UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a one-day visit to Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, confronting the human cost of a crisis that has left more than one in ten Haitians homeless. New figures released by the UN show that 2,300 people have been killed across the Caribbean nation so far this year, around 100 kidnapped, and 1.5 million displaced — a scale of suffering that Guterres described in stark terms after returning from the field. "What I saw will not leave me," he said. "Each day is a fight to survive. The women and the children pay the highest price."

The visit came days after more than 30 people were killed, injured, or reported missing in Cité Soleil, a densely populated seaside slum on the edge of Port-au-Prince, according to the Cooperative for Peace and Development, a local human rights organisation. Guterres's convoy passed through neighbourhoods once fully controlled by armed groups, where bullet-pocked concrete shells, gutted car dealerships, and abandoned homes bore witness to years of fighting. Graffiti on one crumbling wall read: "Down with Viv Ansanm, long live the police." Viv Ansanm is a powerful gang federation designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the United States government; it is estimated to control roughly 70 percent of the capital. Among the more than 300,000 people displaced within Port-au-Prince alone are over 18,000 who fled Cité Soleil in May, according to the UN's International Organisation for Migration. "Haiti's displacement crisis is entering an even more alarming phase," said IOM chief of mission Gregoire Goodstein.

Guterres's first stop was the headquarters of a newly approved international gang-suppression force, which the UN Security Council authorised in September. It replaces an earlier mission led by Kenyan police that was widely considered underfunded and understaffed. Troops from Jamaica, Chad, El Salvador, and Guatemala — numbering fewer than 1,000 so far — have already deployed and are expected to begin operations in the coming weeks alongside Haiti's National Police and its growing Armed Forces. Hundreds of Haitians were seen queuing on a dusty road to apply to join the military. Haiti has been without a president since Jovenel Moïse was assassinated at his private residence in July 2021, and Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who met Guterres behind closed doors, said his transitional government's priority is restoring enough security to hold elections and "get back to republican rule." He called on Guterres to ensure that countries backing the suppression force "live up to their engagement."

Guterres also visited a makeshift shelter housed in a former school, where more than 1,200 displaced people sleep side by side and are guaranteed only one meal a day. Some residents have lived there for up to four years. A group of women told the Secretary-General of the near-total lack of privacy — no space to shower or use the bathroom without exposure — and their fear for their young children. "It's skin-to-skin and mouth-to-mouth," one woman said. Outside, a man struck the building's metal wall and shouted, "We want to go back home!" before security moved Guterres away. "As long as we're alive we have hope, but things are difficult," said Wendy Cejour, 26, who has lived at the shelter with his family for eighteen months.

The visit drew attention not only to the immediate security emergency but to deeper structural failings. A day before Guterres arrived, Human Rights Watch published an open letter urging him to address the root causes of violence and human rights abuses, and calling for a "full-fledged UN mission" in Haiti. "Even when fully staffed and resourced, security measures alone will not suffice," the group wrote, arguing that any meaningful strategy must include victim protection, accountability for abuses, credible pathways for people to disengage from criminal groups, and a coordinated humanitarian response. Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has faced compounding crises — political instability, natural disasters, and economic collapse — that have eroded state institutions and created conditions in which armed groups have thrived. "Gang violence is paralyzing Haiti, its economy, education system and aid delivery," Guterres wrote on social media. "But the situation can be turned around."