Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier filmed a video with six kidnapping victims that the Viv Ansanm freed from recalcitrant leaders in Belair who refused to obey orders to free the hostages.
By Kervens Louissaint, Haiti Liberté, Dec. 10, 2025
In the early morning hours of Dec. 9, a fierce, prolonged battle broke out in Belair, the hilltop neighborhood of Port-au-Prince that has often been the center of political struggle over the past 40 years, since the 1986 fall of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
Six years ago, when its armed group, under the command of a convicted kidnapper, Kempès Sanon, began to clash with the armed group of Lower Delmas, led by Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, Belair was always painted by U.S. and Haitian bourgeoisie-backed “human rights” groups, media, and politicians as the victim of Cherizier’s aggression.
But in later years, it became clear that Sanon’s soldiers were often involved in kidnapping Haitians, harboring hostages, and attacking other neighboring quarters like Solino. After the September 2023 formation of the Viv Ansanm (Live Together) alliance of armed neighborhood groups, which called for a definitive end to kidnapping and aggression, Kempès Sanon’s conduct seemed to improve, and he even made public statements in line with Viv Ansanm’s revolutionary agenda, but, behind the scenes, his old ways gradually crept back.
Finally, on Dec. 9, soldiers of the Viv Ansanm alliance attacked Sanon’s Belair, killing three of his “generals” – Dèdè, Vag, and Vèvè – along with seven of their soldiers, after they refused to free six hostages – including a 12-year-old girl, 18-year-old boy, and their mother – when ordered to immediately do so.
Despite widespread reports that he was grievously wounded, Sanon was not injured, but ran to take refuge in Cherizier’s Delmas 6 neighborhood.
In a viral video, filmed as the sun rose on Dec. 9, Cherizier stood with the six freed hostages and emotionally explained that Viv Ansanm had to act against its own soldiers because “today Viv Ansanm is engaged in a nationalist struggle… and don’t want to see kidnapping, but a group of generals didn’t listen to us when we told them to not do kidnappings… So Viv Ansanm took the decision to stop the kidnapping.”
The victims told of their kidnapping, of ransom they had paid, of beatings they had received, even showing the marks on their buttocks. They thanked Viv Ansanm for freeing them.
Viv Ansanm is now deliberating on what to do with Kempès, who was taken into custody and transported to Croix des Bouquets, where he will be held until a decision on his fate is made.
This was not a simple dispute between armed actors nor a merely a tactical operation. It was a major event, a defining moment, which exposes collective wounds, symbolic codes, survival logic, identity fractures, and political unconscious of Haitian society. It is a mirror held up to the Republic — a mirror the Haitian State refuses to look into, because doing so would force it to admit its own non-existence.
To understand this moment, we must descend deeper — beneath the weapons, beneath the factions, beneath the headlines.
I. The Internal Crisis Within Viv Ansanm
For months, tension had been growing. Kempès Sanon was not conducting “operations” — he was kidnapping civilians within his own ecosystem. Not wealthy elites. Not political enemies. Not targets from the oligarchy.
He preyed on people from the same socio-economic class as Viv Ansanm, on residents of adjacent territories controlled by other branches of the federation, that is now a party. He was warned. He was spoken to. He was cautioned along these lines — multiple times.
“Sa w ap fè a pa bon. Lage moun yo. Nou pa ekziste pou sa. Nou ka goumen ak tout sistèm nan, men nou pa devore youn lòt.”
Kempès became a threat to the group’s identity, not just its safety.
“What you are doing is not good. Free those people. We are not here for that. We can struggle against the entire system, but we cannot devour one another.”
This is the Haitian popular class’ secret moral code. It is not written in law. It is written in suffering.
Kempès violated this unwritten law. Psychologically, he became a threat to the group’s identity, not just its safety. This is why he was neutralized. It was not political — it was existential.
He refused to stop. He acted not as a political actor, but as a freelance agent of violence, feeding his own appetite at the expense of collective balance. This was not ideology — it was entropy.
In a structure like Viv Ansanm, where order is fragile and legitimacy is constantly negotiated, his actions were not only immoral; they were strategically suicidal.
You cannot claim to fight the system when your violence begins to cannibalize your own people.
What happened was not simple “discipline.” It was trauma attempting to regulate itself. Because when institutions collapse, the psychic burden of order transfers to whatever groups survive.
The neutralization of Kempès Sanon therefore reveals a deep psychological law: when the State fails, the collective unconscious generates its own immune system.
These groups become the antibodies of a wounded nation. Not out of virtue, but out of necessity.
II. The Night the System Decided to Repair Itself
On Dec. 9, several branches of Viv Ansanm coordinated an intervention in the zones of Belair under Kempès Sanon’s control. The objective was not to eliminate him, but to recover the kidnapped civilians and stop the internal hemorrhage.
Here, the Haitian State reveals its disappearance.
The Haitian National Police (PNH), supposedly responsible for protecting territorial integrity, has never been able to conduct an operation that is coordinated, multilateral, simultaneous, inside hostile zones controlled by a decentralized armed network.
Jimmy Cherizier did exactly what a delegitimized State has failed to do for decades: he did not protect Kempès.
