Barbecue, the nom de guerre given to Haitian revolutionary Jimmy Chérizier, is a perfect fit. He and his allies are making it hot for the country’s elite and their foreign collaborators, who regularly use the country’s police and rival gangs to destabilize and isolate the country’s poorest residents to ensure they can’t rise up and take control of their own destiny. Through years of door-to-door base-building and the formation of alliances between rival gangs, Barbecue has united large swaths of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince into the “Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies”, or FRG9. Barbecue regularly ends his political speeches with some advice for those who sit on top of the country’s highly unequal economic hierarchy: “Don’t drink moonshine! Sleep with one eye open!”
Tremendous effort has been put into preventing Barbecue’s rise. Any cursory Internet search using the terms “Barbecue Haiti” reveals a totalitarian effort by the foreign press to delegitimize Barbecue’s revolutionary call for armed struggle against the bourgeoisie. Instead these publications dismiss him as a mere “gang leader” (which, given the origin of the Black Panthers and numerous other left-resistance groups, would be unanimously viewed as a superlative in a world not turned upside-down by the logic of capitalism). Moreover, they fail to mention the program he is offering and in many cases already providing for the Port-au-Prince’s poorest residents; healthy food, shelter, and clean water for slum-dwellers; adequate healthcare and education; a fair share of the nation’s export economy; and a political structure in which they can shape their own destiny.
Numerous nonprofits, funded by and answering to wealthy foreign capitalists, have also generated reports that parrot the same stories about several massacres they claim were carried out by the FRG9. One need only dig into the claims for a few minutes to realize their falsity; many reports cite each other, the authors having done little to no original investigation of their own. The few reports that actually generated these stories often use guarded terms like “alleged” when referring to the massacres, or quote officials who have never stepped foot in the scenes where people were murdered.
No matter; most of the neighborhoods where FRG9 is said to have massacred residents have already eagerly joined FRG9 in their fight to more equitably distribute Haiti’s resources. Many residents have taken up arms, ensuring that the police and any foreign military hoping to claw back power will be up against a guerilla force that knows their neighborhood better than any foreigner ever could. Areas under FRG9 control are self-organized to keep streets clean, to rebuild homes destroyed by the police and opportunist gangs, and to develop a grassroots and revolutionary political and economic system. By 2021, FRG9 had amassed so many supporters that when Prime Minister Ariel Henry attempted to perform the annual wreath-laying ceremony at the memorial to slain Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, his motorcade was prevented from entering the memorial due to gunfire. Barbecue himself later carried out the ceremony, symbolically portraying himself as the leader of the nation, and as a modern reincarnation of the revolutionary spirit that led Haiti to become the site of the first successful slave revolution.
You can learn more about Barbecue’s rise to power, and the forces against him, in this excellent Youtube documentary series by Haiti Liberté: