The “Grandparents’ Massacre”: How the Illness of a Haitian Gang Leader’s Son Led to the Largest Massacre of the Century in the Americas

The criminal gang leader known as “Wa Micanor,” a member of Viv Ansanm, massacred 207 people over six days in December 2024. Most of the victims were elderly residents of Wharf Jérémie. He accused them of using Vodou magic to kill his six-year-old son after making him ill. We reconstruct the largest massacre carried out by a criminal gang on the American continent in the 21st century, drawing on testimonies from survivors, United Nations reports, and a report by a local organization

Li atik sa a an kreyòl

JUAN MARTÍNEZ D’AUBUISSON
This story is part of the project by Dromómanos and Global Initiative (GI-TOC) “The Fall of Port-au-Prince”

Little Prince Benson has fallen ill.

His father is King Micanor, the self-proclaimed last monarch of the Caribbean, lord of the docks of Port-au-Prince, “warlord” of the Wharf Jérémie neighborhood and of Viv Ansanm, the gang confederation that controls Haiti’s capital.

And he is convinced he has discovered the cause: there are werewolves in the area, a sort of elderly sorcerers with the power to transform themselves into animals to attack at night, and with a particular ability to make children sick and kill them.

The king then decides that, to save his son, his forces must go out and hunt them.

In one house, Sébastien, a strong, rough 32-year-old man, watches from underneath his mother’s bed as two men take her away.

In another, Evelyn’s grandmother tells her: “Don’t let anyone say a word. Hide, all of you.” The old woman then opens the door, and they kidnap her.

They also take Sheila’s grandfather. When she tries to find out where he is, the old man is already a corpse.

Manú is also looking for his parents. They do not answer the phone. The next day he discovers that his father was dismembered with machetes.

Micanor’s thugs also kill Dustin’s uncle and cousin. He tells the story with two bullet holes in his body.

In the early hours of December 7, 2024, Prince Benson Altes dies. He was six years old.

Over six days, his father takes the lives of 207 people. Most of them are over 60. He chops them up with machetes, makes them disappear on a fire, or sends their remains to the bottom of the sea.

In late February 2025, three months after the massacre in Port-au-Prince, I arrange a meeting with Rosie Auguste Ducéna, a lawyer who heads the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH, its French acronym). But moving around is difficult.

Ninety percent of Haiti’s capital, the most violent city in the most violent and impoverished country in the Americas, has been under the control of Viv Ansanm, the largest confederation of criminal gangs ever seen in the region, for more than a year.

Since February 29, 2024, the thugs have taken neighborhood after neighborhood, burning police stations, local radio stations, schools, government buildings, cemeteries, roads… They have devastated the city.

The ten percent that is resisting the offensive is defended by what little remains of the Haitian state, an international mission led by Kenya, civilians, and the men of several strongmen, such as former police officer Samuel Joasil, the best-known of them all.

These brigades erect barricades almost every day, placing burned-out cars, makeshift gates, barbed-wire fences, or burning tires to keep the thugs from entering, and to make sure that, if they do get in, they move slowly. That way they can hunt them down, kill them, and, on many occasions, burn them.

Mobility is also difficult for those of us inside this kind of fortress.

I have spoken by phone with Rosie Auguste since arriving in Port-au-Prince in late February 2025, but it is not until mid-March of that year that I finally manage to sit across from her in her office.

“I don’t know. Nobody knows why the thugs do what they do,” she answers when I ask her why the massacre in Wharf Jérémie happened.

Rosie Auguste, one of the foremost specialists on the gangs and violence in Port-au-Prince, believes it is a form of pressure intended to make the city fall faster. She calls them “terrorists.”

She also believes that the warlords design the strategy but do not control the teenage forces who, drunk on adrenaline and power, end up terrorizing the population in horrifying ways. And she believes that years of living amid violence deform these young men.

But, like the rest of the experts, she believes, suspects, intuits—but does not know.

Rosie Auguste is angry. You can see it. She calls Viv Ansanm’s thugs cowards. She says they attack the population before attacking the government.

“They know where the prime minister is, where the officials live, but they prefer to attack unarmed women and children. They carry out mass rapes in front of everyone and kill babies,” she says, her brow furrowed.

