Haitian singer Rutshelle Guillame was performing earlier this month over the long All Saints/All Souls Day weekend in the provinces where news doesn't always come in real time, and cellular signals can be fleeting, when upset fans and critics began bombarding her social media pages.
When she finally arrived in Haiti's capital, she learned the reason for their harsh attacks: Port-au-Prince high school student and kidnapped victim Evelyne Sincere was dead. Beaten and bruised, her lifeless body had been dumped on a heap of trash on the side of a road.
And Rutshelle, the most followed Haitian artist on Instagram with 1.2 million followers, was silent.
"I didn't know they had kidnapped a young lady or that they had asked for a ransom for her and they didn't pay, and they had killed her. I wasn't even aware," Guillaume, 32, said last week during a morning panel discussion on Port-au-Prince's Magik 9 radio station, operated by Le Nouvelliste newspaper.
Sincere was gagged, blindfolded, beaten on the sole of her right foot, and according to a judge, possibly raped repeatedly during her captivity. The torture killing and grim discovery of her corpse on Nov. 1, has become a rallying cry for justice after photos of her and a video of her wailing sister discovering her nude body went viral.
In the days since, thousands of Haitians, many of them women, some of them social justice activists, others children purposefully dressed in their school uniforms, have filled the streets of the capital in outrage.
Haitian soccer players, competing in Jamaica, have paid homage by reenacting the kidnapping. They posed for photos with blindfolds and their wrists crossed as if they had been bound like Sincere's in one of the circulated photos. And as her name trended on Haitian Twitter, human rights activists and civil society groups denounced the injustice done to her. Hers was among 162 kidnappings recorded this year in Haiti — 55 of them women, 12 of them minor girls.
In the month of October when Sincere was kidnapped and held over four days, 21 kidnapping cases were recorded, according to figures tracked by human rights groups. Five of the victims were women. Four were minors. October was also the month of the International Day of the Girl, a fact not lost on Dayanne Danier, a Haitian-American fashion designer whose Fleur de Vie nonprofit has made education and the plight of Haitian girls part of its charitable focus.
She views Sincere's murder as more than an indication of Haiti's worsening climate of violence, but part of the systematic abuse of women and girls that feminists in the country say is aimed at suppressing women.
"We're dealing with a society where you have a consistent social injustice done to women and nothing ever happens, and yet we call them 'Poto Mitan,' " Danier, 43, said, referring to the Creole phrase describing women as the backbone of Haitian society. "If you're consistently imposing violence on your poto mitan, what does it say about your society? The situation of Evelyne Sincere's is not rare. It happens in Haiti more often than people want to admit."
On Friday, feminist activists with the Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen/Haitian Women's Solidarity, or SOFA, staged a sit-in in front of the women's affairs ministry before taking their protest to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to demand that "the State stops protecting bandits, criminals and rapists." Across the capital in the Delmas 24 neighborhood where Sincere's body was found, a more solemn memorial unfolded.
As an artist spray-painted Sincere's face on a wall, workers continued to clean up the site, and mourners, many of them strangers, some of them artists and social media influencers, lit candles and laid flowers.
"I live in a country where people's lives and people's bodies just don't matter at this point and we've reached a point of misery that anything that happens is OK," said Mattie Domingue, 30, an entrepreneur with 141,000 Instagram followers who organized the memorial with friend Christopher Philemon.
"This is not normal. This young girl, 22 years old, it could have been me, it could have been my daughter, it could have been my sister, it could have been my cousin. It could have been anybody tossed on top of a pile of trash naked, left lifeless," she said.
Domingue said while she believes "this is the perfect time to wake up," and is not fearful of speaking up, she understands the reluctance of others to put themselves out there and she has no judgment against artists and other social media influencers who do not.
"Not everybody's meant to be a leader, to be a hero, but that's OK," she said. "One thing I have to say is that when you are famous or when you are in the spotlight, you have to use your voice."
