The Gangster Warlords of Haiti's Collapse with Jason Motlagh
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And sold. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. It's May 29, 2023 in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, a Doctors Without Borders hospital. As good as it gets in a city gutted by natural disaster, disease, political turmoil, and more recently, one of the world's bloodiest gang wars.

Laudy Denis already suffered under the violence once, in 2019, when mobsters torched his soft drink store in the neighbourhood of Bel Air with Molotov cocktails and shot him in the foot and groin.

Those guys belong to the G9, a conglomerate of gangs united under the leadership of a former cop named Jimmy Cherizier, aka Barbecue, that swept through shanties and cinderblock hoods to become Port-au-Prince's most powerful organization, arguably even more so than the government itself.

The war ramped up in 2021 when Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was slaughtered at his residence. Now Port-au-Prince is a full-blown conflict zone, buildings in ruins, its front lines shifting from day to day and bodies left to rot in the open air. Civilians are often caught in the gangsters' crossfire but nothing can prepare Denis from the news he receives on this particular day.

Two of his sons have been shot, one in the head, one in the heart, and they're both in comas. Denis races to the hospital's trauma ward, but it's too late. The brothers pass away that same day, and their father, distraught, can't even afford to bury them. This area was once a safe place, he says. Now, he adds, pulling on a cigarette, barbecue is destroying everything. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hello guys and welcome to the Underworld Podcast. I am Sean Williams, a journalist in Wellington, New Zealand. And I'm sorry I couldn't offer you a more upbeat introduction for today's show, but it's a really, really important one. And a story that's fallen down the media pecking order despite near unprecedented levels of chaos and gang violence.

Yes, today we're going to talk about Haiti and Jimmy Cherissier, aka BBQ. And to do that, I'm joined not by Danny Gold, but by Jason Motlow, an award-winning reporter, photographer and filmmaker who's been to just about every conflict zone you've heard of and probably several more that you haven't.

Jason's also a contributing editor of Rolling Stone and it's his feature from Port-au-Prince last November that today's opening story comes from. And that's what we're going to focus on. A very, very brief request to follow us on social media and click the follow button on Spotify to get our shows the moment they come out, of course.

But thanks for joining me, Jason. Your piece is called Inside the World's Most Dangerous Gang War. And reading it, I doubt anybody's going to question that. The story begins with the tragic death of two young brothers and the anguish of their father, a man named Lordy Denis. When were you out in Haiti reporting this story? Yeah, well, thanks, Sean. Very happy to be here. We made two trips last year, 2023, during the late spring, early summer. So May and June.

Each trip was a couple weeks long. To be honest, it didn't start as a magazine commission. My partner Mark and I were out looking for a second possible feature documentary film, and I'd been in touch with Friends Fixers there for a long time. Things seemed to be percolating quite a bit, so we just felt like it was a good moment to go back and see what was going on. And spent a couple weeks the first trip, reconnected with Jimmy Barbecue Cherizier, the arch gang leader of the G9.

I had met him several years before working on a film for Vice documentary and so was able to pick up from there, wasn't starting from scratch. There was some familiarity. What was interesting to see was just how much more self-possessed and schooled to the media game that he was the first time I met him. He was very anxious, wore a suit to the interview. If you watch the film, he's got studded leather shoes, sweating incredibly.

And, you know, by now he was seasoned. He had dealt with a lot of media and so was a lot cooler and kind of knew what his talking points were. One thing that kind of has remained constant was, you know, the amount of access and intimacy that was allowed. I thought given the past shoot that we would pick right up where we left off and we were trying to do more of a personal portrait of this guy beyond this kind of boogeyman caricature that you've seen in a lot of the Western reporting and took some time.

to get, you know, beyond where we had in the past and, and peel back the layers. Uh, I think a lot more guarded and in some cases, understandably, just given what's going on and how many enemies he has. Um, but,

We made a second trip in June, and it was actually on that trip that we met Lordy Denis, the father. It was early on that trip, and one of my goals at that point, having connected with editors and getting a magazine commission, was I didn't want to just center the gangs and barbecue. I think that had been done. I really wanted to look at the human toll of ordinary Haitians who were caught in the middle of this nasty gang war, and

And I met him. He was someone who was still freshly grieving from the loss of his sons two weeks before, you know, they'd both been hit in a crossfire on the way to school, allegedly by G nine gunman, uh, one shot in the head, one in the heart died that day and was just,

He was still stunned, but welcomed us into his home, shared his story, the worst moment imaginable, and confided that two weeks after the boys had been killed, he still wasn't able to bury them because they didn't have the funds needed. And so we knew then that was someone we were going to kind of track over the course of that trip.