This woman has spent years documenting and denouncing not only the atrocities committed by the gangs. She also accuses the Haitian state of passivity, permissiveness, and collusion. That is why she believes her life is at risk. She would not be the first person murdered for documenting these things.

Since my arrival, I have been looking for survivors of the massacre to interview.

A local journalist tells me it is impossible. He says entering Wharf Jérémie is out of the question because King Micanor has become paranoid, and his men have become paranoid with him.

He also says that survivors will not be able to leave the neighborhood either. Micanor has set up checkpoints controlling people’s exits and confiscated residents’ cell phones, while those who have managed to flee to other neighborhoods or makeshift refugee camps would have to take enormous risks.

I ask Rosie Auguste, and she promises to try, but adds that moving around the city would be almost suicidal for them. She asks me to return in early April 2025.

For this second interview, I ride to her office on Ivander’s motorcycle. He is my local guide.

The city is burning today. Viv Ansanm has bitten into the edges of the fortress during the night, the gunfire continues, and the brigade of strongman Samuel Joasil is out in the streets with its weapons and its fire.

Rosie Auguste explains to me that the devastation of the city began with the assassination of Jovenel Moïse, then Haiti’s president, in 2021. She tells me about the painstaking work her team had to do, risking their lives, to prepare the report on the Wharf Jérémie massacre.

At the end of our conversation, she handed me a very detailed document containing more than 120 testimonies.

And then she asks me: “Where would you like to conduct the interviews?”

To my astonishment, she opens a door and points to five people sitting on a bench, their eyes frightened.

In an extraordinary act of courage, they have crossed a city at war, passing through barricades, fire, and bullets, risking the same fate as their relatives, in order to tell me how they died and prevent their story from ending in the same place as their bodies: at the bottom of the Caribbean.

At the end of the interviews, they all say they remain in contact with their loved ones. They say they speak with them in dreams, see them inhabiting the house, taking care of their children, cooking their food, fleeing with them through the city.

Their testimonies, a report by the network of local organizations, and another by the United Nations form the basis of this reconstruction of what happened between December 6 and 11, 2024, when King Micanor perpetrated the largest massacre committed by a criminal gang in the Americas in the 21st century. Those days when the survivors began to dream.

The Murderous King and the Curse of the Elderly

On the morning of December 6, 2024, Evelyn and her family hear motorcycles, men speaking loudly, and banging on the door. They ask from the street for her grandmother.

“Hide and keep quiet,” the grandmother tells her relatives as she opens the door.

One of the men enters with a pistol, the other with a machete, and they take her away on one of the motorcycles. It is the last time Evelyn will see her alive.

In the back of Wharf Jérémie, near the sea, gunshots can already be heard. No one in the house dares to go outside.

The next morning, Evelyn and her sisters, in an act of great recklessness, sneak out to Nan Mangue, a small sandbar beside the port of Wharf Jérémie, and there, amid a huge bloody jigsaw puzzle, they find their grandmother, divided by the machete.

For several days, King Micanor’s six-year-old son, Benson Altes, has had a fever. None of my informants knows exactly what is causing it—a condition involving his lungs or stomach—but he is getting worse by the hour.

Port-au-Prince has lost almost all of its health facilities, public and private, to the thugs. Even Médecins Sans Frontières ambulances refrain from entering King Micanor’s domain, having been shot at on more than one occasion.

Faced with the boy’s illness, Micanor summons his hougan, his personal Vodou priest, to save him.

The priest determines that Benson is sick because of Vodou. He says it is some kind of spell cast by a loup-garou, or werewolf, a kind of sorcerer greatly feared in Haiti since colonial times.

That anonymous priest—none of the sources or reports records his name—also says that the neighborhood’s elderly men and women are responsible not only for the little prince’s illness, but for other deaths from disease in Wharf Jérémie.

To the gang members, the elderly have become a kind of plague, and that is how they will treat them.

On the morning of December 6, 2024, after a long meeting with the hougan, King Micanor decides to put an end to the curse: he gathers his troops at the gang’s headquarters known as the Training Center and orders them to bring him all the elderly people in the neighborhood.

