Murals in the pauperised Haitian slums he rules liken him to the Argentinian guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
In interviews, he poses as a God-fearing Caribbean Robin Hood and celebrates freedom fighters and agitators including Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Malcolm X.
“I like Martin Luther King, too,” the Haitian gang boss Jimmy Chérizier told the New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson when they met last year. “But he didn’t like fighting with guns, and I fight with guns.”
