RS Reports
‘Every Man We Killed Is a Gangster’: On the Front Lines with Haiti’s Vigilantes
Government commissioner Jean Ernest Muscadin’s official duties are to prosecute crimes — but he’s been accused of summarily killing dozens of purported gang members himself
Photography by JASON MOTLAGH. Video by MARK OLTMANNS/BLACKBEARD FILMS
A beat-up truck with dark windows and no license plates pulls into the main market of Miragoâne, a hardworking coastal town in Haiti’s southern peninsula. The no-nonsense government commissioner, Jean Ernest Muscadin, steps out into the fierce August glare and shoulders his rifle for a patrol. Bald, clean-shaven, and muscled enough to fill the sleeves of his shirt, he walks with quick and purposeful strides, accompanied by his squad of enforcers — a mix of civilian henchmen and police officers in tactical gear and balaclavas. Word of Muscadin’s arrival ricochets through the warren of street stalls, and supporters rush out to greet him with a flood of raw emotion. Men clutch his hands and whisper praise in his ear. A woman kisses him on the cheek; others break into sudden fits of clapping and dancing. Several children trail behind him, wide-eyed. Young and old, they all exclaim the same thing: Papa cheri! Dear father! Our father is here!
With the Haitian state effectively collapsed, Muscadin has made a name for himself across the country and the diaspora for a zero-tolerance approach to crime fighting that has largely insulated the south from the gang terror emanating from the capital, Port-au-Prince. Although his official duties are to prosecute crimes — initiating legal proceedings, forwarding criminal complaints to a judge — the United Nations and Haitian human-rights investigators allege the 49-year-old commissioner has acted as judge, jury, and executioner, summarily killing dozens of purported gang members himself. And he’s doing so in plain sight: Social media channels are rife with videos of crowds gawking at Muscadin victims left roadside to send a message, their blood pooling on the ground. “The Great South will always be a graveyard for gangsters,” he’s fond of saying on camera.
Muscadin’s critics say his Dirty Harry-style tactics are degrading what’s left of the state, making him scarcely any different from the gangsters he’s hunting down. “He has begun to drift, and since the state doesn’t have the capacity to intervene to stop him, he’s entering a spiral,” says Himmler Rebu, a retired Haitian army officer. But in a climate of near-anarchy, the rogue commissioner’s harsh brand of justice has struck a deep chord among a population that is taking matters into its own hands out of desperation. In the lawless vacuum that followed the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, vigilantes have fought back alongside police in a widespread movement known as Bwa Kale (street slang in Haitian Creole for “erection”), slaughtering hundreds of suspected gang members across the country with machetes, rocks, gasoline, and matches.
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No place epitomized the spirit of anti-gang resistance more than the working-class neighborhood of Solino, in Port-au-Prince. Though it lacked a domineering Muscadin-like figure, the densely packed bowl of concrete and tin-roofed homes was home to a staunch brigade of vigilantes that guarded entry and exit points around the clock by the light of trash-can fires, allowing residents some peace of mind. Children walked to school unaccompanied. Kompa music played late into the night at street bars. And as the gangs overran other parts of the city, extending their reign of murder, rape, and extortion, the local soccer field became a sanctuary for the swelling ranks of internally displaced. “It was a beautiful neighborhood,” recalls Stephanie Luma, a lifelong resident. “If you came at any time of the day — 1, 2, 3 a.m. — you would feel at ease and find anything you needed to eat.”
The standoff began to shift in late 2023 after the two largest gang coalitions, the G9 and the G-Pep, ended their blood feud and formed an alliance called Viv Ansanm (“Live Together”) to oust the government. Early the next year, while then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry was out of the country, the alliance launched an offensive in Port-au-Prince that freed nearly half of the prison population, shut down the airport, and temporarily closed the port. Solino, a gateway to one of the city’s largest commercial corridors and other vital areas, became the gangs’ strategic focal point. Residents were increasingly struck by gunfire, including Luma’s husband, Kendy, a shoe vendor who was shot dead on his way home from work. Multiday sieges stoked fears of an imminent takeover, compelling her and her daughter to flee during the night. “In the morning, when we returned, they would start shooting again,” she says. “It went on like that until we were forced to flee for good.”
After the November 2024 killing of a much-loved police officer who was leading the neighborhood defense, the gangs invaded Solino. Although she escaped, Luma, then four months pregnant with her second child, says her home was torched along with scores of others. Flush with military-grade weapons trafficked from the U.S., Viv Ansanm has since consolidated its hold over 90 percent of the capital and pushed farther into rural areas, sparing nothing in its path. Nearly 5,000 people died in gang violence over a nine-month period ending in June, according to the U.N. Hospitals, schools, media offices, and cultural touchstones have come under attack, along with the U.S. Embassy compound. The airport receives few domestic flights, and the gangs control all of the main roads in and out of the capital, choking aid and commerce. A Haitian journalist colleague likens it to an “open-air prison.”