That day Sébastien has lunch with his mother at home. He does not remember what they ate. He assumes it was rice, because for many people in the city it is practically the only food.

The neighborhood is tense, the common denominator of life in Port-au-Prince. They hear gunshots, the city’s background music for the past five years.

Then the thugs arrive.

They come on motorcycles. They are young. They bang on the door and shout from outside that they want his mother. She tells Sébastien to hide; she does not ask him. She orders him.

Sébastien is a large man, with strong features, a deep voice, and broad arms. His neck looks like the trunk of a sturdy tree, and the top buttons of his shirt do their best not to fly off every time he breathes.

But on December 6, 2024, this huge man squeezes himself underneath his mother’s bed and covers himself with her blankets.

He thinks they have come to rob her, because he and his mother are merchants and keep cash at home.

Since King Micanor is their neighbor and they have known him for two decades, he does not think they are going to kill anyone in the neighborhood. Perhaps his mother does, and that is why she orders him to hide.

So Sébastien watches from his hiding place as two young men take her away and put her on a motorcycle. Hours later she will become part of the human jigsaw puzzle that also includes Evelyn’s grandmother.

That day, King Micanor kidnaps 127 elderly people—90 men and 37 women—and takes them toward Nan Mangue.

There, once night has swallowed everything in darkness, his men shoot them and hack them to death with machetes.

The hougan collects blood from the victims and stores it in containers alongside some parts of their bodies.

In the Vodou tradition, this is a way of preserving a person’s essence, of keeping hold of someone, of enslaving them beyond the barriers imposed by death. In Vodou terms, the man keeps the souls of the elderly.

The Prince’s Death and the King’s Tortures

In the early hours of December 7, 2024, Benson Altes, King Micanor’s son, dies.

But the blood spilled the night before is not enough for the hougan. The king sends his men out with clear orders to kill everyone related to the elderly victims.

They spread throughout the neighborhood, trapping entire families.

About 50 people have planned to flee by sea and have built a boat out of boards and plastic.

But before boarding and venturing into the Caribbean, they organize a ceremony to ask the loas, the deities of Vodou, for protection.

The music and singing alert Micanor’s men, and soon they are surrounded.

They beat and stab them without killing them, and at gunpoint take a total of 57 people away.

Some are transported on motorcycles, others in pick-up trucks, crammed together, and tied up.

At the Training Center, King Micanor himself tortures them for hours, according to the testimonies.

He cries. He is suffering, wounded, paranoid. He wants to know who cast the curse and where the sorcerers who killed his little boy are. But no one gives him a satisfactory answer. They do not tell him where the monsters are hiding.

In the early hours of December 8, they begin slitting the hostages’ throats and dismembering them. When the sun comes up, his men throw whatever pieces they can into the flames.

The remains the fire does not consume are thrown into the sea.

The Kings and Vodou

At Saint Michel Church, on the edges of Pétion-Ville, inside the small fortress that survives in Port-au-Prince, dozens of women and men raise their hands and wave them in the air. Drums rumble like thunder, smoke rises, and deep voices escape from a wooden hut.

They look at me suspiciously, but no one dares to throw me out or hurt me. It is a sacred place, and they will not stain it, least of all with the blood of a white man.

It is March 5, 2025, and in this hounfor, or Vodou church, a ritual is being held for Ezili, the family of loas associated with fertility, the strength of motherhood, sensuality, femininity, dance, and protection.

A group has carried in a young woman with Down syndrome. Motionless, she looks like a large bird with wings only halfway grown. She does not speak, only emits a kind of painful grunt and drools.

They found her on the street, where she lives beside a garbage dump. They have dressed and shod her as well as they could and organized this event for her.

The purpose is to ask Ezili to protect her, accompany her, and forgive her. The woman is pregnant and will give birth in the coming days.

The worshippers also demand peace, shouting for the loas to give them hope, to help them survive. They beg them not to let Viv Ansanm enter, and if it does, to help them defeat it.

Vodou is one of the most stigmatized religions in the Americas.

According to Alfred Métraux, one of the pioneering anthropologists in its study, it is a set of hybrid beliefs rooted, first, in African faiths and, later, in the Catholic faith of the slaveholders who came to the Americas.

