Jimmy Chérizier says he is leading Haiti’s poor against corrupt government forces but experts point to a dark and violent past
Murals in the pauperized Haitian slums he rules liken him to the Argentinian guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
In interviews, he poses as a God-fearing Caribbean Robin Hood and celebrates freedom fighters and agitators including Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X.
“I like Martin Luther King, too,” the Haitian gang boss Jimmy Chérizier told the New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson when they met last year. “But he didn’t like fighting with guns, and I fight with guns.”
The stunning gang-led insurrection against Haiti’s government has catapulted Chérizier, a raffish, rifle-wielding 47-year-old mobster, into the international headlines – a place history suggests he enjoys.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In interviews, he poses as a God-fearing Caribbean Robin Hood and celebrates freedom fighters and agitators including Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X.
Over the past five years the Haitian outlaw – who has emerged as the main spokesman for the gang uprising against Prime Minister Ariel Henry – has welcomed a succession of foreign reporters to his gangland domain hoping to justify what he calls his noble – if bloody – crusade to defend his country’s famished urban poor.
He was expelled from the force in 2018 for alleged involvement in a litany of crimes, including a horrific massacre that year in a slum called La Saline in which 71 people were killed, seven women raped and 400 homes torched.
The G9 controls some of Port-au-Prince’s largest slums and most important road arteries allowing Chérizier to paralyze the country on several occasions, cutting off petrol supplies and forcing schools and hospitals to close.
“Barbecue is engaging and really is a natural politician … when I met him, I knew straightaway [he] was a force to be reckoned with,” the Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay wrote after their 2023 encounter.
That nightmare plumbed new depths this week after Chérizier announced he was leading a massive gang assault against Henry’s government, and ordered his gunmen out on to the streets to sow chaos.
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