Dios Francoeur: Arrested and Disappeared

(Français)

The following article was written during the week before the night of Aug. 23-24, 2026, when armed men and possibly drones killed an estimated 47 people and wounded 22 others in the immediate vicinity of the Kenscoff Police Station, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR).

Wilner Joseph, a highly placed advisor to de facto Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, asserted that this violence was “planned and organized” by Police Inspector Nickenson Cadet, who was the Kenscoff Police Chief at that time.

Meanwhile, protestors in a large demonstration outside the Kenscoff Police Station after the violence also accused Cadet of orchestrating the violence with an armed group and called for his removal as Kenscoff police chief. Haitian National Police (PNH) Director General Vladimir Paraison was forced by the popular outcry to replace him in that post with Police Commissioner Jean-Pierre Ketler Mariceau on Aug. 27.

The Fils-Aimé government bears major responsibility for the tragedy because it knew, as Joseph’s testimony reveals, that a confrontation was brewing and that violence was going to erupt in a power struggle between Inspector Cadet and Kenscoff’s Mayor Jean Massillon.

It is well established that the PNH works closely with numerous paramilitary armed groups called “brigades” which it arms, provisions, and pays, just as has been done over past decades by other national police forces and armies facing popular insurrections in Latin America, most clearly in Colombia and El Salvador. In Haiti from 1986 to 1990, as neo-Duvalierist regimes battled a growing democracy movement, these police-supported paramilitaries which carried out massacres were called “attachés,” meaning “attached” to the police force.

In early August, a family in Thomassin, a town about eight miles north, down the mountains toward Port-au-Prince from Kenscoff, reached out to Haïti Liberté to investigate the disappearance of a young family member whom they believe the PNH and local “brigades” kidnapped and likely killed. Here is their story.

At 8:08 p.m. on Sat., Sep. 20, 2025,, Djanina Dérise, 33, received an alarming phone call while at home with her four-year-old son. It was her cousin, Dios Francoeur, 27, who lived with her. He was in trouble.