It would be very difficult to explain the deeper keys to Vodou in this article. So I will simply say that it is a religion created from below, with a deep and tender relationship to nature and the dead.

In this tradition, the dead do not leave. They remain, and they are an important part of everyday life. They return in dreams, comfort the living, and over time become deities, causing the Haitian pantheon to grow until it becomes impossible to list them all.

Vodou has nothing to do with violence, or no more than Judeo-Christian or Muslim faiths do. It also became the ideological and spiritual engine of the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

It was after a ritual organized by a woman that enslaved people destroyed the French plantation-slave system in 1791. Thus, Haiti was founded, following the first successful slave revolution in the Americas, the first independence in Latin America, and the second on the continent after that of the United States.

Vodou was, and in some ways remains, an eminently anti-imperialist religion.

Like all religions, however, it has also been used to further oppress those who are already oppressed.

Using Vodou as a weapon to subjugate people is not something King Micanor invented; dozens of warlords boast of being hougan and having the protection of the loas.

Perhaps the first to see the potential of faith as a means of repressing Haitians was François Duvalier, the dictator known as Papa Doc.

His chilling regime, from 1957 to 1971, had two pillars. The first was the creation of the Tontons Macoutes, a paramilitary group that murdered opponents and imposed terror in the neighborhoods; the second was Vodou.

Duvalier himself claimed not merely to be a hougan, but to be a loa—specifically Baron Samedi, lord of the cemeteries, who guards the entrance to the world of the dead.

He appeared in the traditional attire of this spirit and spoke—as Haitians say the loas and the dead speak—in a nasal tone.

He ruled Haiti for 14 years, leaving behind a trail of death and establishing a way of doing politics that still prevails today.

In simplistic terms, one could say that Viv Ansanm is Papa Doc’s legacy and that those paranoid, mystical warlords are his inheritance.

When King Micanor decides on December 6 to murder his neighbors, he is not innovating the methods of barbarism; he is following a political tradition that began before he was born.

The King’s Paranoia and the “Werewolves”

On December 9, people in Wharf Jérémie are cut off from the outside world.

Following local media and social media coverage of the massacre, King Micanor has ordered the confiscation of the entire population’s phones.

His men kidnap another 60 people and take them to the Training Center, where they torture and interrogate them. The leader wants to know who leaked the information to the press and to the human-rights organization that I will speak with months later, in March and April 2025.

A curfew is imposed on the neighborhood. “Nobody leaves; nobody enters!” The thugs shout through the streets.

Manú does not fit the archetypal image we have of a refugee. He wears a button-down shirt and glasses, and his shoes are polished. He speaks English, and I can talk to him without a filter.

He tells me he lives in another neighborhood whose name we will omit for security reasons and that he frequently visited his parents in Wharf Jérémie, able to come and go without being bothered by the king’s thugs. This is a rare privilege.

His parents had a successful business there. Because it was a port, there was plenty of movement and the opportunity to obtain products before they became more expensive farther inland.

On December 6, Manú called his parents, and they did not answer.

Since rumors were already circulating that something strange was happening in the neighborhood, he ventured out and managed to enter Wharf Jérémie on December 7.

His mother greeted him at home with the news that men on motorcycles had taken his father away the day before.

Despite the curfew, he went out to find out what had happened to him.

He learned that they had dismembered him, burned his body parts, and thrown what remained into the sea.

He was also told that everyone over the age of 60 was being killed.

His mother was over 70. So he hid her as best he could, and on December 9 he smuggled her out. But she became ill, stopped eating, and died on Christmas Eve. “She died of sadness,” Manú says.

At her funeral, beside his mother’s coffin, he buries another one containing things that belonged to his father. That is how he says goodbye to them, while explaining that they have returned to a world the king’s rage can no longer reach: the world of dreams.

“My children are very young and they won’t remember them, but they take care of my children,” he says, and tears break through his cold bureaucratic composure.

On the afternoon of December 9, King Micanor’s thugs capture three men and two women trying to flee Wharf Jérémie and shoot them on the spot.

