Trees wrap around buildings, roots sprout from riverbeds of plastic trash, and vines creep down the street. Nature is working to reclaim downtown Port-au-Prince after years of dereliction and gang warfare. But at dawn, through this post-apocalyptic urban forest still come streams of humanity: Hundreds of civilians walk through this dead zone every day, some carrying food, others heading to work — as first light permits them to cross gangland and into what’s left of the city’s free streets.

It is a scene of desperation that repeats at dusk, when the same single file of hundreds returns home. Here were once waterfront villas, a cathedral, a busy market frequented by tourists. No one comes here anymore — unless they have no other choice.

Years of political turmoil, corruption and the ascendance of a deadly gang coalition are suffocating Haiti’s capital city. The US and international community have repeatedly tried and failed to help bring order. Now, the remnants of Haiti’s government have rolled the dice with a very different option: a US private security tycoon.

Erik Prince and his private security teams were contracted by the US government during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, most remembered for Blackwater employees opening fire in Baghdad’s Nusoor Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Four of his contractors were convicted in the US and later pardoned by President Donald Trump.

Now he’s in Haiti, where his mercenaries are working with elite local police to break the gangs’ chokehold — a secretive project known as the “Task Force.”Prince has also introduced drone warfare to Haiti, with over 2,000 strikes since the Task Force began its operation last March. One seen by CNN shows a tiny drone flying straight into what looks like a water tank on a roof. It ruptures, and then suddenly the building is aflame — a strike on what a Task Force source said was a gang factory for Molotov cocktails.

“Insurgencies are not defeated by taking out just leadership,” Prince said last month, in an exclusive interview with CNN in Port-au-Prince. “I know there’s been obsession of that in the United States, but wars are won by taking significant numbers of enemy manpower off the battlefield.”

“They are evil criminals and the best place for them is in the ground.”It’s an approach that critics say defies international law and due process. But for many Haitians exhausted by years of gang atrocities, the more important question is: Is it working?

Prince’s new company Vectus Global was hired by Haiti’s interim government last year. The Task Force now works in a fractured security landscape that includes the Haitian National Police, the new UN-mandated Gang Suppression Force, Haiti’s long-neglected army and a network of armed vigilante groups.

Soft-spoken in person but prolific on social media, Prince touts his work in Haiti as a model to other failing states with their own intractable security problems.

“When we started, a police truck was lost every week — attacked, ambushed, burned, the occupants slaughtered, butchered,” Prince said, standing on a rooftop overlooking gang-held parts of the capital. “That’s done now, because there’s much better response, quicker air support, drones, whatever, that prevents the police from being overmatched.”Promised milestones have been elusive. When his contract was announced early last year, Prince said he aimed to free up key roads within a year, making it possible to drive from the northern port city of Cap Haitien to Port-au-Prince. Eighteen months on, the vital route remains strangled by gang checkpoints.

International flights to Port-au-Prince are stopped because of the risk of being shot over gang territory. General elections were supposed to be held in December; they have been postponed indefinitely.

Nonetheless, the past year has, at the least, halted the gangs’ advance in the capital, according to one assessment. The United Nations, which monitors the situation on the ground with quarterly updates, said in September that security operations “have contributed to halting the expansion of gangs in Port-au-Prince and cleared some areas from gang control, including in downtown.”The death toll remains high. Of the 5,700 people killed or injured in 2026, more than half were casualties around security operations, UN human rights chief Volker Türk said in early October.

The gangs are also changing their strategies. They’re accelerating into other parts of the country, including farming communities that feed the nation. Forcible recruitment of children has tripled over the past year — between 30% and 50% of gang members are now minors, UNICEF estimates.

When gangs come under attack, they leave their youngest members behind with orders to fight until the end, one police commander told CNN.

In the mists of the steep hills that ring southern Port-au-Prince, CNN saw one Task Force operation where helicopters manned by foreign contractors assaulted gang positions, and drones detonated amid the clatter of gunfire.

Earlier this summer, a gang had massacred at least 47 residents and kidnapped dozens more in the town of Kenscoff, on the main southern route out of the capital. It was an apparent attempt to gain leverage over the Task Force, with the gang leader releasing a video threatening to kill hostages if drones hurt his troops.

The gang eventually released its hostages but dug into the tiny nearby hamlet of Bois D’Avril, into which Prince’s foreign ex-special forces flew in September, engaging them in an hours-long firefight.

