Some of Haiti’s best-known media personalities and journalists appealed for help Tuesday amid ongoing attacks by armed gangs that have shut down the international airport, paralyzed the capital and increasingly poses risks for those trying to cover the news.

In a joint appeal, 90 Haiti journalists and the group Reporters Without Borders called on the international community and the country’s newly created transitional presidential council to help protect Haitian journalists amid the crisis that’s forcing many to either practice self-censorship, abandon the profession or flee the country.

Since 2022, at least six journalists have been murdered in retaliation for their work. The killings made Haiti the world’s third-worst offender on the list of countries where the murders of journalists go unpunished, behind Syria and Somalia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2023 Impunity Index.

Journalists are being forced to work in a climate of almost total lawlessness, the committee said last fall, before the current violent uprising. Since Feb. 29, when armed gangs began tightening their grip on the capital, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 people since the beginning of the year, journalists find themselves increasingly targeted.

“We Haitian journalists live in daily fear of being attacked, of being kidnapped, of being murdered,” the journalists said in a statement.

Attacks on the press have long been a problem in Haiti, where the slaying of the country’s most famous journalist, Jean Léopold Dominique, remains unsolved 24 years after he was gunned down outside of his Port-au-Prince radio station in 2000. Such attacks have increased in recent years, and a number of journalists have fled the country, settling in Miami and elsewhere.

As the crisis in Haiti grows, so too have the risks for reporters. A number of journalists have been injured while attempting to report on the armed clashes between the various gangs and the police. During their work, they are often subjected to abuses, the journalists said, “with complete impunity, in the absence of the rule of law.”

Local media organizations and the Committee to Protect Journalists both track reports of journalists kidnapped, killed and injured, including several incidents in February before armed gangs launched their united attack against key government institutions

During anti-government protests in early February that preceded the latest attacks, at least five journalists were injured, including freelancer Jean Marc Jean, who according to local media reports was struck in the face by a tear gas canister fired by a Haiti National Police officer.

Most of the journalists who have signed the statement on Reporters Without Borders website are based in Port-au-Prince. At least one, investigative journalist Roberson Alphonse, is in the United States after he was forced to flee Haiti after surviving an October 2022 assassination attempt when his vehicle was sprayed with bullets as he headed to work.

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