Prison guard trial ends in surprise conviction

On Jan. 19, 2010, prison guards in Les Cayes, a town on the southern coast of Haiti near the country’s most western point, carried out a massacre of over 20 prisoners. Though the government charged 13 guards with murder, attempted murder and other crimes, few expected justice to be done at the trial.

After the judge, Ézékiel Vaval, went to New York at the end of testimony, most Haitians thought the fix was in. The threats against the judge and the prosecutors had apparently worked, people thought: the guards would walk.

The guards were so confident that they even threatened a New York Times reporter covering the trial.

The list of historic massacres carried out against the workers and peasants of Haiti is long. For example, the big landlords that massacred hundreds of poor peasants protesting in Jean-Rabel in 1988 weren’t even identified, much less sanctioned. The authorities didn’t even count the corpses.

But when Judge Vaval returned to Les Cayes and issued his verdict on Jan. 19, the second anniversary of the massacre, he found seven of the 13 guards guilty and sentenced them from two to seven years in prison.What was even more surprising was that the verdict was primarily based on the testimony of prisoners who survived.

Hundreds of members of the community packed into the theater in downtown Les Cayes, where the trial was held. These people erupted into cheers over the verdict and jeers at those convicted. The 21 guards and cops who escaped before the trial started were convicted in absentia.

The defense lawyers announced that they intend to appeal.

The result of the trial in Les Cayes shows that the thirst for justice among the Haitian people has not been quenched. But with a half a million families still living in ripped tents and squalid shacks because their homes were destroyed in the earthquake two years ago, with no public sanitation system in all of Haiti and with just a small percentage of Haitians having access to clean water, after billions of dollars were raised for Haiti, much, much more remains to be achieved.