![]() But people are aware that he is one of the main people responsible for the nightmare they are living,” Da Rin said. He gives money to families that don’t have the means to send their kids to school. “He gives women presents on Mother’s Day. ![]() “He sees himself as a revolutionary fighting against the dark corruption of government and oligarch businessmen, but make no mistake, he is an out-and-out gangster.”ĭiego Da Rin, an International Crisis Group Haiti specialist, said Chérizier’s attempt to paint himself as a compassionate if iron-fisted champion of the ghetto was not entirely without basis. “Barbecue is engaging and really is a natural politician … when I met him, I knew straightaway was a force to be reckoned with,” the Sky News correspondent Stuart Ramsay wrote after their 2023 encounter. Some suspect Chérizier has political aspirations of his own. He was rumoured to be close to the former president Jovenel Moïse, whose 2021 assassination paved the way for the current mayhem. Like many Haitian crime bosses, Chérizier is also a man with high-level political connections. “He has some charisma, he’s a thinker, but he’s a violent individual also.” Speaking to the Financial Times, Mars compared the gangster to a volcano, constantly poised to erupt. He listens, but in the end he does what is in his best interest.” “But he still continued burning down people’s houses. ![]() “In 2020 me and other peace-builders went to see him to ask him to stop his assaults on the Bel Air neighbourhood and he made some promises,” Mars added. “He is a criminal businessman,” said Louis-Henri Mars, director of the Haitian non-profit Lakou Lapè. 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. But the former police officer has been sanctioned by both the US and the UN for his alleged crimes. 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.Ĭhérizier, who leads a gang alliance called the G9 Family and Allies, has denied wrongdoing. But Chérizier – who has also publicly voiced admiration for François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Baby Doc’s father – appears not to have honoured those values. The motto of Haiti’s police is “proteger et servir”: to protect and serve. View image in fullscreen Haitians protest in Port-au-Prince to demand Ariel Henry’s resignation. He worked for the Unité départementale de maintien d’ordre, a riot squad whose members have been accused of shooting protesters dead. The children grew up in Delmas, one of the rundown Port-au-Prince communities he now runs, by a mother who hawked fried chicken on the streets.īy Chérizier’s account, it was his mother’s occupation that earned him the nickname Barbecue, although many claim that a habit of incinerating his victims was the real reason.īefore establishing himself as Haiti’s most influential gang kingpin, Chérizier was a member of the country’s national police. In a 2022 interview with Vice, Chérizier called his ragtag favela army “a sociopolitical structure and force that is fighting on behalf of the vulnerable”.Įxperts say the truth about Chérizier – who is best known as simply Babekyou (Barbecue) – is far more complicated and unsavory.īorn during the 1970s, during the brutal and corrupt reign of Baby Doc Duvalier, Chérizier has previously said he was one of eight siblings and lost his father at the age of five. I’m just carrying out a social fight,” Chérizier told the Associated Press last year while sat outside a bullet-pocked house. 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.
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