In interviews, he poses as a Godfearing Caribbean Robin Hood and celebrates freedom fighters 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 gang-led insurrection against Haiti's government has catapulted Chérizier, a riflewielding 47-year-old, into the international headlines - a place he seems to enjoy.
Over the past five years the Haitian - who has emerged as the main spokesperson for the gang uprising against the prime minister, Ariel Henry - has welcomed 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.
Last year, Chérizier said: "I'm not a thief. I'm not involved in kidnapping. I'm not a rapist. I'm just carrying out a social fight." In a 2022 interview with Vice, Chérizier called his ragtag army "a sociopolitical structure and force that is fighting on behalf of the vulnerable".
Experts say the truth about Chérizier - who is best known as Barbecue is far more complicated.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 11, 2024 من The Guardian.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 11, 2024 من The Guardian.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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