Luma now lives in a filthy makeshift camp, one of the more than 1.4 million Haitians uprooted by violence. The U.N. estimates another 5.7 million people — half the population — face acute food insecurity, in a spiraling humanitarian crisis that has been made worse by the Trump administration’s funding cuts to the World Food Program and shuttered USAID. Government food distributions in Luma’s camp are irregular at best, clean water in short supply. With gunfire raging almost every night, she sleeps “with one eye open,” unsure of where she’ll run to next. Normally, she would head to Kenscoff, in the mountains above the city, but the gangs are dug in there despite efforts of a Kenyan-led multinational police mission to dislodge them.
“We always say: ‘Our lives are in the hands of the gangs,’ because if we run and leave this place, we will have nowhere else to go.”
Meanwhile, Haiti’s nine-member transitional council is all but invisible. Tasked with holding elections for the first time since 2016, the unelected leadership has been plagued by infighting and scandal while outsourcing security operations to foreign mercenaries. Erik Prince, the American founder of Blackwater whose contractors committed a 2007 massacre of civilians in Iraq, confirmed in August that his new private-military company, Vectus Global, had signed a 10-year contract with the government to battle the gangs and restore tax collection on the borders. The company’s opaque operations, which began in March, have coincided with a surge of drone attacks targeting gangsters such as Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, the former police officer who fronts Viv Ansanm, designated by the U.S. as a foreign terrorist organization. (Vectus Global didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
An October U.N. report claims drone strikes killed 527 suspected gang members and 20 civilians from March to late September. But these figures are contested, and the civilian death toll is climbing — a pattern that risks inciting popular blowback in a land with a history of rising up against intervention. “This contract with foreign mercenaries proves the Haitian government is not serious about security,” says Abel Loreston, a lawyer protesting outside the prime minister’s residence. “Our people are in misery, and they want to maintain the status quo so they can stay in power to keep profiting and stealing.” Invoking the memory of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a revered leader of the revolution that evicted colonial France and ended slavery, he shouts, “No more foreigners on the soil of Haiti!”
Instead, Loreston favors a more homegrown resistance incarnated by Commissioner Muscadin — a cold-blooded agent of justice whose ends justify the means. “Even the Bible says those who kill with swords should be killed by swords,” Loreston says. “Most Haitians back Muscadin since he lives among them and knows their pain. If there were no Muscadin, the south would be finished. And if he were in Port-au-Prince, things would be very different. Gangsters would be afraid to step outside because they know that Muscadin doesn’t play around.”
‘If He Is a Gangster, He’s Dead’
Early on a weekday morning, Muscadin and his crew are running a snap checkpoint on Highway 2, the sorry excuse for a road that connects his Nippes department territory to the capital. Two days before, acting on a tip, he intercepted a shipment of police SWAT uniforms and body armor shipped by would-be gang infiltrators, and he’s heard that more contraband is inbound. No motorists are immune to the commissioner’s scrutiny. Not the tap-tap drivers he recognizes, or a pallet of caskets, nor a U.N. aid truck bearing a load of rice and palm oil. Muscadin orders the driver to open the rear door for a spot check. His right index finger invariably points straight above the trigger of his rifle, disciplined yet poised to fire.
A few minutes later, he flags down a pickup full of passengers. An elderly man from New York visiting family in the south recognizes the commissioner and blurts out “Muscadin!,” starstruck. Muscadin shakes his hand and then grills a young traveler with dreadlocks and shifty eyes. He speaks in a stern and fluent baritone, leaning closer as the subject mumbles vague answers that elicit more forceful questions from the commissioner. He scans the man’s ID card one more time, registering the details, and waves him on.
“We always say our lives are in the hands of the gangs, because we have nowhere else to go.”
“If he’s not a gangster, we send him home. But if he is a gangster, he’s dead,” Muscadin tells me later. “It must be an eye for an eye. You have to strike them proportionally to their action, at the same level they attack the population. Someone who has a big gun in his hands, who is killing people, who is kidnapping people — if he finds me, he will kill me. Any of my guards who finds him will kill him; they will spit on his body, spit on his face. And me, if I find him, what should I do with him? Do you think I can just arrest them? Never.”
For every 100 people he intercepts, Muscadin reckons just one or two of them are gangsters. He says dreadlocks and tattoos are often telltale signs, but they’re not enough. “Here we must have proof, as I’m a man of the law.” Muscadin searches for incriminating phone messages and videos, and cross-checks a suspect’s alibi with people living in their local community, looking for discrepancies. Additional intelligence is gleaned from a vast network of informants that he’s cultivated around the south. “Every single man who [we have] killed in the Nippes is a gangster; not one innocent has died,” he insists. “If a single innocent person was killed, the population would rally against us.”
