Haiti Child Soldiers: Barbecue, Gangs And A Growing Crisis

By Danny Shaw

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. April 1, 2026: A shaky video shot in the streets of Solino in October 2024 captures the reality unfolding in Haiti. In the clip, a contingent of young men and child soldiers wave guns in the air and chant triumphantly: “Take Solino! If you are not with Viv Ansanm, we will burn you all together.” It is a brief, jolting window into the growing power of the Viv Ansanm (Living Together) paramilitary coalition and the central role of children within its ranks.

Despite the insecurity and social crisis affecting the people of Haiti, many residents continue to struggle to carry on with their daily lives in Port-au-Prince. Haiti on March 31, 2026. Under difficult conditions, they demonstrate resilience and determination as they adapt their lives to the reality the country is facing. Citizens continue to go to work as police officers patrol around the streets. (Photo by Guerinault Louis/Anadolu via Getty Images)

As the group expands its control over the country, one glaring reality is that a significant portion of its armed members are under 18. Under the command of Jimmy Chérizier, known as “Barbecue,” and his former lieutenant, escaped kidnapper Kempès Sanon, Viv Ansanm deployed these armed youths to sack the sprawling neighborhoods of Solino. Their assault has displaced over 125,000 people across 24 different communities. “Viv Ansanm burned us out of our homes because we were one of the last bastions of peace and resistance left in Pòtoprens [Port-au-Prince],” said Ezayi Jules, a spokesperson for the community. “They reduced our neighborhoods to ashes. Now our families are homeless as Barbecue runs around everywhere talking about his “revolution.’”

Haiti’s Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier presents himself as a revolutionary and is seldom pictured without his rifle and spare clips of ammunition. (Photo by CLARENS SIFFROY/AFP via Getty Images)

Beginning in 2018, Viv Ansanm and its predecessor, the G-9 gang alliance, have targeted and invaded neighborhoods that had long been bulwarks of popular resistance agains the interests of big capital and foreign domination. The numbers speak for themselves. Armed groups murdered more than 5,600 civilians in 2024, and at least 4,026 in the first five months of 2025. The police are no better. The corrupt and fractured National Haitian Police (Police Nationale d’Haïti, PNH), aided by a contingent of U.S.-financed mercenaries, prey upon the same populations as Viv Ansanm. According to one UN study, the police were responsible for 64 percent of the violence in a three-month period between April and June of this year.

On September 30, the UN Security Council approved the deployment of a Gang Suppression Force to Haiti, replacing the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support Mission that had been in the country since June 2024. There are concerns that the latest mission will replicate the failures of the 2004 to 2018 UN Stabilization Mission, failing to address the root causes of the violence while targeting more ti solda (low-ranking soldiers) and civilians.

This dance of death is all these young “soldiers” have ever known. Traumatized and desensitized, they have been indoctrinated to believe they are fighting a formidable “enemy,”—one that often consists of peaceful communities like Solino, Kafou Fèy, or Nazon, neighborhoods that have long formed the social fabric of the capital.

UNICEF estimates that over half of the country’s gang members are children. Additionally, children represent half of the more than 1.3 million Haitians displaced by conflict, ensuring a constant reservoir of cannon fodder for a paramilitary army that has now rebranded itself as a political party.

In the most unequal society in the hemisphere, violence robs children of childhood and dehumanizes them to the point that they are capable of the most phantasmic acts. These children are the colonial boomerang of violence hurled back against their own communities and the society that failed to protect them.

From Revolt To Despair

On August 22, 2018, Haiti exploded into open rebellion with millions of Haitians taking to the streets. The impetus was the revelation that the corrupt Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) government had stolen an estimated $3.8 billion dollars from the PetroCaribbean fund set up by the Venezuelan government to provide subsidized oil and gas for the Haitian people. As protests rocked the country, Haiti became peyi lok (a country locked down), demanding the resignation of the corrupt kleptocracy and free elections.

Since this mass uprising, the oligarchs and their U.S. accomplices have armed and unleashed paramilitary gangs to crush the popular movement. In September 2023, the gangs confederated into one criminal alliance called “Viv Ansanm” led by Barbecue, a former police officer. The paramilitaries have since been waging war on local neighborhoods to make sure no one can oppose their reign of kidnapping, sexual violence, and the burning of oppressed communities. Professor Henry Boisrolen breaks down the class dynamics of the gang alliance and project: “The social decomposition caused by so many decades of foreign domination, exploitation, and occupation explain how we arrived at this place.”

Tens of thousands of children make up Viv Ansanm’s rank-and-file of because they have no other choice. Children do not go to school in the Haitian capital. By January of 2024, the violence had caused 900 schools to shut down in Pòtoprens, denying education to more than 200,000 children. From the cracked screen of his 2020 Motorola Stylus, Lucson Charles, a displaced elementary school teacher, explains just how dire the situation is: “Two hundred and twenty-seven schools in the Ouest department have a 0% success rate [in the latest baccalaureate exam]. Zero admissions. Zero prospects. Zero dreams realized.”

Charles himself, like so many teachers and professionals, is a victim of the orgy of violence. Last year, Viv Ansanm attacked his school. “They stole my HP computer, all of my belongings and burned my house, alleyway, and neighborhood down,” he recalled. “They left us with nothing. This prevents us from fighting back in any effective way.”

