Criminal gangs for hire: Corrupt cops and the fight for votes in Haiti’s next elections

Earlier this month, a fired policeman wanted in the slaughter of dozens of men, women and children in one of Haiti’s most impoverished slums donned a three-piece light blue suit and red tie, sat in front of a rolling video camera, and announced a new alliance among nine gang leaders.

Congratulating the gang leaders on their “exemplary work,” Jimmy Chérizier, who is known by the alias Barbecue, said the G-9 and Family and Allies coalition was neither created for the “government nor to work for the opposition.”

“It’s a group of young men and women who have put their heads together,” said Chérizier, 43, who fashions himself as a community leader seeking to protect his Delmas 6 neighborhood and others from rival gang attacks. “We, in the ghetto, have never benefited from anything. Tell me, what professional school is there inside Wharf Jérémie? I want you to tell me what professional school is there inside TiBwa... What good hospital is there inside Cité Soleil? Inside Simon Pelé?”

To some, Chérizier’s public pronoucement of the neglect of some of Port-au-Prince’s poorest neighborhoods and their continued exploitation by multiple Haitian governments and those seeking office — “They utilize the ghetto every time they want to seize power,” he said at one point — is on point.

Yet for human rights observers, the new gang coalition is a worrying development in a country besieged by armed confrontations between rival gangs and some of the worst violence the country has seen in years despite a 15-year U.N. peacekeeping operation.

The absence of the state in Haiti’s slums has long allowed the commission of human rights violations, and a lot of the recent attacks have been linked to Chérizier, whose arrest warrant dates back to February 2019. The warrant was for his alleged involvement in the November 2018 La Saline massacre, where as many as 71 people were killed. Witnesses identified Chérizier, who was still a cop, along with two government officials as perpetrators of the attack.

He was again singled out, this time in a United Nation’s human rights report on an attack against the Bel Air neighborhood, a year later.

Despite it all, an emboldened Chérizier, a 14-year veteran of the Haitian police force before his December 2018 firing, continues to walk free.

“They say we are working for the PHTK [political party] and [President] Jovenel Moïse. It’s a lie,” he said in the video.

But even as he tries to present himself as a polished, well-spoken activist and not a bandit, he tells journalists in a second video: “The battle to change Haiti can only be fought by two people, the slums themselves and the armed gangs.”

And that thinking, say human rights observers, makes Chérizier a powerful protagonist in an unfolding drama involving desperate politicians, corrupt cops, sporadic armed attacks on opposition strongholds and Haiti’s upcoming but yet unscheduled elections.

Criminal gangs, already linked to kidnappings for ransoms, rapes and multiple massacres, are becoming guns for hire for Haiti’s political forces, two Port-au-Prince-based human rights organizations conclude in two separate reports issued this week.

Protected by politicians and specialized elements of the Haiti National Police, the gangs are terrorizing working-class and poor neighborhoods, extorting businesses and battling rivals for expanded territory as they repress dissent.

And it is all being done in collusion with the government, which is not only seeking to hold on to its tenuous grip on power but control the outcome of the next elections, the human rights organizations say.

“The government wants to have control over all of the gangs,” said Marie Yolène Gilles, the executive director of Fondasyon Je Klere, which issued its 15-page report on Monday. “Parallel to that, the power in place also wants to come up with another constitution. It wants to weaken the opposition so that it cannot use the popular neighborhoods like La Saline, Saint Jean Bosco to do its [anti-government] mobilizations. The government also wants to do elections with a new constitution in the coming days.”

And Moïse, Gilles said, wants to be able to make a public outing on Oct. 17 to the historic neighborhood of Pont-Rouge without the chorus of automatic gunfire that greeted him and his presidential entourage in 2018, and forced them to flee.

Located just north of Port-au-Prince, the four blocks that make up Pont-Rouge are where one of Haiti’s founding fathers, Jean Jacques Dessalines, was assassinated on Oct. 17, 1806, during an ambush. Last year, an embattled Moïse was forced to forgo the traditional visit to commemorate Dessalines’ death as a result of the 2018 incident and demonstrations triggered by growing anger over corruption, inflation and a fuel shortage.

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That political reality, said Gilles and Marie Rosy Auguste Ducena of the National Human Rights Defense Network/Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), has made Pont-Rouge ground zero in a battle to not only display a show of force on the part of Moïse and his supporters, but to control the elections.

Over several days last month, dozens of houses in Pont-Rouge and the nearby communities of Chancerelles, La Saline, Tokyo and Fort-Dimanche were set ablaze, while people were burned and shot to death, Fondasyon Je Klere and the National Human Rights Defense Network documented in their reports. The actual number of deaths varies from six, according to Fondasyon Je Klere, to at least 34, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, which listed the names of the victims, including three minors and six women.

“Beyond acts of terror, Pont-Rouge is at the heart of a horrifying electoral strategy that needs to be understood and denounced in order to avoid the worst,” Gilles wrote in her report.

Responding to the accusations against the government laid out in both reports, Haiti Minister of Justice and Public Security Lucmane Delile on Thursday denounced Fondasyon Je Klere and the National Human Rights Defense Network. He accused the human rights groups of being against the government and protecting bandits.

“Every time the government wants to do an operation against the gangs, they defend them and accuse us of carrying out a massacre,” Delile said at a press conference in Port-au-Prince. “Now they say it’s the government who is supporting them.”

