behind the news

Ginger Thompson on Haiti’s Chaos and Courage, and Calling Gang Members

The New York Times' Mexico City bureau chief discusses the Haitian people's resolve to cast ballots, getting the green light to report in Cité Soleil, and...
February 10, 2006

ginger_thompson_125.jpg
Ginger Thompson, the New York Times’ Mexico City bureau chief, has been reporting from Haiti on that country’s presidential election this week. In a string of stories, she has described the “tensions and disorder that have kept this poor, troubled nation at the brink of chaos for the last two years,” and its tentative steps toward stability. Before joining the Times in 1998 and becoming its Mexico bureau chief in 2000, Thompson previously reported on Cuba for the Chicago Tribune and covered Latin America for the Baltimore Sun.

Edward B. Colby: The story you filed on election day described four Haitians dying and frustration among voters in Cité Soleil boiling over, with people “scaling walls, smashing windows and breaking down doors to confront poll workers” — yet you also reported that more than half of registered voters showed up to the polls before 6 a.m., with some waiting in half-mile-long lines to cast ballots. What did you find most striking about election day?

Ginger Thompson: I think what was most striking about election day was the determination of Haitian people, despite enormous hardships, to show up to the polls and to wait in long lines and to cast ballots in an atmosphere that was tense at best, and at worst chaotic. There was enormous disorder at the polls. It seemed that the government wasn’t ready for people to vote. Polling places were not ready, ballots had not arrived until ten o’clock, at ten o’clock every ballot had to be counted by the electoral supervisor, [and] that took another couple of hours.

Meanwhile, people are outside who haven’t eaten all day, who have walked hours, and they stood and they waited. There were people who became very frustrated, and there were scuffles, there were people climbing walls, there were windows broken, there were doors pushed down, because people got desperate after awhile believing that perhaps the government was going to try to steal the election from them. There’s a lot of distrust in the government, as you might imagine, in Haiti, and so there was a time or period in the morning where frustration turned crowds of voters into angry mobs, and they began to mob these polling places. Police fired tear gas in the air, some fired gunshots in the air — there were two people, one an elderly man who died of what seems like a heart attack, another [a] woman who seems to have collapsed either from exhaustion or from the pushing, and she died. Then there was an incident where a police officer shot someone near a polling place, and an angry crowd lynched the police officer. So there were incidents that were very scary, but in the end by the afternoon order had returned … mostly that was due to the resolve of the Haitian people to cast their ballots. And so to me it seemed an amazing display of courage and of hope by Haitian people.

EBC: How difficult is it to get out in the field and report stories in Haiti? How do you try to keep yourself safe and get the story?

GT: It’s not difficult to be out in rural communities. There is not a lot of organized violence outside of Port-au-Prince. And inside of Port-au-Prince, there’s really one or two areas, principally Cité Soleil, that are dangerous. And when we go into those areas we often have to call gang members to advise them that we’re coming into the neighborhood, and to sort of get their approval to enter and to talk to people. People have been kidnapped in there, people have been shot, and so every time we go in, I try to go in with local journalists who know the community well, who have relationships with these gang members, and who can take me to where they are. I present myself, I tell them what I’m trying to do, often I tell them I’m trying to tell the stories of the people that live inside these neighborhoods — and they give me their accounts of how the government is repressing them, that the United Nations is attacking them, and so we sort of have to listen to their accounts, and then we’re sort of given a green light to go ahead and spend time in Cité Soleil. Once you’re there, however, it’s very hard to get an average family, or to get the story of an average family, because you’re being watched at all times by either the gang members or people who are conspiring with gang members or who are affiliated with gang members. So it’s not easy to get people to talk to you about the reality of their lives.

Sign up for CJR's daily email

EBC: That leads into my next question … in a rather incredible front-page story (subscription required) a few weeks ago, you described the chaotic and corrupt and warlike situation in Cité Soleil. What led you to write that story, and how did you report it?

GT: The story was an attempt to explain why Haiti had postponed elections for a fourth time. And Cité Soleil … it’s almost like the last battleground in the United Nations’ effort to restore order to Haiti, to the entire country. It all comes down to this one neighborhood of about 150,000 to 200,000 people that has essentially been impenetrable to the Haitian national police and to the United Nations troops. And so our goal was to try to explain why Haiti had postponed elections a fourth time. A lot of the problems, or a lot of the reasons for the postponements, had been concerns about insecurity, because of a wave of kidnappings that has lasted in Haiti since last summer — and a lot of the kidnappings, it is believed by law enforcement officials, are organized out of Cité Soleil. And so I wanted to go inside to explain how difficult the challenge was for the United Nations to bring order to Cité Soleil.

EBC: Toward the end of my year living in rural Costa Rica a few years ago I briefly visited Nicaragua and I was taken aback by the level of poverty I saw there, which was way beyond my host family’s situation in Costa Rica. Haiti, as the poorest country in the hemisphere, is even worse off. Is it sometimes hard to get across to your American readers the desperation and poverty you see on the ground in Haiti?

GT: Yeah, I do think it is. I mean, I was writing the word “poor masses” again last night and I kept thinking that it’s so much more than poor masses, what I see here is so much more than poor masses — and you try not to write using loaded language, you try not to overwrite, but it is overwhelming here, sometimes, the poverty that we see. And I’m not sure that I’ve ever done a really good job in explaining how bad it is, explaining how enormous the challenges are, at explaining how devastating these decades of corrupt government have been on this country. … [I]t is something that I think about every time I write that word “poor masses,” and I write it almost every day.

EBC: You’ve been the Mexico City bureau chief of the Times for over five years now. What’s been the most fun part of your job?

GT: Ooh. Wow, well, that’s difficult. I have to tell you, my job is fun. It’s hard. It’s hard, it’s sometimes a little scary, it’s tiring, and I’ve written about a lot of very difficult problems. …. Really, honestly, the most fun part of my job is doing it. I love being out in the field, I love standing on the border walking across with immigrants. … I love the work, I love being out, I love traveling, I love hopping on airplanes and landing in some faraway place. I mean, one of the most fun assignments I had recently was Tropical Storm Stan in Guatemala. And I landed, and we had to drive all night on this highway to get to this tiny village that had been covered by a mudslide, and along the way I met people who were, on their own, digging for relatives in the mud, but all by themselves — there were no trucks, there’s no heavy equipment — and just sort of spending the night talking to communities of poor people who were trying to dig themselves out of disaster was extremely fascinating. Because again, like the Haitian election, it was an opportunity to really witness immense, profound human courage. And I’ve had a lot of opportunities like that in five years, and so that’s probably what I love most.

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.