And we did. We went back to him on numerous occasions and got to know him better. And he, at that point, had abandoned his home because it was under assault all the time and people were getting hit by straight gunfire, burned out of their homes, and was living in a little makeshift shanty camp very near the White House, actually, right in the heart of the Capitol. And so I think just that fact that you have people fleeing closer to the center was just very emblematic of how dangerous and desperate things are.

Yeah, and it's really striking how, I guess, hopeless and almost, I don't want to say like docility, but there's a complete resignation to this from a lot of the characters in the story that you flesh out. And there's, I guess this has been going on for so many years now that it's kind of become just...

just the sort of daily shape of life in the city, in Port-au-Prince anyway. It seems like it's not that people are kind of inured to it so much that they accept it as this kind of power structure, I guess, that just exists now. Yeah, that's right. I mean, people have been through so much over the last 20 years. Foreign intervention, the earthquake in 2010, and then a few years ago, another, the rise of the gangs. And

endemic corruption in the government. I mean, there's just so much cynicism and a hardness that people have taken on because they just can't seem to catch a break. I mean, I started reporting from Haiti really early on in my career in 2006 was one of the first places I went. And I've never seen this level of despair. I mean, it really is just the

complete resignation. What was interesting is even when you talk to experts, the policy people who are paid to have ideas about what needs to happen to unkink the situation and make improvements, everyone was at a loss. No one even pretended to have an answer to get out of this morass that we're in now.

And that, to me, was telling. It's rare that you talk to experts who are just kind of speechless, echoing the same thing. I don't know where we go from here. This is uncharted territory, and the primacy of the gangs is undeniable. They've always been a factor, but now they very much are the law unto themselves, as I write in the piece, and have kind of untethered from their traditional nature.

So we're in just a new, completely new phase with the prospect of another foreign intervention on the horizon, but they've never encountered gangs that are this heavily armed, this organized, this violent. Is it really that in 2021 when Jovenel Moise was

was killed, the former president. Is that really the kind of spark that lit this particular fire? I mean, obviously the gangs had been operating with political patronage before then and kind of running around and causing chaos on politicians' behalf, but that really seems like

It's almost like a sort of Joker movie moment where, you know, the gang's just completely overturned this power structure and run wild. Yeah, I think especially where barbecue is concerned, right? Because...

You know, the understanding is that barbecue was linked to Moyes' administration, you know, doing his bidding on the street. And so he had already created the G9, but the violence just hadn't exploded to the level that we're seeing now. And, you know, after that happened, it was like all bets are off and people

the G9 got way more aggressive in terms of pushing out, fighting their enemies, and everything has escalated since then. So, yeah, that kind of

I guess just rip the lid off what has been festering for many years as these gangs have grown more powerful. And I think once barbecue saw that, you know, he, he, he genuinely had hopes. I think in Moise, I mean, at least he told me that, you know, there would be some reform and that he had an ear to the people and that it wasn't just going to be, you know, a guy doing the bidding of the oligarchs as usual. And then that, when that was stripped away, it just activated him and, and,

Now, you know, he's just been very clear about wanting to take on sort of the whole existing structure and the opposition who killed Moise. And, you know, he'll do anything he can to tear it down. Yeah, it's kind of there. There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in his own self-mythology, right? Whether he was...

Somehow, like you said, he told you that he was somehow inspired by a chance to break the oligarchy or simply whether he was striking it out alone and trying to make a power grab for himself. It's kind of unclear, I guess. What else that you sort of took from him this time around?

was different apart from this kind of like sheen media savvy I guess because I mean yeah he has spoken so many times to media members and you often see the same quotes even from story to story attributed to him in the news media especially um

What kind of is different about his character now compared to back then? I think the noises he's making about being a revolutionary, they rang a little hollow, I think, early on because it was early days and

You've heard that kind of thing before. It's often a great PR smokescreen for criminal activity or what have you. And over time, it tends to play out that way. But just more overtly political statements. I think part of that is just the fact that he's been leading this G9 for some time.

