Published on: 10 March 2023
DOHI NEWS
Father Antoine Macaire, 33, a Claretian priest from Cameroon, escaped his captors unharmed after being held against his will for 10 days. He is currently being kept safe in Santa Domingo, the Dominican Republic.
Macaire, ordained in 2021, was abducted by a criminal gang the morning of February 7 as he traveled to his mission station in Kazal, 20 miles north of Port-au-Prince. He was returning to his missionary community from a spiritual retreat in the Dominican Republic when his bus for was stopped by the gang.
The priest was taken and held in an abandoned house on the fringes of the Haitian capital. Eventually, in the early morning hours of February 17th, when his captors left the premises, Macaire decided to attempt a daring escape.
He “made a hole in the ceiling of the room where he had been confined to get out, and then he started running until he reached a road. He ran a lot until 5 a.m., until he reached a neighboring town called Cabaret. There, a well-known priest took him in at the parish. He was there for a few days until we managed to take him to the island of Gonave, and later to the capital, heading to the airport,” shared Father Fausto Cruz Rosa, leader of the Antilles Delegation of the Claretian Missionaries.
According to Father Cruz, “[the gang] took him because he’s a foreigner. That’s the strategy they always use.” Though there is no pressure from the church for him to return, Cruz emphasized that Macaire has stated that he is “willing to return to Haiti as soon as possible.”
In recent years, both political and social unrest has reached fever pitch in Haiti. As the struggle for power worsens, gang warfare has grown out of control and the police have proven unable to stop the violence that has made life almost unbearable for all in the country.