Muscadin hails from the southern city of Les Cayes. His father farmed sweet potato and manioc, which his mother bore to market on her head. As a boy he “always dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest,” and still would, he says, if Haiti ever finds peace. He studied law in Port-au-Prince and served in the prosecutor’s office of another district until his 2019 appointment as commissioner of Miragoâne, a troubled city of 90,000 in thrall to a local gangster. “President Moïse told me the gangsters and killers — either they die or run away,” Muscadin says. “And he gave us the means and the strategies to establish security.” Moïse, a onetime banana exporter, was assassinated in 2021 in his bedroom by a hit squad of Colombian mercenaries, plunging the country into chaos. (Among those charged in the case are a former Haitian Justice Department official, a former police chief, the acting prime minister, and the head of security for the national palace.)
Along with avenging the president’s death, Muscadin’s chief motivation is combating the gang menace that permeates life in the capital and is spreading outward. He cites how people are forced to sell their belongings to pay kidnapping ransoms; and women are raped and tortured by gangsters who melt plastic bags on their skin. “These things,” he says, “have made me revolt as a human being.” He counts Alexander the Great, Stalin, and George W. Bush as influences — the latter for asserting he’d go to war against Iraq with or without U.N. support. Likewise, Muscadin says, “When I make a decision, I act on it,” in spite of the risks and persistent calls for him to resign or be fired — something he’s convinced would have already happened if officials didn’t fear the public’s wrath. Indeed, after Haiti’s justice ministry wrote Muscadin a December 2023 letter accusing him of “disregard for the law” and flouting his jurisdiction, one former ministry official noted that “even a simple letter of reprimand [against Muscadin] was seen as an act of courage on the part of the minister.” (On a separate occasion when he faced public criticism, thousands demonstrated on his behalf in the streets, saying, “If Muscadin weren’t here, we would all be dead.”)
Muscadin still collects a small government paycheck each month. But without his patron Moïse, he depends on the largesse of southern businesspeople and supporters in the diaspora who track his exploits on friendly social media and YouTube accounts run by local journalists. “Ninety-five percent of government commissioners are thieves who steal land and property and free prisoners for money, but Muscadin can’t be bought — he is a self-made man,” says Theriel Thelus, a New York-based Haitian media personality whose anti-gang diatribes have stoked the Bwa Kale vigilante movement and support for Muscadin. In 2023, Thelus led a successful GoFundMe campaign that raised tens of thousands of dollars to purchase an armored vehicle for the commissioner. Muscadin says that, save for a church, “there’s nowhere I can’t go in the [south],” claiming that top-level justice ministry officials have granted him the authority to operate across jurisdictions despite public censure from the ministry. (The Ministry of Justice and Public Security did not respond to requests for comment.)
People living in the region concede that Muscadin’s scorched-earth policy has been a mixed blessing to the economy. Because the highway connecting the southern peninsula to the capital is now blocked by police, businesspeople pay upward of $3,000 per container to ship cargo by boat a mere 20 miles from Port-au-Prince to Léogâne in the south, a hefty toll that gets passed on to consumers. A bag of cement that sells for $8 elsewhere in the country might go for double the price, and staples like rice and wheat flour have risen by as much as 30 percent. Still, the gang extortion that is an inescapable fact of life in the capital is almost nonexistent in the south. Merchants in Miragoâne count their money openly and operate long after dark.
“If Muscadin were not here, people would not be able to walk,” says Dieuseul Saint-Jean, a fuel-truck driver parked next to a billboard erected by supporters of a rifle-bearing Muscadin that presides over the central junction. “Fortunately, when he captures a gangster, he does not send them somewhere to think; he sends them to a place they can never come back from.” Cafe owner Choulette Jean calls Muscadin her “second god,” and credits him for an influx of business as more and more people decamp from Port-au-Prince for security. “Before we could not sleep,” she says. “Now, Miragoâne is paradise.”
“It’s not a good image for a government official, nor the country. [Muscadin] is above the law.”
At a nearby cellphone-repair stand, 31-year-old Jean Urie Nathan says he recently left the capital to live with his mother’s family after witnessing a spate of killings. In the stalls next to him, young men who might elsewhere slide into gang life operate a sewing machine and a snack bar. In a country where more than half the population lives on roughly $2 a day, Nathan admits, criminal temptations abound. But in Muscadin’s domain, he and his peers exercise self-restraint, calmly settling any disputes that arise to avoid trouble with “the father.” “Here I only hear the birds singing. And if I hear a gunshot, at least I know it’s a police officer who is doing the shooting,” he says. “Port-au-Prince is like a different planet.”
Life Under Gang Rule
Just 20 miles away from Muscadin’s territory, in Port-au-Prince, the airport is still closed to commercial U.S. flights after they were fired upon by the gangs. The only practical way to reach the capital is an unreliable charter flight to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. From there, U.N. humanitarian helicopters shuttle passengers to Pétion-Ville, a residential suburb where international aid agencies still have a foothold. Having missed my Friday connection due to delays, I opt to run the gauntlet on a public bus down National Highway 1. Erik Prince has reportedly said that being able to drive from Cap-Haïtien to Port-au-Prince without being waylaid by gangsters would be “one key measure for success” of his company’s operations, predicting roads would be taken back within a year.
The 130-mile trip is uneventful until we pass Saint-Marc, two hours from the capital. Armored police vehicles peppered with bullet holes rumble past, and it’s not long before we’re stopped. A vigilante with rum on his breath and a revolver sagging from his torn jean shorts calls everyone off the bus for inspection. Farther along, tree-trunk chicanes and tire barricades are manned by pistol-wielding teens. A parting graffiti message, “The gangs must be exterminated,” is tagged on a wall as we near the front line in Arcahaie. (Three weeks later, Viv Ansanm carried out a retaliatory massacre in the area that left at least 42 people dead.) Our passage into gangland is signaled by portraits of Chucky, Tupac, and the Mask. Soldiers reposted from the Village de Dieu slum lounge in the shade with assault rifles. They exchange salutes with our driver, who’s never made to stop. His company bosses have paid their tax.
Since taking over the capital, the gangs have blocked off key roads to dictate the flow of traffic and thwart police incursions. According to Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst at the International Crisis Group, tactics include creating camouflaged ditches that trap armored vehicles so they can be ambushed by gang members with molotov cocktails, and posting snipers at strategic points. Networks of lookouts and informants, many of them children, allow them to keep 24-hour watch over the streets; some gangs even operate surveillance drones to monitor their territorial borders and maintain aerial visibility during offensive operations. Uncontested authority over much of the capital and critical roadways lets them “extract revenue from all economic activity in the areas they control,” Da Rin says, enabling them “to grow their ranks and arsenals, and maintain tight control over their strongholds and any new territory they seize.”
Reaching Solino the next day to meet with Vag, the shot-caller for Viv Ansanm in the area, entails changing vehicles and following a moto guide on a roundabout route through the waterfront industrial zone. Reefs of trash have swollen in the absence of city services. Delmas road, the usually bustling commercial artery that runs east from the port, is deserted. We detour through a maze of dank alleyways to the rendezvous point. A late-model Land Cruiser pulls up, and we slalom uphill past the charred husks of vehicles to the ruins of Solino.
Vag steps out with a pink ski mask and walkie-talkie and leads me on a shotgun tour of the neighborhood. His rail-thin gang dons looted wigs, scuba masks, and fake gold jewelry. The last time I was in Solino, in May 2023, I stayed out past midnight with a local defense group patrolling this same area in a haze of fire smoke. Now it’s hardly recognizable. Block by block, homes are a mosh of calved floors and blown-out walls — the kind of wholesale destruction associated with bombs and artillery, not small-arms fire. The plastic casings of electrical wire lay about like dead serpents, stripped of their copper insides. Gaping living rooms are strewn with ash-covered belongings: undergarments, teddy bears, Economics for Dummies, ID cards left behind. The dead quiet is interrupted only by the screech of sheet metal dragged away by scavengers on motorbikes.
Kamikaze drones have become a regular presence in the skies above. Though none have been spotted in a few hours, we move through the wreckage at a fast clip, surging across streets exposed to police snipers. At a church that serves as the gang’s lookout post, Vag points his rifle at their position a few hundred yards away in the Christ-Roi neighborhood and bangs off several rounds. A barrage of return fire cracks into the wall, and Vag responds in kind. A message painted outside promises “Jesus will be back.”
Vag retreats to lower ground and sparks a blunt to calm his nerves. Originally from Bel Air, a downtown slum with a reputation for political resistance, he says he dropped out of school and fell in with a kidnapper named Kempes Sanon, a G-Pep member who was then battling Chérizier’s G9 coalition. Getting a gun in his hands was a means to strike back against elites who have long profited at the expense of the underclass, he says. “We are hungry, and we are jobless; we’re all in misery.” (On two occasions, his soldiers make furtive, hand-to-mouth gestures at me seeking money for food.) The rich “steal blindly without caring about anything — that’s why there’s so much insecurity now,” he goes on. “They gave us weapons and ammunition to have control over us, but they’ve come to regret it.”
“If the U.S. promises $5 million to capture me, it’s clear I disturb the system it has created.”
When I ask about the devastation in Solino, Vag claims Viv Ansanm had no choice but to smash through to secure freedom of movement across the city. Seizing Solino better positioned the gangs to advance on the rest of the Delmas corridor, the prime minister’s offices, and the transitional council. “The private sector was an accomplice — they create these situations so they can earn money,” he adds, alluding to a cynical subplot. Unsurprisingly, given the anarchy and violence, conspiracy theories swirl everywhere in Haiti. Each side posits the most sinister of plots without much evidence other than horror. People search for explanations and villains to make sense of societal collapse. (Without offering proof, a former government security official later tells me he believes the gangs were manipulated by developers to raze Solino as part of a “city reorganization project,” but ultimately lost control.)
Vag likewise asserts the highway between Port-au-Prince and the southern peninsula was sealed off by a southern businessman in league with corrupt officials, not Viv Ansanm. Instead of paying transit fees to the gangs on the southwestern edge of the capital, everyone is now obliged to ship their southbound cargo on boats at a massive markup. “They are making a fortune using the sea,” Vag says. “Do you understand?”
Vag alleges that Muscadin is one of the officials enforcing this monopoly. “The [business elites] realized they can’t use us anymore, so they chose a government official, who forgets he’s an official, and they pay him to block the south,” he says. “A man whose mandate is to protect and serve is not allowed to kill for nothing. Muscadin is no longer [acting like] a government official — he’s a gangster like us. It’s a battle between gangsters.”
The Commissioner at Work
Seated at his desk on the lower level of Miragoâne’s Palace of Justice on a Thursday morning, Muscadin is in the eye of a legal storm. Opposing lawyers furiously plead their cases on behalf of family members locked in a dispute over an inherited piece of land. In a justice system riddled with graft and inefficiency, the commissioner understands that people want results over procedure, settling disputes in a matter of minutes. Flanked by two armed bodyguards, he takes it all in, sweat soaking through his shirt, until he’s heard enough and smashes a silver bell for silence: The defendant who sold his parcel of land without permission must get his money back to reimburse his relatives. “If I hear you make one more threat,” Muscadin warns, “I’ll come for you.” No one dares challenge the verdict. The attorneys shuffle papers for the next case, which involves stolen laundry, in a litigation smackdown that will last most of the day. Outside, more than 30 people wait in line, fanning themselves against the heat.
“Muscadin is a gangster like us,” says gang leader Vag. “It is a battle between gangsters.”
“When the population has a misunderstanding among them, they come to see the commissioner, because they believe in the justice given here,” says veteran lawyer Bleus Claude, noting that people travel from other jurisdictions for Muscadin’s judgment. “He inspires confidence because he is not corrupted and he doesn’t ask people for money to give them justice.”
If a case is more complex, he’ll refer it to an investigative committee. But when he issues a verdict, it is decisive and accepted by all parties. “If you’re right, he tells you you’re right, and if you’re wrong, he tells you you’re wrong — that’s why people trust him,” Claude says. “In Port-au-Prince, justice is for sale.”
A quote is posted behind Muscadin’s desk: The government commissioner is a military man in plain clothes. Though he’ll typically hear a few dozen cases each week, he says he doesn’t feel comfortable in the office, preferring to hunt down gangsters in the streets. “Fighting every day, that’s what we like to do,” he says. “We live like soldiers.” Divorced with two children, Muscadin rarely takes a day off, sleeps in three-hour stretches, and swears he’ll never be found drinking in the street or having affairs with people’s wives. Canvassing the south nonstop in his hearse-like truck, he boasts he has the guns and muscle to “take out any gangster, at any time. And we do it with love — not only for our country. It’s a pleasure for me to attack gangsters.”
Muscadin’s critics counter that his zeal has run amok. A 2022 U.S. State Department report on human rights cites a video that began circulating in May of that year in which Muscadin walks up to an alleged gang member from Village de Dieu named Elvain Saint-Jacques and tells him to “say his last words to his parents” before shooting him at point-blank range. That same year, he was also accused of murdering a clerk from Nippes. When a human-rights advocate published an open letter denouncing the extrajudicial killings, another video clip made the rounds on social media where Muscadin threatened to arrest her.
“He’s a bad guy,” says Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH). The organization has documented at least 38 extrajudicial killings attributed to Muscadin, though Espérance says the true count is higher. (According to the U.N., Muscadin executed 27 people with “complete impunity” over a three-month period early last year.)
“He is not protecting people’s lives; he is making them afraid,” Espérance adds. “Zero tolerance doesn’t mean you can arrest someone and kill them without trial.”
I speak with nearly a dozen people living in the south who insist their relatives were non-gang members executed by Muscadin. The only one willing to go on the record, a soft-spoken 27-year-old painter named Jonathan Maurice, shared his story despite the risks of living in Muscadin’s hometown of Les Cayes. Jonathan says he initially “appreciated” how Muscadin all but eradicated gang crime in the city, even if he was disturbed by the commissioner’s alleged habit of summoning local journalists to execution scenes.
“It’s not a good image for a government official, nor the country,” he says. “[Muscadin] is above the law.”
On a Sunday morning in May, Jonathan received a call alerting him that his uncle, Durancy Maurice, a moto-taxi driver, had been picked up by Muscadin on a gang dragnet. Jonathan drove around frantically in search of the commissioner’s familiar truck. He managed to track it down and shadow the vehicle at a distance until it came to a stop near a bridge. Muscadin hauled his uncle out of the back and put him on his knees. Seeing Jonathan approach on foot, Muscadin ordered him to come and kneel opposite his uncle. As Durancy begged for his life, Jonathan says, Muscadin shot his uncle in the back of the head. The bullet’s path was diverted as it passed through his uncle’s skull, sparking the pavement next to him. “[My uncle] saved my life,” Jonathan tells me, breaking into sobs.
