Report on the tragedy at Cayes-Jacmel on 23 September 2010

Cayes-Jacmel is a commune of the Sud-Est, fifteen kilometres from Jacmel, with about 36,693 inhabitants and four communal sections. On the afternoon of 23 September 2010 the officer on duty at the station was mediating a payroll dispute between two residents when a man known at the station interrupted, was ordered out and left with an insult. The officer went looking for him that evening, tried to arrest him, and in the struggle drew his weapon and shot him in the left thigh and right forearm before handcuffing him. A crowd the network puts at about five hundred gathered; two other officers on duty fled; repeated calls for reinforcements, made by the wounded officer, by the station chief and by local figures, went unanswered, though the drive from Jacmel takes twenty-five minutes.

Armed men who had joined the crowd attacked the station and the officer was killed. The network's conclusions run in both directions: it condemns the killing of the officer, the shooting of the young man and the beatings the police inflicted on residents afterwards, and it records that the police force has since taken to treating the commune as a lawless zone and a bandits' lair, and that the people it interviewed describe a struggle for local hegemony in which known politicians use notorious armed men and then intervene to keep them from being arrested. It asks for a thorough inquiry reaching every author and co-author, sanctions against the officers who beat residents, a repair of relations between the population and the police, and more officers at the station.