‘Barbecue’ Feared gang boss leading an assault on government

Murals in the pauperised Haitian slums he rules liken him to the Argentinian guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

- TOM PHILLIPS

In interviews, he poses as a Godfearing 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, riflewielding 47-year-old mobster, into the international headlines - a place history suggests he enjoys.

Over the past five years the Haitian outlaw – who has emerged as the main spokesman for the gang uprising against the 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.

“I’m not a thief. I’m not involved in kidnapping. I’m not a rapist. I’m just carrying out a social fight,” Chérizier told the Associated Press last year while sat outside a bulletpocked house.