Muscadin’s men shot several more rounds into his uncle’s body. Jonathan told the commissioner to shoot him, as well. He says Muscadin put his foot on his head, telling him he would finish him off if witnesses were not present. Then Muscadin’s men started to bludgeon him in the ribs with their rifle butts. Medical X-rays show four were broken on the right side.
Jonathan says he reached out to 13 local journalists to share his story. The only one who posted a video calling his uncle’s killing into question quickly took it down for fear of retribution. When Jonathan got a hold of a judge to file a case, the judge told him Muscadin had threatened him personally, so he could not pursue the matter. Today, Jonathan has no expectation of justice, but says it’s his duty, come what may, to clear the name of his uncle, an honest, law-abiding man who left behind a wife and two children: “Imagine I am a victim and I air my complaint — I will be victimized again. There is no justice in Haiti.”
“The people of solino will feel much more comfortable at home in their crushed homes than in shelters.”
When I confront Muscadin about the Maurice killing, he betrays a fleeting look of surprise and disgust. “Other motorcycle drivers informed against him,” he snaps back. “His family members are just paid to lobby against me.” The RNDDH, he continues, are “a group of slaves” used by rapacious elites and foreign powers that fear his growing popularity and want to control Haiti’s politics by spreading misinformation. “They don’t know the reality on the ground. If they think those baseless reports can stop us, I will attack the gangs even harder.”
In Muscadin’s view, the weak state has capitulated to the gangs out of fear and greed. “The insecurity is good for them; it enables them to stay in power longer [without elections].” In the same way he claims he’s capable of eliminating any gangster, anywhere in the south, Muscadin says specialized police units in Port-au-Prince could take out Viv Ansanm leaders like Chérizier “tomorrow” if they were given the order and robust support. “These criminals are only still alive because the state is afraid of them.”
Haiti’s Most Wanted Man
In late September, the U.N. Security Council finally answered the transitional council’s pleas for a larger international mission to combat the gangs. The so-called gang suppression force will deploy up to 5,550 foreign personnel with a more aggressive mandate to pursue and arrest gang members. The U.S., for its part, has slapped sanctions on a host of Haitian businessmen and former politicians for financing the gangs, and intercepted thousands of American-made weapons bound for Haiti, while ramping up the pressure on Chérizier. In announcing a $5 million bounty for information leading to his arrest, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro cited “heinous human-rights abuses,” notably his alleged involvement in the 2018 La Saline massacre that killed 71 people. (He’s always denied the allegations.)
Meeting up with Haiti’s most wanted man in his Lower Delmas base has never been very difficult. The morning I turn up, Chérizier steps out half-naked in a towel and barks at his soldiers for loitering in the street. He’s put on weight since I last saw him in 2023, and his chin is flecked with gray. He reappears in a black tactical vest packed with bullet magazines, and we take a walk up to a vacant health clinic. It has a USAID plaque on the wall and large caged windows — the better to scan for kamikaze drones that have become a fixture over the neighborhood.
Chérizier says he survived two drone attacks in March, the same time Prince’s Vectus Group mercenaries started operating in Haiti. He dismisses reports that Johnson “Izo” Andre, the brash leader of the Viv Ansanm-allied 5 Segond gang, was seriously injured in a May strike, along with claims that hundreds of gang members were killed in a matter of months. “The local and international media are making propaganda for the government to put the idea in people’s heads that [Vectus Group] is doing a good job” so they can justify their contract, he says. “In all the blocks where they use drones against us, aren’t we still in the same places? In reality, the drones don’t kill gangs, they kill civilians. The regime is carrying out massacres in the ghettos.” (According to rights groups, a Sept. 23 drone attack against a gang leader at a birthday party in the Cité Soleil slum left 13 civilians dead. Eight were children.) “Our objective is to wipe out this current racist system of apartheid and destroy this political class because it is these corrupt politicians, in complicity with the corrupt oligarchs, that brought us to this critical situation we are in today.”
Despite the fact that President Moïse was killed by mercenaries, Chérizier notes the “nine thieves” of the transitional council have again contracted foreign mercenaries to extend their time in power without accountability or oversight. “The poor will get poorer, and they will get richer.” As soon as the council is overthrown, Chérizier pledges, Viv Ansanm will “cancel all the bad contracts” and then “create some sort of stability to hold an election.”
Chérizier’s revolutionary rhetoric has only amplified with time. Neighborhood walls bear his likeness as Che Guevara, as does his custom-made cellphone case. But for all of the social-justice messaging, some experts contend that Viv Ansanm’s ulterior motive is more self-serving.
“What they really want is to ensure that whoever is in charge agrees to open negotiations and offers them amnesty for their crimes,” says Crisis Group’s Da Rin. “To bring down the government without being dismissed, both in Haiti and internationally, as a criminal takeover of the state, Viv Ansanm needs some form of popular support to strengthen its image as an insurgent movement instead of a coalition of criminals seeking to erase their wrongdoing.”