Footage obtained by CNN showed the Haitian National Police’s SWAT unit entering the village, machine-gunfire in the background, and the distant thud of explosions. It also provided a rare sighting of some of Prince’s men, chatting with a SWAT officer who says, “I have heard a lot of things about you.”A heavily armed foreign contractor points out to the officer a hillside building as a good security position. “We will be around the next few days to help you out,” he says, in an apparent Australian accent.

It was an operation that local residents cheered, rushing in to burn gang barricades after police declared the area clear. But for now, it’s still too dangerous for the area’s residents to return home. Many are now refugees in their own country, adding to the more than 1.5 million people who are internally displaced in Haiti — about a tenth of the national population.

“I’ve been left with nothing,” said one Kenscoff refugee, Luckson Alfrezin, from a cramped encampment in the capital, after the gang killed his uncles, cousins and aunts, and livestock.

“It’s like being a car with no lights on. You’re living but you don’t see why. You are already dead.”A central question is how Haiti’s patchwork forces will hold and defend reclaimed areas like Kenscoff. It’s a role beyond what Prince’s small force is designed to do, but where coordination with the still-growing Gang Suppression Force and Haitian National Police is evolving.

Prince would not disclose the annual fee he receives for work with the Task Force, claiming only that it is a “fraction” of the cost of the short-lived Multinational Security Support mission — an initiative backed financially and logistically by the United States, that once envisaged 5,500 foreign police in Port-au-Prince.

“Our cost is one-sixth of what their annual camp cost was,” Prince said. The sum is likely in the tens of millions of dollars.

His income will be augmented by a deal to help control Haiti’s porous border with the Dominican Republic for the next 10 years in return for 10% of any new customs revenue collected. The long-term contract has raised criticism locally of how Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé is using his mandate as interim leader.

Human rights lawyer Rosy Auguste Ducena, who advocates for the rights of victims of violence, says the Haitian public is fed up with the slow pace of change.

“Absence and inaction are still the biggest issue with all the security forces operating in Haiti,” she said, pointing out that no major gang leader has been killed in years.

So far, the Vectus contractors are perceived as “useless,” she added.

“First of all, we don’t notice them, that’s the main thing: We don’t see them. And we know they’re very costly because it’s still our taxes that pay them and we don’t see the results,” she added, calling for greater accountability from all the security forces operating in the country.

Armed groups still operate with “relative impunity” in Haiti, according to Ducena — a fact underlined by dozens of gang social media accounts flaunting their money, weapons, and freedom of movement, in addition to gruesome torture and kidnapping videos. Prince’s drones have had two palpable effects.

First, ordinary people have been caught in some of the blasts. The UN counts 85 civilians dead from drone strikes across Haiti, according to a CNN tally of UN reporting, and directly attributes this to a “private military contractor.”Accounting is patchy, however, and rights workers say some deaths may go unreported because of difficulties they have reaching the kinds of gangland areas targeted by drones.

The most prominent case was a failed strike on a gang leader’s birthday party in September last year. At least eight children were among the dozen or more people killed when a drone’s explosive fell in the wrong location.

“Everybody started running and screaming. A drone had fallen behind the square where the gang leader was having a party, at the soccer field,” said one woman to CNN, whose 6-year-old daughter was among the dead. “When I rushed to see, I found my child dead, face on the ground.”Prince acknowledges that accidents are “not impossible,” but declined to comment on specific cases. His team runs “dozens of hours of surveillance in an area before we do anything there — a patrol, a raid, or certainly a drone strike,” he added. The second impact of the drone strikes has been to force the gangs to take note.

CNN spoke to several gang members in the downtown area of BelAir, where armed men roam the streets openly. They don’t flinch when armored police patrol vehicles pass by, but are wary of the drone threat.

One of them, who gave him name as Etienne, told CNN that “drones are pushing us out of the area.”A gang lieutenant, Julio, had a message for Prince. “The biggest threat is Erik Prince’s force,” he said, claiming that if the American left “tomorrow,” it would create a need for peace and dialogue with Haiti’s National Police.

“We armed men need peace too. Imagine, I have a wife and kids,” he said from behind his camouflage balaclava, his subordinates holding batons and guns around him.

Dialogue and disarmament have been floated before in Haiti, but sources say attempts to gauge interest from the main gang coalition Viv Ansanm (“Live Together” in Haitian Creole) have so far fallen flat. And while Haiti has committed to a handover protocol for child gang members, getting the public to accept reintegration of anyone with gang associations is likely to be challenging. That may be why Prince seems so confident in the brutal fix he’s offering.

“I welcome all those critics to come and walk through the rough neighborhoods of Port-au- Prince for a week or a day and see how long they last,” he said.