Jimmy Chérizier says he is leading Haiti’s poor against corrupt government forces but experts point to a dark and violent past

Murals in the pauperized 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.”

The stunning gang-led insurrection against Haiti’s government has catapulted Chérizier, a raffish, rifle-wielding 47-year-old mobster, into the international headlines – a place history suggests he enjoys.