When I bring up the destruction of Solino, Chérizier shows visible remorse. At one point, prior to forming Viv Ansanm, he’d backed vigilantes defending the area against his former G-Pep rivals. He says it’s “a long story” involving “bad blood” with a small group of people that ended up impacting the entire neighborhood. (A Haitian journalist later tells me that a group of police officers living in Solino had accepted a bounty to kill Chérizier, a betrayal that further stoked the gangs’ appetite for vengeance when they finally overran the area.) “The local people couldn’t understand what we were fighting for, so they decided to face us in battle,” Chérizier says. Now, in damage-control mode, he’s working on a plan that would enable former Solino residents to return home — part of a broader strategy to win back trust and “become one with the population,” he says. “The people of Solino will feel much more comfortable at home in their crushed houses than living in temporary shelters.”
Chérizier seems untroubled by the U.S. bounty and the coming deployment of a beefed-up military force. “If the U.S. government can promise $5 million to capture me, it’s clear that I disturb the system it has created in Haiti,” he says, calling the U.S. “an accessory” to Haiti’s misery. In its August indictment of Chérizier, the U.S. named his childhood friend Bazile Richardson, a Haitian American trucker living in North Carolina, as a co-conspirator for sending a series of money transfers to the gang leader that amounted to less than $40,000 (one was for $25 to top up his phone plan). Chérizier calls the charges absurd given that a single AK-47 assault rifle costs more than $10,000 in Haiti, adding that he has more than 100 of them. (Richardson has pleaded not guilty.)
“If the FBI wants to know who used to finance me,” Chérizier says, “they should talk to Reginald Boulos,” a Haitian oligarch and former presidential candidate accused of financing gangs who is currently in immigration detention in Florida. (A source close to the Boulos family calls the allegation “categorically false.”) “They must also arrest Claude Joseph,” the former acting prime minister indicted for the assassination of Moïse. “They have to put me face to face with Youri Latortue,” a former senator sanctioned by U.S. authorities for trafficking drugs. (Joseph and Latortue didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Chérizier maintains he’s never committed crimes against American citizens or sent drugs north, and is ready to negotiate with U.S. authorities so long as there “are no lies told.” Otherwise, he’s “ready to fight to the death.”
As for Muscadin, Chérizier says he has no connection to him and is not worried by his strength in the south: “He kills people without evidence, but Muscadin is not an obstacle to us. He has never confronted a strong armed group like Viv Ansanm before. We don’t fear him.”
The Return to Solino
A couple of hours after my sit-down with Chérizier, a surreal spectacle likely stage-managed by the gang leader plays out in the heart of the capital. More than 500 displaced Solino residents gather under the overpass of the Carrefour Aéroport, one of the city’s major intersections, a short walk from their homes. Almost a year after the gangs purged them in a hail of fire and bullets, they’ve been told they can return. Suddenly, a throng of residents from Chérizier’s Lower Delmas base, a rival territory, marches in waving flags and tree branches, and the Solino side erupts in cheers. The groups combust into a carnivalesque frenzy of dancing and call-and-response song: “We must all become one! We are the same blood!” On any other day, anyone caught out in either neighborhood might have been lynched. In this moment, Solino’s outcasts celebrate a possible homecoming alongside former enemies sent to reassure them they would be safe to enter.
The crowd advances up the hill toward Solino, past bullet-strafed storefronts tagged with Roi Babé (“King Barbecue”) and over furniture barricades, and the euphoria starts to fade. A human skull staked to the ground marks the edge of gang territory. Viv Ansanm soldiers hang back in the shadows of gutted buildings, masked up and weapons down. Rony Nazaire, a 43-year-old father of seven, says he saw his block destroyed on a YouTube video but would rather pitch a tent on his own concrete block instead of “sleeping like pigs” in a camp. On seeing his burnt shell of a home in person for the first time in more than 10 months, though, he stands in silence for a minute, stricken by the visceral reality. “There is nothing left. What can we rebuild from this?”
“It’s not that the bandits are braver. It’s that the state has totally abandoned the field.”
I descend back to the now-vacant crossroads with a group of journalists, and we run into a small convoy of Haitian police and Kenyan armored vehicles on patrol. A Kenyan turret gunner starts to rotate in our direction, and I wave my camera to preclude any trigger-happy behavior. After a confused look from the driver through a cracked plate-glass window, the convoy lumbers past us up the hill toward Solino. We’re hustling in the opposite direction through no-man’s-land, to the relative safety of middle Delmas, when gang fire kicks off a gun battle that echoes throughout the barren warscape.
Haitian authorities now project holding elections in August 2026, having deemed the previous Feb. 7 deadline “materially impossible.” But absent a dramatic surge in international support, the odds of delivering credible polls by then remain “vanishingly small,” says Robert Muggah, an expert on security and organized crime in Haiti. If a hasty ballot is attempted, he expects there will be targeted attacks on polling sites and election staff, kidnapping of local officials, and gang-enforced road enclosures to cut people off from voting. Though Haiti has pulled off elections in tough circumstances before, such as after the devastating 2010 earthquake, today the state is far weaker. Gangs are heavily armed, displacement is widespread, and hunger is more acute. “The most plausible outcome is a delayed election into 2027 and toward a negotiated extension or reconfiguration of the transitional authority,” Muggah adds, “punctuated by protests and sporadic gang offensives.”
