US Announces $3M Bounty for Info on Haiti Gang Financial Networks

The United States is offering up to $3 million and potential relocation for information about how Haiti's largest criminal organizations finance their operations. This represents a new approach, as previous rewards targeted individual gang leaders rather than their financial networks.

The United States announced Wednesday it will pay up to $3 million and provide potential relocation assistance to anyone who provides information about how Haiti’s two largest criminal organizations fund their operations.

Federal authorities are seeking details about the financial networks of the Viv Ansanm and Gran Grif crime syndicates, both of which have been classified as terrorist organizations by Washington. These powerful alliances unite hundreds of individual gangs operating throughout Haiti’s capital and extending into the country’s agricultural heartland and central regions.

This bounty represents a new strategy for U.S. officials, who previously focused rewards on capturing specific gang leaders rather than dismantling their funding sources.

Despite ongoing operations by Haitian law enforcement, supported by a United Nations-backed international force that arrived three years ago and assistance from a U.S. private military contractor, authorities have stepped up their campaign against armed criminal groups that now dominate most of the capital city. However, no major gang leader has been successfully captured.

Haiti’s criminal organizations have evolved significantly in recent years, becoming far less reliant on financial backing from the country’s wealthy elite as they have solidified their grip on the capital and expanded operations into countryside areas.

Law enforcement officials say these groups generate revenue through multiple illegal activities, including operating roadblocks and checkpoints, demanding protection money from businesses and residents, conducting thousands of kidnappings for ransom, and trafficking weapons, narcotics, and human organs. They also steal vehicles, seize buildings, and take crops from farmers.

The ongoing gang violence has forced more than 1.4 million Haitians from their homes, worsening an already severe food crisis throughout the nation. Since 2021, nearly 20,000 people have been violently killed in Haiti, with the death count rising each year.

United Nations investigators report that most gang-related killings involve firearms that are smuggled illegally into Haiti, with many weapons believed to enter through ports in Florida and Georgia.