COMMENTARY The U.S. has indicted Haitian gang ruler Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier — but he and his Viv Ansanm confederation hold the cards in Port-au-Prince as long as they don't face real force.
This week’s U.S. indictment of Haiti’s Gang Godfather, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier — and the $5 million reward posted for his arrest — might feel like Ameriken resolve. But in reality, it just underscores what now looks like the unwelcome choice the Trump administration faces in Haiti:
Either sponsor a much larger international show of force against Chérizier and his murderous gang confederation, Viv Ansanm, which now rules the capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the rest of the country.
Or negotiate with them.
Otherwise, the world may need to resign itself to de facto gang governance in Haiti for the foreseeable future.
Problem is, both options may well be non-starters.
READ MORE: Like Trump, Haiti's gangs are determined to burn down Haitians' dignity
Sure, it’s painfully evident that a U.N.-created, U.S.-funded, Kenyan-led multinational security support mission, which was sent in to back up Haiti’s overwhelmed police last year, is no match for Chérizier’s ruthless, heavily armed forces.
But given the unpleasant history of past U.S. and international intervention in Haiti, there’s scant appetite in either Washington or Port-au-Prince for another full-blown, militarized U.N. peacekeeping force there. The last one, known as MINUSTAH, in place from 2004 to 2017, is unfortunately best remembered for causing a cholera outbreak that killed 10,000 Haitians.
And yet, without that scale of multinational muscle on the ground at this point, a U.S. grand jury charge and a $5 million bounty probably isn’t keeping Barbecue awake at night.
Chérizier claims his murderous crew is more social movement than sinister mafia — holding the kind of leverage Colombia's FARC guerrillas once did.
So let’s turn to the U.S.’s second unpalatable option: bless or broker talks between Viv Ansanm and Haiti’s interim government, the Transitional Presidential Council, installed last year to fill the void left by the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and to oversee new elections.
This isn’t a new notion. Earlier this year, several prominent Haitian political leaders broached the possibility of a seat at the elections planning table for Viv Ansanm — which means, with brutal irony, “Live Together.”
Terrorist designations
Chérizier claims his crew is more a social movement than a sinister mafia, even if it was responsible for 5,600 homicides last year and is on an even bloodier pace this year. He insists Viv Ansanm aspires to the sort of political party that guerrilla armies like Colombia’s FARC have morphed into.
Right now, Viv Ansanm holds the kind of leverage the FARC once had — power that last week emboldened Chérizier, a former cop, to warn that his troops are poised to march on the Council and take it over at gunpoint in order to guarantee they’re given a role in Haiti’s transition.
As I was told this week by one security consultant in Haiti, who asked to remain anonymous:
“At this point the Transitional Presidential Council is sort of staring at either dialogue with Viv Ansanm as a civil society phenomenon that claims to be fighting a political and economic elite that’s kept most of the Haitian population in abject poverty for decades — or watching him take control of the elections process by force while the Council members hole up in hotel rooms.
“I’m not excusing the gangs’ terrorism by any means,” the consultant said. “I’m just describing the realpolitik at play here.”
But the possible necessity of bargaining with Barbecue is the last thing the Trump administration wants to hear, after it designated Viv Ansanm and another Haitian gang, Gran Grif, as foreign terrorist organizations in May.
That’s likely a big reason the U.S. slapped an indictment on Chérizier this week on top of the terrorist stamp — to emphasize it doesn’t want to see legitimacy conferred on a gang lord.
Still, Colombia’s government eventually struck a peace deals with the FARC, and the country’s right-wing paramilitary armies, even though the U.S. had labeled them as terrorists, too. But all that came after the U.S. had bankrolled a $5 billion Colombian offensive against the FARC.
Back in Haiti, the U.S. indictment could give the Transitional Presidential Council some leverage if it does decide to haggle with Chérizier. As the consultant and other lawyers and security experts in Haiti suggested to me, the Council is urging the U.S. and the international community to keep that kind of pressure on Barbecue so it can hold a few cards as well.
Even so, the Council's hand is weak.
And so, in the absence of real international firepower in Haiti, is the Trump administration’s.
Barbecue knows that.