It’s not yet clear when the surge of international forces will arrive, and many Haitians don’t think it will make any difference in the long run. “They’ll do some things and then they’ll leave, and the same problem will come back,” says Rebu, the retired army colonel. He cites the 2004-17 U.N. intervention known as MINUSTAH, which had some initial success in taming the gangs and building up the national police force, before a deadly cholera outbreak and reports of widespread rights abuses incited a popular backlash. “We had no troops to replace MINUSTAH, so there was no successful transition to stabilize the situation.”
The deployment of private military companies is similarly destined to be ill-fated because “they are in it for the money — they are not coming to die,” Rebu asserts. “They will play cat and mouse as long as they can because the longer the problem lasts, the longer they can stay and profit. It’s a commercial and political transaction they’ve made, but it will not produce results.” In teeming slums, kamikaze drone attacks kill far more civilians than high-value targets. “If you disorganize the enemy and don’t have ground troops to exploit that action, then you just kill people, plain and simple.” The U.N. recently flagged the government’s use of drones as “likely unlawful” under international human-rights law.
With police outgunned by weapons of war, and lacking actionable information, Rebu wants to rehabilitate the fledgling Haitian army to take back the capital’s streets and porous borders that allow guns, drugs, and bad actors to move freely. Now, he says, “anyone can come in and do anything.” The yearslong project would require building better intelligence networks, and could benefit more immediately from foreign technical assistance. At the same time, the government needs to overhaul a broken justice system so that it’s capable of prosecuting criminals, while developing social programs to demobilize gang members. “If you build a house and you don’t put doors and windows in, you shouldn’t be surprised that a thief comes to visit,” he says. “It’s not that the bandits are braver. It’s that the state has totally abandoned the field.”
This void accounts for the extraordinary popularity of Commissioner Muscadin. “Precisely because of the absence of the state, the population supports his actions even though they’re crimes,” Rebu explains. “He ends up believing he’s doing good, even though he knows very well he’s acting outside the law. It’s the vacuum of power that makes people like him into heroes.”
‘Long Live Muscadin!’
Muscadin! Muscadin! Long live Muscadin! Under a searing midday sun the following week, hundreds of Muscadin partisans block traffic on the Boulevard des Quatre Chemins, the main road through Les Cayes. They are convinced that the U.S., France, and Canada are part of a conspiracy to oust their beloved commissioner, and they won’t stand for it.
“We are with Muscadin to the end,” says Anthony Desir, a mechanic wearing a pro-Muscadin T-shirt. “The international community has been complaining about human rights, yet they’ve committed far greater crimes in the world. They can’t revoke our Muscadin.”
Another protester tells me that any media trying to smear the commissioner “will be put aside,” a less-than-subtle threat.
“We are with Muscadin to the end,” says a mechanic. “They can’t revoke our Muscadin.”
I’m soon bundled into a sweltering plywood radio studio off the street, where Muscadin is giving an interview to a roundtable of local journalists whose questions are laced with flattery. One asks about the U.N. report alleging Muscadin killed at least 27 people suspected of gang ties over a three-month period. The commissioner scoffs that “they know they are lying,” that the actual number is much higher. A second asks whether Muscadin would ever move to Port-au-Prince if summoned to take on the gangs. “[The government] would never entrust me with that jurisdiction because peace would return and the population would be free to cry out ‘Up or down with them,’” he says. “Trust me, if today they could drop a drone on my head, they would do it. My biggest fight is not with the gangsters with sandals, but with the gun smugglers and the bullet sellers — the guys in power who are insecurity’s father and mother.”
Nearing the end of the session, the host says that even if Muscadin does not run for president in the next election, his legion of admirers would write him into the ballot regardless. The commissioner deadpans that he’s not interested in politics that would interfere with his day-to-day actions on the street. “I don’t have any such plans. I am a commissioner of the government. I’m doing my job, and I’ll go farther than anyone can imagine.” To conclude, he offers listeners in Haiti and the diaspora some reassurance: “Haiti does not belong to the corrupt and to the gangsters. Remember that when it’s darkest, a new dawn is closer.”
Muscadin steps outside into the wild embrace of his supporters. Revved up by a Rara band of drums and tin trumpets, they strain against his bodyguards to touch the man who embodies the vengeance of a proud nation pushed to its breaking point — at once a symptom and tainted savior. The commissioner walks with them for a few minutes, amused by all the adulation. And then he’s off again. An informant has alerted him that a driver in the employ of a government official is alleged to have killed several people and was now hiding out in his city.
“There’s a problem,” he says, piling into his truck with his crew of gunmen. “I need to go check it out.”