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.
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