Haitian gang leader and associate indicted in U.S.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A federal grand jury has indicted one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders and a US. citizen accused of conspiring with him to violate U.S. sanctions and fund gang activities in the troubled Caribbean country, the U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday.

- By DAnica Coto AND ASHRAF KHALIL

THE U.S. has a $5-million bounty on Haitian gang leader Jimmy Chérizier.

Jimmy Chérizier, best known as “Barbecue,” is a leader of a gang federation called Viv Ansanm that the US. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in May.

Chérizier lives in Haiti, and the U.S. is offering up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Chris Landberg, a senior U.S. State Department official, said Chérizier’s “reign of terror and mass violence against Haiti must end.”

But Jake Johnston, author of “Aid State” and international research director at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, questioned the government's reason for offering a bounty.

“This is a guy who is giving international media interviews regularly. I don’t think the issue is being able to find him,” Johnston said, adding that the indictment doesn’t represent a threat to Chérizier because he lives in Haiti. “It’s hard to see how it'll have much of an effect.”

A former policeman

Chérizier is a former elite police officer who was fired in December 2018 and was later accused of organizing large-scale massacres in the slums of Grand Ravine in 2017, in La Saline in 2018 and in Bel-Air in 2019. More than 100 people were killed in the massacres, which Chérizier has denied organizing.

“Haiti is a hot spot right now... there is incredible violence going on there,” U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro said Tuesday, calling the killings in La Saline “notorious because [Chérizier] both planned and participated” in the slaughter.