Stefan, another displaced teacher, explained that 90 percent of Haitian schools are created by the private sector and churches. The state has completely abandoned investing the national budget in the people, while NGOs throw some disjointed crumbs of charity into the ocean of manufactured want. Who can the population turn to if, as Charles says, “governing seems to boil down to looking the other way while the house collapses?”

Growing Up A Solda

Barbecue claims to be leading an armed revolution, despite a grisly track record of massacres against his own people. Understanding the role of his paramilitary coalition helps connect the dots between the massive influx of U.S. guns, drug running, and a social media cover-up campaign, where the warlords present themselves as revolutionaries fighting the oligarchs.

Barbecue is an enforcer, a hustler, and the top spokesperson of the gangs whose economic and political interests are diametrically opposed to any prospect of peace. He is the epitome of the law of the jungle—the capitalist jungle—that has given birth to many Ti Babecue yo (Little Barbecues).

At the top of the gang hierarchy一below the oligarchs and their intermediaries一Barbecue preaches a sense of belonging and describes the ghettos beyond Viv Ansanm’s control as “the enemy.” His bosses, part of a complex web of power and influence, tell him that the neighborhoods they attack, loot, and burn are “police bases.” This is the only Haiti they know. It is a world of hunger, humiliation, and hell. Young solda, seeking to imitate their social media heroes, can access highly-coveted consumer objects previously out of reach, such as kleren (moonshine), weapons, clothes, sneakers, iPhones, and even girls. Higher-up members may earn a motorbike. This system ensures that, in the context of deepening deprivation in Haiti, there will always be fresh recruits.

Makenson, a longtime friend and community leader, told me about his 16-year-old little brother who was a gang soldier killed by the PNH. Joderson, nicknamed Ti Lanmò (Little or Young Death), “joined [a gang] to protect himself. He joined to gain access.” Impacted by the absence of their parents and the constant grangou (hunger), tire (shootouts), and bal mawon (stray bullets), his brother saw no other choice. “After a lot of Lanmò San Jou’s guys got killed, some local gangsters asked Joderson if he’d help carry packages and be a lookout from the front of the neighborhood,” he recalls. As his brother became more important to the gang, he acquired money and weapons. “I no longer recognized him,” Makenson said. The brothers lost communication and Makenson was eventually forced to leave his home. Joderson was killed during a police raid in 2024.

Displaced and refusing to embrace the paramilitary project, Makenson worries about future conflicts sparked by these gang invasions. In his home commune of Kwadèbouke, neighboring communities once stood united against the corrupt PNH and the kleptocracy that runs Haiti. Now, reflecting on the system that killed his little brother and so many like him, he wonders what future is possible in a country that is thirsty for revenge. “After being burned out of homes, forgiveness is foreign to our people right now,” he remarked. “When they see Lamo San Jou or Barbecue boasting and celebrating on TikTok, they want blood.”

The Wretched Of The Earth

A piece of propaganda used by the paramilitaries to justify and glorify their use of child soldiers shows several children holding automatic weapons. Below them the text reads: “You created another spirit in a young man the day you chose to murder his family because of the ghettos they are from. You made him live without love, without his mother, older brother and older sister. His revenge will be even worse.” Its creator, Jeff Kanara Larose, is Viv Ansanm’s “Taliban” gang boss in Kanara, a sprawling neighborhood formed by refugees after the 2010 earthquake in Site Soley. Like Barbecue and Lamò San Jou, he has a million dollar FBI bounty on his head and a massive stock of U.S.-made automatic weapons.

It is not clear who the target of revenge is in Kanara’s propaganda. The paramilitaries have not targeted oligarchs or imperialists. Instead, they target the poorest ghettos, home to those that Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the Earth.” These are the effects of colonial processes of dehumanization on the colonized: internalizing and turning the violence towards their own people.

Even amid the violence, the displaced and clear-eyed Haitian intelligentsia and their skeleton of community organizations refuse to demonize these children. Some, like Patrick, a displaced lawyer from Kafou Fèy who now lives packed in a school classroom with his family and hundreds of others, points to the continuous intervention of western powers in the country. “This is the result and continuation of the 1915 U.S. occupation of Haiti,” he said.

Others like Erika, a Haitian mother of two whose entire extended family was burned out of Delmas 31, highlight the need to build alternatives to militarization. “These children are the orphans of the 2010 earthquake and the harsh neoliberal economy,” she said. ”They have a lot of blood on their hands, they have raped many of us and our daughters. But there are better solutions than a superior force coming into Haiti and murdering them all.”

Unfortunately, Haiti’s elites and western powers continue to send foreign soldiers, who do not speak Kreyòl or understand anything about the country, to face the gangs. Two armies, both armed to the teeth with U.S. guns, are squaring off, with the Haitian people hopelessly trapped in the middle.

Editor’s Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the safety of the Haitian social leaders and journalists.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Danny Shaw is an International Affairs analyst with TeleSUR, HispanTV, and other international media outlets. He teaches Latin American and Caribbean studies at the City University of New York and has worked with Haitian social movements and studied Kreyòl since 1998. His work can be found at @profdannyshaw.

Credit Line: This is syndicated in partnership with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) .

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