These killings are no longer about Vodou and werewolves. The king wants by every means possible to prevent more of the massacre from becoming known and therefore forbids people from leaving their homes or speaking among themselves.

But hiding more than 200 murders, even with fire and the sea as allies, is extremely difficult.

The news leaks out. Some people send videos to relatives outside the neighborhood, who share them with local journalists or on social media.

[Jimmy Chérizier, known as] Barbecue, the man who has become known around the world as the spokesman and leader of Viv Ansanm, and other leaders of the confederation demand answers. Although each warlord has autonomy over “his” territory, carrying out a massacre on this scale requires at least an explanation.

United Nations analysts monitoring communications intercepted a message from the king to Viv Ansanm’s high command in which he refers to what happened:

Hello, colleagues of Viv Ansanm. Greetings, this is King Micanor.

I will tell you about the incident in my area.

Many people say that I committed a massacre and talk about killings. The victims are sorcerers (werewolves). The Viv Ansanm coalition does not collaborate with these kinds of people.

Can you imagine that I have a son who was born healthy and that the elders in the area conspired to kill him by casting mystical spells on him? In this case, I cannot remain passive; I must take revenge. In all Viv Ansanm bases, we will exterminate the sorcerers and cleanse the areas.

I have heard many messages in the press and from human rights organizations.

You know my hideout; you know who I am. You must come for me. You are cowards. I am waiting for you. Come for me. I take full responsibility for what I did.

The elders killed my son. Did you think I was not going to react? A son whom I love so much. You are not the child’s parents, and that is why you are insensitive to the pain.

I myself, King Micanor, did not commit any abuse; the people who were killed are truly dead. If others must be killed, they will die. All Viv Ansanm gangs will hunt the werewolves (sorcerers).

Given the explanation, he continued the massacre.

“You Kill Mine, I Kill Yours.”

The neighborhood wakes up in silence. No one wants to speak loudly for fear of alerting the thugs to their presence.

“The most dangerous are the children, because they want to demonstrate their power and can hurt you just for that,” Evelyn, the first survivor I interviewed, tells me.

The king’s men control the streets and are looking for someone to kill. Dustin is among them.

Thin and around 30 years old, he limps, one leg bandaged, supported by a crutch.

He worked with his uncle and cousin in a small workshop in the neighborhood, which gave him access to the area. He also admits to having good relations with King Micanor’s gang.

When he arrived there on December 7, his uncle and cousin had already been murdered. Even so, he decided to stay with the gang, he says, out of fear that they would mistake him for an informant.

But he insists he had nothing to do with the massacre and, as proof, shows the two bullet holes in his body.

He says the thugs accused him of failing to obey the king’s order: everyone had to kill. Some had even made a deal to avoid shedding their own blood: “You kill mine, I kill yours.”

That Dustin escaped that sentence apparently did not sit well with them.

On December 10, one of King Micanor’s mid-ranking men tells him to extend his hand and, as punishment, shoots him in the center of the palm. Another points a gun at his head. Dustin moves; the thug pulls the trigger again and hits him in the leg. But he keeps running and manages to escape.

He now lives as a refugee somewhere inside the fortress that still resists in Port-au-Prince. His wounds appear to have become infected.

If the men of the self-defense brigades catch him and discover his connection to Viv Ansanm, they will take him to the cuisine, at the corner of rue 27 and Bois Patate, in front of the abandoned Tag Supermarket, in the Canapé Vert neighborhood, the stronghold of Samuel Joasin and his brigades.

They will hack him with enough machete blows to keep him from moving, then place tires around his neck and set him on fire. Bwa kale, this practice is called, and it is the fate of the gang members captured by the brigade.

The king’s paranoia and his obsession with preventing news of his massacre from spreading make him even more distrustful.

He finds eight men and five women who still have their phones, accuses them of being the ones who spoke to journalists, and takes them to Nan Mangue, where he killed the first groups.

There he tortures and kills them, and their bodies meet the same fate as the others: machete, fire, and salt water.

The Mad King and Dreams

The leader’s head is a lottery.

News of the massacre spread throughout Port-au-Prince. “King Micanor has gone crazy,” people say in neighborhoods controlled by the thugs, even inside the fortress.

