internet recently showed a Haitian gang leader, Joseph Wilson, shirtless, happily showing off belts of .50 caliber ammunition, mockingly saying he used the armor-piercing bullets to groom his hair. “We have enough combs for our hair to last a year,” he joked. So …
Two days before last Christmas, Dr. Pierre S. Prince took an exciting new job as director of Haiti’s largest public hospital, which the United States spent tens of millions of dollars renovating and is so deep in gang territory that it has been closed for a year. Dr. Prince, a …
The last time Faida Pierre, 10, went to school, her mother found her stranded on the roof of the school’s building, barefoot and crying, while a gang stormed the surrounding downtown Port-au-Prince neighborhood. The principal and teachers had called parents to pick up their children as the sound of gunfire …
A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months. But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is …
For centuries in Morlaix, a city of cobblestones and creperies on the Breton coast of France, the best-known dealers were the ones who traded in linen during the Renaissance and built a number of unique half-timbered houses in the middle of town. The new dealers are another story. France, long …
Violence has flared again in Haiti, with gangs engaging in running gun battles with police, as the effort to push forward with a political solution to the crisis drags on. Gangs launched an armed attack overnight on Monday, clashing with police in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The violence came as Prime …
As El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele embarks on his second term in office, an international rights group has warned that his war on gangs has created a spiralling human rights crisis. As of February 2024, Bukele’s draconian two-year campaign, which has seen the authorities detain about 78,000 people, has caused …