I chalked some of it also up to perhaps the fact that this guy Iskar, who was one of his co-leaders, you could say, almost like a shadow leader of the G9 out of Siti Soleil, died under murky circumstances. As I understood it, Barbecue would often work in consultation with him. He was quite smart and wouldn't make really moves without him. And so absent his right-hand man, it was like, okay, this is on me for better or for worse. I need to own this.

And just stepping out unilaterally and being far more directly political in word and floating the idea of potentially getting into politics in the future. And I think he's reinforced that, you know, saying that he will fight any foreign intervention that tries to come into the country. He'll treat them as hostiles and that any kind of settlement needs to involve him.

and the gang alliance. Otherwise, it's a non-starter. And he told me as much that he may well have to enter politics when the situation is right. But I think right now, he's still very much on a war footing, which, let's be honest, is where he's most comfortable. He's a soldier. I mean, he came up through the police. He was in this very aggressive SWAT kind of unit, riot suppression. And that experience very much infuses...

how he runs the G9 and his guys. There's a lot of discipline, a real command structure that he relies on to keep himself and lower Delma, his base, relatively safe. And he chalks that up to why he's lived this long in a place where

You know, betrayal can come from anywhere. A bullet can come from anywhere. And so right now, you know, as you saw one of the early March when the guy, the G9 had made the move on the airport, shut it down. And then there was this dual prison break, 4,000 plus prisoners getting out. He did sort of an impromptu press conference and he was wearing his, you know, his flak vest. I think that very much signifies where he's at in his bracing for more as foreign forces finally appear to be mustering

to come to Haiti. Yeah, there was talks for a long, long time of Kenya sending troops into the country, which seemed to be scuppered. And then Ruto, the president there, was kind of saying, no, no, this is still on. And then I think I read a couple of days ago in the New York Times that

It says Kenya will now lead a coalition of seven nations and 2,500 men and women, including the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Chad, and Jamaica. I don't know if they just picked those countries alphabetically or something, but that is a strange coalition of forces with 300 million US dollars from DC, except, you know, most of it can't get through Congress because, well, yeah, we all know why. But that is a strange coalition.

coalition. What is your feeling and how that's come about? Why was Kenya involved in the first place and why did they not? It's a coalition of the sort of kind of willing. The US, Canada, France, all the usual players

They don't want to touch this one. I mean, the U.S. being spread very thin overseas right now as it is, but I'm just looking at the way past missions have panned out. There's just not a lot of appetite to go back hot into Haiti. And so, you know, even where the funding is concerned, I mean, I think it's a little over 20 million or something that has been fed into this collective pool to fund this whole mission, which is not a lot of money. Yeah, I think the Kenyans came forward because they saw it as an opportunity to...

make a statement, right. That we can have our name on this one and be out in front. And, you know, they've been involved in different African union missions, missions to varying degrees of success. As for the others, uh, it almost feels like a sort of a token participation, you know, 150 police here, a couple hundred soldiers there personally, you know, just with that level of manpower and funding and given how, uh,

armed to the teeth the gangs are at this point. We're talking military grade weapons from the U.S. and elsewhere. It just doesn't seem to be a very serious proposal to take this on. And, you know, we're talking about potential urban combat in an area that, you know, the gangs know better than anybody. They have, you know, weapons that are almost or equally as good. It doesn't see how this all holds together. And then, you know, you look at the Kenyans leading the operation in

They don't have the greatest track record. And these are police officers that they're coming in with. So how effective can they be in a foreign country? Even though there is an openness in the country because things have just gotten so bad, there's also a deep-seated aversion to the presence of

foreign troops in the country. I mean, Haiti's a very proud country and past experiences have not panned out well. And so I don't think it could take much for public opinion to turn against them. You know, if civilians there are caught in the crossfire, reckless gun battles, you know, as we saw in 2004 and five in places like Cite Soleil, when the Brazilians were present, um, there's still a hangover from that experience. People haven't forgotten. So, um,

This whole thing doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence. No. I mean, you know, I guess the silver lining is that the Bahamas and Chad can finally work together after their decades of enmity. It didn't occur to me. Yeah. It is a really strange one. It's a motley crew. Yeah. And it remains to be seen. But I don't think anybody who follows affairs in Haiti has taken this very seriously.

