For months, Haitian warlord Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier has been in the habit of announcing on social media the next targets of his brutal foot soldiers.
Seemingly drunk on his own power in a shattered society where the rule of law and government institutions are notable only for their absence, the gang leader has issued death threats against everyone from the country’s interim government to international peacekeepers.
But telegraphing his next operational move in a public video this week proved disastrous for him and his Vivre Ensemble alliance of trigger-happy thugs, after it gave police and vigilantes a chance to prepare their fightback.
In the video, Cherizier said that his men would target any hotels in Petionville, an affluent suburb in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, hosting members of the transitional council, a panel charged with organising the country’s first elections in a decade. Describing them as “oligarchs”, he said the only way they could save themselves would be by stepping down.
A few hours later, in the small hours on Tuesday, two trucks carrying dozens of his heavily-armed men swung into Petionville, one of them parking across the main road into the suburb to block residents from fleeing.
Dawn revealed a scene of carnage. Yet it was the gangsters who had paid the heaviest price for their attempts to terrorise the suburb.
Their mutilated corpses littered the streets. Some had been decapitated. Others had had their feet hacked off. There was also a pile of smouldering bodies which neighbours had set alight. At least 28 Vivre Ensemble members are confirmed to have died.
Cherizier said that his men would target hotels in a Port-au-Prince suburb hosting members of an election panel – Giles Clarke/Getty Images Europe
Martine Villeneuve, country director for the charity Action Against Hunger, said shooting and shouting could be heard around Petionville from 2am to 11am as the vigilantes and police repulsed wave after wave of Vivre Ensemble attacks.
“The self-defence groups in the neighbourhoods were carrying out a manhunt for anyone associated with the gangs. Tuesday was a long night. It was very disturbing,” she told The Telegraph.
Vigilantes protecting their families from the gangs that target them with rape, kidnappings, murder and extortion, is not new in Haiti, where the police force is undermanned, riddled with corruption and outgunned by the gangsters.
The vigilante movement is known as Bwa Kale and has even inspired musical tributes with machine gun-like drum mixes. Typically, residents and local business owners club together to arm neighbourhood self-defence groups, meaning that Petionville’s self-appointed defenders may have been better equipped than those in poorer districts.
“The auto-defence groups are trying to protect their neighbourhoods. They put barricades in the street and control who enters and leaves,” said Ms Villeneuve. “They know who lives there, and which organisations are trying to help, but they stop anyone suspicious.”
High-stakes strategy
Yet fighting back against the gangs is a high-stakes strategy. One of the worst massacres since the current bout of bloodshed broke out in Haiti in February came in September in the small town of Pont-Sondé after locals dismantled a “toll booth” that the Gran Grif gang had placed on a nearby road. The gang responded by shooting and hacking to death around 70 people.
Meanwhile, in the institutional power vacuum currently engulfing Haiti, the Bwa Kale have sparked concerns about their own human rights abuses and the risk that they will devolve into yet more criminal gangs.
Tuesday’s gun battle in Petionville comes as the bloodshed in Haiti appears to be ramping up amid yet more political turbulence in the former French colony, founded in 1803 by African slaves.
Two weeks ago, the transitional council replaced Garry Conille, a US ally, as prime minister, prompting the latest wave of bloodletting.
Since then, flights into Port-au-Prince’s main airport have been suspended after a Spirit Airlines passenger jet flying in from Florida was shot at multiple times, injuring a stewardess.
Meanwhile, after 30 years of uninterrupted service, Doctors Without Borders this week suspended its operations in Haiti, saying the security situation had become untenable and blaming, among others, the Bwa Kale.
In a statement, the group accused police and vigilantes of having “executed” two patients, presumably injured gang members, being transported in one of its ambulances, the latest in a series of threats and attacks on its operations.
The gang violence comes amid a growing humanitarian ‘catastrophe’ in Haiti – Ralph Tedy Erol/Reuters
The group’s withdrawal intensifies a humanitarian situation that Ms Villeneuve describes as “catastrophic”. The violence has ground the economy to a halt, leaving crops unharvested and food unable to enter Port-au-Prince, with the port closed and the roads into the city controlled by the gangs.
Half of Haiti’s population of nearly 12 million now eat just one meal a day. Another 1.2 million are “on the brink of famine”, according to Ms Villeneuve, with just one meal every two or three days.
Yet Cherizier, a former elite police officer with political ambitions and a penchant for pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, appears undaunted, treating both ordinary Haitians and his own gang members as expendable.
Since the disastrous street battle in Petionville, he has been seen handing out school backpacks to children in Port-au-Prince as he attempts to bolster his image as a Robin Hood character defending the very communities he terrorises.
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