Someone with access to foreign intelligence information tells me that Viv Ansanm considered overthrowing him and putting someone more trustworthy, less unpredictable, in charge of Wharf Jérémie.

The same source tells me that the king learned this, or sensed it, and then wanted to demonstrate that he was in control of the neighborhood and of his own mind.

On December 11, he releases the 60 people he kidnapped two days earlier and orders his men to prepare bags containing rice, beans, sanitary pads, and little else.

He forces people out of their homes and distributes supplies.

He orders them to shout his name, to thank him because, although he failed to save his son, he did protect the neighborhood’s other children from the werewolves.

“Long live King Micanor!” Sheila must shout while holding up a bag of rice to the camera of a gang member’s phone.

On December 5, this woman had gone to the market with her grandfather. They bought chayote, a vegetable similar to cassava, and cooked it to eat together.

There was some left over, so she believes that when they took him away to kill him on the afternoon of December 6, along with 126 other elderly people, her grandfather must have eaten the chayote they had prepared together the day before.

By December 11, King Micanor has already killed 202 people. But despite his kidnappings, tortures, and murders, the curfew, and the rice he distributed, his men tell him there is a new video circulating on social media in which women’s voices recount what has happened over the past few days.

In response, he has five women captured and taken to the Training Center, where they are tortured and then taken to Nan Mangue.

Those five women now share the sea with the remains of Jacinthe, Marcel, Grette, Magarette, Mimose, Ellionise, Montellas, Charita, Marthe, Adeline, Amadide, Charléus, Euvanie, Milou, Immacula, Olympia, Umaliance, Milot, Jacqueline, Dieuvé, Bénita, Roosevelt, Jean, Rosiane… and 173 other people whose names do not appear in the reports for security reasons.

In this city of thugs, the false king massacred the elderly and, with them, the memory of the neighborhood.

But the survivors say their loved ones keep returning every night, in dreams, and with them the past returns as well.

The False King and Impunity

Micanor is not a king. He is simply a man who rules with impunity over a piece of the world on an island in the Caribbean.

He is not even the founder of his gang. According to someone who once belonged to the group, Micanor was third in command, an extremely violent man with an easy trigger finger—or an easy machete hand. That is why they never trusted him: he was always paranoid, impressionable, and unstable, they say.

In 2008, this lord of misery murdered his own mambo, or Vodou priestess, in order, according to him, to obtain her power. In 2012, he killed 12 people whom he accused of being sorcerers.

The two leaders who preceded him died around 2015 in the fratricidal wars among the capital’s gangs, when they fought one another for control of those miserable spaces and the poor people who inhabited them, before Viv Ansanm.

The afternoon of this day in April 2025 is fading over Port-au-Prince. Viv Ansanm is attacking the edges of the fortress.

As I conduct the fifth interview of the afternoon, gunshots can be heard in the distance, and columns of smoke rise toward the sky outside the window.

The brigade will soon close the streets to protect itself from the rabid packs of the great confederation of thugs.

Dustin speaks slowly, in slang and with a heavy accent. He is difficult to understand.

But the man is telling me about the death of his uncle and cousin, and how he had to walk for more than an hour with his injured leg and mangled hand to tell me this story, so interrupting him is not an option.

When the interviews are over, we speed away on Ivander’s motorcycle. Some barricades are already in place, but we manage to get around them.

The fortress bares its spines and prepares to survive another night.

The witnesses to the “Grandparents’ Massacre” will sleep here now; they can no longer return to their homes. Tomorrow they will try to go back without being murdered or captured by Viv Ansanm or by the vigilante brigades.

Almost a year and a half later, as I write this chronicle, the Wharf Jérémie massacre remains unpunished despite all the testimonies and evidence pointing to the person responsible for the murder of 207 Haitians, most of them elderly: the self-proclaimed last monarch of the Caribbean, lord of the docks, a simple thug named Monel Félix Altes.

Mò yo pa janm ale

Yo la toujou

Yo dòmi nan dlo

Yo mache nan rèv nou

(The dead never leave.

They are always here.

They sleep in the water.

They walk in our dreams.)

Traditional Haitian Vodou funeral song

*The names of the survivors have been changed in this chronicle for security reasons.