Haiti massacre suspect a hero in his neighbourhood

(7 Jun 2019) He's known as Barbecue, an ex-policeman suspected in the massacre of dozens of men, women and children in the Haitian capital.
But he is a hero in his neighbourhood, and followed by crowds of adoring residents who consider him their protector.
Authorities say men like Barbecue, whose real name is Jimmy Cherizier, are increasingly taking charge of areas across Haiti as public safety disintegrates and the government loses its grip on a country facing one of its most violent periods in recent history despite a 15-year UN peacekeeping operation there.
"The problem is that armed gangs have multiplied, it is a real problem," says Paul Eronce Villard, Haiti's attorney general, who estimates there are more than 50 gangs now operating in the country.
Among those gangs is Base Delmas 6, which local human rights groups say is led by Cherizier in Port-au-Prince's impoverished Lower Delmas neighbourhood.
Cherizier denies that, describing himself as a community leader who gives residents money when they're hungry, clears rubbish from the streets and protects the neighbourhood from rival gangs.
He's also a suspect in the country's worst massacre in years, accused by police and witnesses of helping to orchestrate the slaughter of at least 59 men, women and children in the nearby neighbourhood of La Saline last year.
But despite being named in a police report and in two local human rights groups' investigations of the killings, Cherizier, remains not only free, but the most powerful man in Lower Delmas.
A police badge tattooed on his right forearm and a 9 mm pistol in his waistband, the 42-year-old Cherizier sleeps during the day and spends nights scanning the streets for enemies.
He enforces a nightly curfew and has a small army of lookouts who bang on drums to alert residents that rival gangs are approaching.
On a recent Saturday, Cherizier ducked through purple and yellow sheets hung out to dry in narrow alleyways and sidestepped rusty wheelbarrows filled with sugarcane and women washing sheets and towels in buckets as the smell of marijuana and raw sewage filled the air.
He swigged from a small bottle of Barbancourt rum and later pointed at a wide canal that residents use as a toilet and a shuttered medical clinic, then noted the lack of schools.
This is where a weeklong massacre began last year on 13 November, when men with guns and machetes broke into homes, killing at least 21 people and raping several women.
The bodies of victims were then burned or cut into pieces and thrown to pigs and dogs.
Among the dead was a four-year-old girl shot in the head in her mother's arms, according to authorities.
An internal report by the Haitian police Bureau of Criminal Affairs obtained by The Associated Press recommends that authorities arrest Cherizier and 68 others on charges including murder and rape.
It is now being reviewed by a judge, but more than six months after the carnage none have been charged.
Cherizier is mentioned twice in the report: once by a woman accusing him and 13 others of fatally shooting her cousin and dragging his body into a swamp, and again by another woman who accused him of colluding with others to kill her son.
Cherizier denied the accusations and said his enemies are linking his name to the killings out of revenge, adding that he got his nickname Barbecue as a child because his mother was a street vendor who sold fried chicken, not because he is accused of setting people on fire.
Weeks after the massacre, police accused Cherizier of being away without leave and expelled him from the force.

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