I mean, it kind of moves on to another point I want to ask you, which is you mentioned the amount of high-powered weaponry that the gangs have got there. It's sort of accepted that it's leaking out from the US, and it kind of plays into another one of the factors here, which is that

the transshipment of drugs right is a is a growing problem or it seems to be a growing problem i guess on one hand the complete lack of law enforcement or order would suggest a good place to do business but then the g9 is not the best bedfellow i would imagine for the for the likes of the sinaloa cartels how big a role did you feel that narcotics was playing in the situation not

As much as people might think, given the power of the gangs right now, I don't think the G9 is very much involved. I mean, they might be looking the other way in certain areas, but actively involved in the drug trade, not to my knowledge, perhaps more so on the GPEP side. You know, my sense is it's always been politically, you know, people connected to the oligarchs, you know, are very powerful in the interior of the country and able to manipulate the ports, right?

and things that are coming in and out by sea that are really calling the shots in the drug trade. And I don't think we should overstate. I mean, it's certainly a significant entrepot for cocaine coming from Colombia, but it's not a major transshipment hub yet.

That said, you know, that could well change. I mean, we don't know, you know, how this is going to play out with the G9 and the GPAP. And most of their power is still concentrated in Port-au-Prince. If, you know, they're able to push further out into the countryside where you have private airstrips and things like that, you could see more involvement in the drug trade, you know, further along the coastline. That could start to change. But as of now, I don't think...

the gangs are major players in the drug trade. I think that's more like on the side of the traditional business elite and some of the politicians that they have in their pocket. Oh,

I want to talk about just the experience of being in that city right now because some of the photos that you took alongside the piece, it's pretty raw. I mean, you know, charred bodies of combatants basically and gang members, the likes of which you would rarely see outside of an incredibly hot conflict zone. Do you feel that...

comparison there what is it like to walk down these streets is it is it really can you fear that it's sequestered off from one gang to another from street to street how does it feel like there yeah no i mean parts of port-au-prince are de facto war zone you know no no pretense of government or police authority i mean the gangs hold sway and you know this is an intensely congested city if you're coming in for the first time even if you have a lot of experience it's very hard to

sort of where the neighborhoods end and, you know, the next territory begins. And, you know, these fault lines, they can be very fluid too. So, you know, even versus the last time I was there doing the Vice film, like some of the front lines had shifted considerably.

But no, it's the kind of place where it, you know, as the story illustrates, bullets can rain down at any time, almost anywhere. And, you know, it's, it's a lot of tin and cinder blocks. So these things just kind of tear through and ricochet around. And, you know, a lot of the gunmen are teenagers with incredibly powerful weapons. And, you know, when you're with say the G9 or with, with barbecue, uh,

You feel a little more secure, at least I did, because of his rigor and his discipline, which comes from his time in the police. He's not running around high and on a sleepless bender. He has a lot of protocols and he's kind of keeping track. And so you feel the odds are more in your favor. But if you're going into the GPAP areas, it's like anything at any time, the police are...

shooting harassment fire. There are snipers around. You never know when they're going to make another attempt to break through. And it's just kind of anything goes. But, you know, having worked in a lot of conflict zones, I think one of the more treacherous elements is just having these young gunmen who

with really strong rifles who, you know, might be strung out on drugs, maybe have eaten once, barely have flip-flops on their feet, but they're lethal. And it just lends itself to this very volatile kind of atmosphere.

And so you just have to be hyper vigilant, you know, as you're moving around and, you know, it's the kind of place you could be walking down the street and you feel like you're surrounded on both sides, but there's a crack in a wall and there's someone, you know, 50 yards away on the other side of that who's waiting for someone to appear, you know, at any moment and send a bullet through. So you just have to be very aware. And, you know, my security is the people I work with. I'm lucky to work with two of the best security.

Haitian journalists around have known them for years and so I just trust them and their judgment implicitly and we're able to get places and cross fault lines that are very difficult to maneuver around but when they say it's time to go, we're out. No questions asked. I feel like the kind of narrative of the story as well, it's almost like you start by laying some very big bricks to show a couple of opposing parties. You've got the GPF and the G9 obviously and Jimmy Teresier but...

And then the kind of allegiances, I guess, unravel as the story continues. And you've got these smaller splinter groups and just like you say, groups of young guys off their heads, you know, arm to the teeth, just criminals, just gangsters basically running around trying to sort of, I guess, cop a bit of clout money for themselves.

When you met those, there's a particular scene in the story where you meet this really young kid who's just, he looks up to this gangster as a kind of father figure. Really sad. Is that the growing trend there for these sort of smaller street gangs to pop up or is it being consolidated more? Yeah, I think that's,

That's the phenomenon we're seeing as to how the gangs have proliferated so rapidly is you've just got a lot of despair among young men who just don't see like a viable pathway to a future in the country as it exists. You've got this entrenched elite who will do anything to protect their interests. And then there's everybody who's...

