The situation in Haiti is spiraling out of control. Gangs have taken over in Port-au-Prince, terrorizing regular citizens on a daily basis. This isn’t the disorganized behavior of regular street gangs. The gangs have banded together under the leadership of one man named Jimmy Cherizier aka Barbecue.
Folklore says his nickname comes from the way he treated his victims; his friends say it is actually because his mum ran a fried chicken stall and he has had the nickname since he was a child.
He is the same gang boss leading a violent anti-government uprising that has seen two jailbreaks, violence, and mayhem on the streets over the last few days…
Barbecue is a former policeman, now gang boss who is the acknowledged mouthpiece for a coalition of gangs called the G9, which he describes as a group of armed young men and women with an ideology to change the lives of those who live in Haiti’s notorious slums.
Cherizier may portray himself as a people’s revolutionary, but kidnapping for ransom and violence against regular people has become routine in Port-au-Prince.
In this city, the most-shared online videos are often torture footage, recorded and posted by gangs to spread horror and hasten ransom payments for thousands of kidnapping victims. Last month, within hours of landing at the city’s Toussaint L’Ouverture airport, a CNN team began to receive forwarded messages from contacts sharing the latest cruel footage – a bound woman twisting away from flames as her kidnappers jeered.
The gangs are estimated to control about 80% of the city and yesterday the current government declared a state of emergency after a prison break involving more than 3,500 men.
Haiti’s government declared a state of emergency on Sunday after thousands of inmates apparently escaped from its largest prison during a surge of gang violence that has upended the Caribbean nation for months.
The government cited the “deterioration of security,” notably in the capital Port-au-Prince, and “increasingly violent criminal acts perpetrated by armed gangs,” including kidnappings and killings of citizens, violence against women and children and looting, according to a statement from Finance Minister Patrick Boivert, who is serving as acting prime minister.
It also cited the attacks by armed groups on Saturday against the country’s two largest prisons, one in Port-au-Prince and another in Croix des Bouquets, which led to the escape of “dangerous prisoners” and caused deaths and injuries among police and prison staff…
The Haitian Ministry of Communication said in a statement Sunday that police confronted “heavily armed criminals seeking at any cost to free people from custody” and were “not able to stop the criminals from freeing a large number of prisoners.” The violence left several inmates and prison staff injured, it said.
Cherizier is demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry. Henry wasn’t elected but took over in 2021 after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. An investigation into the assassination uncovered links between Henry and the people who carried it out. The chief suspect is a man named Joseph Felix Badio. Badio made two calls to Henry after the assassination, the first of which happened only two hours later. A judge who oversaw the investigation said he believed Henry helped plan the assassination.
Until recently, Judge Garry Orélien was the top judicial official in Haiti overseeing the case.
In a recording taken in the fall of 2021, when he was still presiding over the investigation, Orélien makes his views on Henry’s involvement very clear.
“Ariel (Henry) is connected and friends with the mastermind of the assassination. They planned it with him. Ariel is a prime suspect of Jovenel Moïse’s assassination, and he knows it,” Orélien said in the recording, obtained exclusively by CNN.
But Ariel Henry was never charged, in part because he used his position as Prime Minister to do everything he could to shut down the investigation including firing the chief prosecutor and the Justice Minister.
All of that to say, the idea that Ariel Henry doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister is widespread and the gangs may be on the right side of that political issue. But as mentioned above, what they have actually brought to Port-au-Prince isn’t justice for the likely coup leader but terrorism of regular people for profit. In January, one gang made news when it kidnapped a group of nuns.
Armed gunmen hijacked a bus in the capital on January 19, taking eight hostages, including the nuns from the order of the Sisters of Saint Anne…
The kidnapping prompted religious leaders to issue a letter criticizing the Haitian government for its lack of response to an increase in gang-related violence. Separately, Pope Francis on Sunday called for the nuns and other hostages to be released.
The United Nations estimates that the violence in the Caribbean nation has led to more than 4,700 killings and nearly 2,500 kidnappings in the past year. A U.N. report in October said the gangs run schools, clinics and foundations in place of an increasingly absent government, even as their criminal rackets help gang leaders amass funds and afford luxury homes with swimming pools in the hemisphere’s poorest country.
The nuns were innocent but no one else involved in this conflict can say the same. Unfortunately for regular people trying to survive, things are probably going to get worse in Haiti before they get better.
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