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Is the feared gang boss ‘Barbecue’ now the most powerful man in Haiti? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 8 months ago

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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[-] harderian729@lemmy.world -1 points 8 months ago

Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X.

These are all great people. I'm not sure about this 'Barbecue' guy, but if he's anything like Castro or Sankara then I support him.

[-] Alllo@lemmy.world -5 points 8 months ago

Basically all i kno about haiti is: only country to successfully throw off colonizers (they beat the french). then they got superwomped by foreign nations flooding their markets with oversubsidized goods and draining wealth out of haiti to where the people got thrown in extreme poverty.

with what little i kno of haiti, i would assume the power figures in haiti government are just as corrupt as those everywhere else and that removing their corrupt hold wouldn't be a bad thing... except that there needs to be some support for countries that do that instead of just 'crushed and controlled by foreign corporate and government interests' afterward. Maybe oldendays cuba and tito woulda helped support him afterward?

i literally armchair philosophizing with basically no info.

is fun tho plz join

[-] wahming 30 points 8 months ago

with what little i kno of haiti, i would assume the power figures in haiti government are just as corrupt as those everywhere else and that removing their corrupt hold wouldn’t be a bad thing

The guy is a former member of a govt kill squad who got expelled for excessive violence and brutality. That should tell you something about him. There are worse things than corruption in govt.

[-] thomas@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago

Basically all i kno about haiti is: only country to successfully throw off colonizers

Not exactly. Other countries have done that (the US for example). What sets Haiti apart is that they are the first and only successful slave revolt. Slaves gained their freedom through revolt, which terrified every nations that used slaves (basically every Western powers and their colonies at the time).

[-] mmcintyre@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago

American revolution didn't successfully throw off colonizers. In any kind of way.

[-] otp@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 months ago

Other countries have done that (the US for example).

LMAO what??

The predominant demographic in the US is colonizer ancestry.

And there's the fact that it's called the US today, and not any name properly related to any of the indigenous peoples of the land.

this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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