Newshour Extra

The Haitian government declared a 72-hour state of emergency on Sunday. It follows the storming at the weekend by gangs of two prisons, with some 3,700 inmates escaping. The gang leaders want the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, with one of them (Jimmy Cherizier, aka Barbecue) saying there will be civil war if Mr Henry does not go. Mr Henry had travelled to Kenya to discuss the deployment of a UN-backed security mission in Haiti, but is now in Puerto Rico after his plane was denied permission to land in Haiti. Gangs are now estimated to control most of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas with a history of political instability, dictatorships and natural disasters. It became the world's first black-led republic and the first independent Caribbean state when it threw off French colonial control and slavery in the early 19th Century. But it was forced to pay crippling reparations to France, which demanded compensation for former slave owners. That "independence deb