In April, local and international human rights observers criticized Delile after he announced amid the COVID-19 pandemic that police were launching a raid to curb gang violence in Village de Dieu, a Port-au-Prince slum that has become a kidnappers’ lair. He gave those who “were not part of the gangs and crime” 72 hours to leave, saying that the government was “not responsible” for what happened afterward.

The day after Delile’s April 24 ultimatum, Chérizier said he and 19 police officers would “clean up” Village de Dieu.

The government, Delile said, “has no rapport” with either kidnappers, bandits or thugs. The state, he said, will continue to track gangs and do its job.

Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe offered a different reaction to the reports. He told the local daily Le Nouvelliste on Thursday, ”we are pleased with the publication” and he’s “looking for evidence to find out whether the police used armored vehicles to protect bandits,” as documented by the National Human Rights Defense Network.

Following last month’s attacks, victims did not turn to the government or even the police. Instead, they sought out the human rights defenders, which after listening, launched separate investigations.

“In all of the interviews we conducted with the victims, we asked them what do they think is behind these attacks against them. They all said, ‘The power in place wants to control the disenfranchised neighborhoods for politics and elections,” Ducena said. “It is effectively a matter of politics and elections that is unfolding here.

“In all of the neighborhoods where a gang has fallen, the winning gang has replaced the leadership and installed its own people,” she said. “In the month of May, for example, there were nine new gang leaders who were installed... and all are considered close to the government and Jimmy Chérizier.”

Both organizations outlined a series of sporadic attacks on the capital’s impoverished neighborhoods, dating back to 2018, that eventually led to last month’s five-day carnage that was first made public in a May 28 letter from U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., to the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Michele Sison, urging her not to let Haiti descend into chaos and violence.

“If the reports are verified, they represent the most recent incidents in an escalating series of violent attacks on residents of impoverished neighborhoods in Haiti that began about two years ago,” Waters said, referencing the La Saline massacre and citing Chérizier’s alleged involvement in the May attacks.

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In its report, the National Human Rights Defense Network said while the violence began in earnest on May 24, the attacks were plotted out the night before at “a preparatory meeting” between Chérizier and 13 armed gang leaders close to the government.

“This meeting was an opportunity for these leaders to organize simultaneous attacks against Pont-Rouge, Chancerelles and Nan Tokyo,” the 25-page report said, referring to two other communities.

On May 24 around 2 p.m., armed gangs led by two allies of Chérizier besieged the four blocks of Pont-Rouge while Chérizier headed for the districts of Nan Tokyo with his gang and Haitian National Police officers in tow.

That afternoon and all through the evening, as well as the following day, automatic gun fire was heard in the communities.

Then on May 26, at about 3 p.m. five armored vehicles of Haiti National Police took position at the entrance of the area called Underground in the neighborhood of Nan Brooklyn in Cité Soleil. Tear gas was launched in all directions, forcing the residents of the area to flee.

“Shortly after, automatic weapons were fired from all sides. Those who tried to flee were then shot or wounded with a knife, hit with stones and blocks. Many bodies were burned or thrown into the water,” the report said.

“Those who escaped the fury of armed gangs were able to take refuge in neighboring neighborhoods such as Cité Militaire and Simon Pelé,” the report said. “Others hid in the camp for people with reduced abilities and visual impairment... several others threw themselves into the sea.”

As residents fled, they saw burning bodies on piles and bandits continuing “to behead people while they were still alive.”

“It’s clear today that either the high command of the police is directly implicated in what is happening here or it has completely lost control of the management of police equipment,” Ducena said. “What’s important for us at [the National Human Rights Defense Network] is that it’s with taxpayers money the police has purchased this equipment, and police equipment cannot be used to attack people in the population. Whenever we’ve asked the police to go into these communities, they always tell us they cannot go because they do not have the means.”

The role of police officers in human rights abuses is a long standing problem in Haiti. During a recent meeting of the U.N. Security Council, members expressed alarm at not only the lack of judicial action in the La Saline massacre but that the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti had documented 470 cases of alleged human rights violations between Jan. 1 and May 31, and Haiti National Police officers are believed to be responsible for 93 of them.

The U.N.’s Haiti office report made no mention of the May attacks, although it mentioned clashes in mid-April among various gangs in the Martissant neighborhood, which resulted in the killing of eight residents and the injury of 11, while displacing at least 136 families. In another incident, on 18 April, three civilians were killed during territorial clashes between gangs in the La Saline neighborhood.

“Those events echoed similar emblematic incidents of the recent past, such as in Lilavois and Grand Ravine (2017), La Saline (2018) and Bel Air (2019), after which no new concrete judicial actions were taken in response to the human rights violations and abuses committed,” the U.N. said.

Gilles questions the commitment of the international community in what’s happening in Haiti, and her report is recommending the creation of an independent commission of inquiry with the support of the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“If we don’t wake up to reverse this macabre plan, I think it will be very difficult for Haiti because the country will not be able to sustain this type of terror and violence,” she said.

Ducena said the declarations by Chérizier clearly demonstrate “an acceleration of the consolidation of gangs in Haiti,” which would like for everyone to believe that they have come together to ensure security in their respective neighborhoods.

“The government cannot accept these gangs coming together and deputizing themselves so they can continue to do reprehensible things,” Ducena said. “For us there needs to be an end to this gang problem and the government needs to stop giving them weapons and ammunition. Haiti doesn’t produce weapons, we don’t make ammunition and the country is under an arms embargo. So what explains that these armed gangs are flooded with weapons and ammunition in the country?”