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.
Denne historien er fra March 15, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra March 15, 2024-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Power play The Solar Mamas who are lighting up Zanzibar
In a dimly lit corridor of a mudwalled house nestled among coconut trees, Sharifa Hussein stripped red and black cables, a screwdriver voltage tester balanced between her lips and rolls of cable lying by her feet.
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David Lynch 1946 -2025
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Mood music
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North Koreans' capture sheds new light on war
The news was sensational.
Fragile truce An agreement is in place-if it will hold matter is another
The hours-long delay in implementing the Gaza ceasefire agreement last Sunday was not a good omen for a deal that many fear could be doomed to failure as it moves through its challenging three phases.
Why did LA's wildfires explode out of control?
Acombustible combination of factors laid the groundwork for disaster as the city struggled with catastrophic blazes