Yet a federation operating without a functional State did it. Not out of sanctity. Not out of legitimacy. But because power hates the kind of chaos that threatens its own reproduction. And Kempès had become pure chaos.
Psychosocially, Kempès embodies something fundamental: unrestrained survival instinct. He is the raw, unstructured, unprocessed form of Haiti’s social suffering — violence that is neither political nor strategic nor ideological, but purely reactive.
He is the shadow of Viv Ansanm, the part of the group acting from scarcity, paranoia, and rage, with no consideration for collective consequences.
Every system has its shadow. But here is what matters: when a system destroys its own shadow, it becomes more coherent than the Haitian State. And that is exactly what happened.
III. The Flight into Jimmy Chérizier’s Territory
Faced with the internal offensive, Kempès sought refuge in Jimmy Chérizier’s area (Delmas 6). This is not a detail. It is the structural truth: Jimmy is the President of Viv Ansanm. Running to him was not only strategic. It was psychological.
Jimmy embodies authority, arbitration, the symbolic paternal figure of a fragmented system, the only central ego inside a decentralized collective id.
Whether one likes him or not politically, psychosocially he occupies the role abandoned by the Haitian State i.e. deciding what is acceptable and what violates the collective survival order.
Kempès acknowledged this authority by running into Cherizier’s territory. Sanon’s final judgement was now in Jimmy’s hands.
And Jimmy did exactly what a delegitimized State has failed to do for decades: he did not protect Kempès. He did not justify the kidnappings. He did not shield him in the name of clan loyalty. He disarmed Kempès, disarmed his men, neutralized the threat, and restored internal coherence.
This is not moral approval — it is analysis. It is what the State should have done. What the Police cannot do. What the transitional government does not even understand.
Viv Ansanm operates like a super-organism: a collective ego that self-regulates. When one part becomes cancerous — preying on its own cells — the body eliminates it.
Official institutions can no longer do this, because they have lost authority, trust, legitimacy, coercive capacity, and moral coherence.
Hence this reality: a parallel system now performs the psychological functions that the State has abandoned.
The Haitian elite and international actors panic at this. They see a “gang” but refuse to see an emerging political psychology. And this terrifies them more than the weapons.
IV. The Lesson: the Haitian State Exists Only Through its Absence
Let us be honest with Haiti’s intellectual class: what happened is not a “gang incident.” It is a case study in State collapse.
Two kinds of power can neutralize an armed actor:
- A legitimate, competent, sovereign State.
- A parallel system with superior internal order.
Haiti has only the second. The first died long ago.
The State has vanished. The institutions are dead. The laws have become fiction. The Constitution, a rumor. Authority, a void.
The Haitian people have been abandoned by a State that behaves like a father who left the home, a patriarch who never returned, a symbolic figure who never fulfilled his role.
In the psychology of nations, when the father disappears, the children create their own survival hierarchy. That is Viv Ansanm. Not a moral hero. Not a political savior. Not a romantic rebellion. But a survival hierarchy born from absence.
Viv Ansanm corrected itself on Dec. 9. The Haitian State has not corrected itself in 30 years.
In that hierarchy, Kempès became the child who violated the family code. The brothers corrected him. The father figure rendered judgment. This is the raw psychology of structural collapse.
The “Republic” has collapsed to the point where the self-regulation of armed actors has become the only functional mechanism of collective security. It is neither romantic, nor desirable, nor sustainable. But it is real. And Haiti will not heal as long as it refuses to recognize this truth.
V. Why this Matters for the Future
The neutralization of Kempès Sanon proves one essential thing: Viv Ansanm is not a monolith of disorder. It is a political ecosystem with its own laws. Its internal corrections do not prove that it is virtuous. They prove that it is structured.
Structure is the beginning of political identity. Political identity is the beginning of legitimacy. Legitimacy is the beginning of power.
This is why the Haitian State fears the Viv Ansanm so deeply, because it does what the State cannot do, and what the State refuses to learn how to do.
VI. Conclusion
There is a rule I have repeated, written, and demonstrated in many texts:
When the State collapses, power reappears wherever there is structure, coherence, and capacity. The void is never empty — it reorganizes.
To rebuild Haiti, we must understand the roots of social violence, not moralize about it.
What happened on Dec. 9 confirms my thesis: violence in Haiti does not come from “bad people.” It comes from structural abandonment, psychic fragmentation, the loss of symbolic authority, the collapse of collective bonds, distorted survival instincts, the vacuum left by a dead State.
To repair violence, we must rebuild connection, restore meaning, restore dignity, restore trust, restore structure. And this requires building and reinforcing a guiding ideology.
Haiti will not rebuild until it confronts the psychosocial architecture of its chaos.
What happened to Kempès Sanon is not the triumph of good over evil. It is the triumph of structure over entropy. Because the first law of political survival is simple: a system that does not correct itself dies.
Viv Ansanm corrected itself on Dec. 9. The Haitian State has not corrected itself in 30 years.
Haiti doesn’t lack order, it lacks a State. Violence does not beget disorder; disorder nourishes violence. And until we rebuild our social links and social fabric, and constructively develop a clear political line of march, our survival instinct will rule the nation.
Posted Dec. 25, 2025