And so, you know, if you're coming up in a poor neighborhood and you see the guys on the corner and they've got swagger and, you know, they've got cheap dope and they're packing a heavy weapon, like it's very enticing. And I think, you know, with the guy you're referring to, you know, with others who were, this was in Village de Dieu on the GPEP side.

But, uh, just, it's kind of this, this nihilism really. It's like, get what you can while you can. Life is cheap and it's short. And, you know, at least I can have a little fun and, you know, walk around with a heavy weapon and maybe get a little respect in my neighborhood before it's, it's my time to go. And, you know, it's not just guys who, you know, were sort of condemned from the beginning, you know, being born in the wrong place. I mean, I met

Young men who were coming from middle class neighborhoods, right, who, you know, could have had like a pretty basic job, but just just didn't see any any point and had broken away from their own families. You know, one case where a guy's sister, you know, was basically on the other side and he had gone to fight.

for the GPAP, and it wasn't uncommon to hear stories like that. And I think it just all speaks to how dire things have become in Haiti, and for some people just don't see an alternative. And so it's that really get-what-you-can-while-you-can mindset that's kind of infected a lot of these areas. I guess that kind of chimes with Barbecue's, ostensibly his mission is to sort of rid the country of these

sort of venal oligarchs that are taking away the futures of all young people because there isn't really anything for anyone to hold on to. So his is the only story that has any teeth, right? No one else is offering anybody anything. Yeah. And it strikes like a deep chord in Haiti, right? Because, you know, this is the first black Republic. They cast off their French colonial masters. And so there's a real resonant narrative there, I think, you know,

that they're being controlled and manipulated by these elites. And it strikes a chord for a lot of people on the street. And, you know, barbecue savvy to that. I mean, not just in the things he says, but just the visual messaging, you know, I, you see these billboards of, of him sort of as Che Guevara, Barbie Vara, right. Wearing a beret. He's got a cell phone case. Yeah. With custom cell phone case with Barbie Vara. And,

And then all this other iconography of other leaders like Nelson Mandela and Castro and others in these areas. And, you know,

I think he genuinely believes in some of that or is trying to position himself in such a way. I think in other areas, say in the G9 orbit that, you know, maybe don't have as much of a intent, you know, a revolutionary intent. It's more just kind of window dressing and they're, they're fine to go along with it. But I think he takes it pretty seriously and he's got a pretty decent sense of, of history.

and the country's trajectory and, you know, is trying to position himself in that same vein of disruptors, of people who are taking on the existing system to upend it and, you know, restore the people to power. Yeah, I mean, and he's sort of semi-seriously positioned, well, I guess seriously positioning himself as something of a politician, right? You mentioned him going around as if he's on the campaign trail kissing babies and

this vision to people. But no one's going to bring him to the table, right? They're going to end up killing him, surely. I mean, this is how this ends. They can't. Yeah, it seems faded, but there have been plenty of crooks in office. I mean, I guess the thing now is it's hard to imagine this scenario unless he takes a bullet out of the blue of how peace can be re-established in any meaningful way in Port-au-Prince.

when he's not in the picture. They just have so much firepower. And who knows if this alliance with the G. Pep will, but you know, it's almost like the Warriors where the gang leaders united all the gangs into the super gang in New York. And like, we're going to take down the police and all these other institutions. I mean, he's been working on that for a long time. And when they announced that,

alliance it was it was no surprise and so yeah i mean who's going to be the spoiler they're always spoilers looking about in haiti but you know things continue to go on and you know this intervention falters and he remains a a um a force on the ground it is kind of hard to imagine um that scenario without him and i would speculate that you know it has to involve some kind of an immunity right for alleged crimes massacres that he's been tied to it's it's it's ugly but

You think someone like Guy Philippe, who was instrumental in this insurgency against Aristide back in 2004, he was in office and implicated in drug trafficking and all sorts of other crimes, spent years in a U.S. prison, just came back and is making a play at residency again.

And he is quite popular. I've heard rumblings that he might be in contact with barbecue. And I don't know if that's true yet. But yeah, it feels like at this juncture, really anything is possible and that business as usual just no longer applies.

Have you got any plans to go back out there at all? Are you focusing your work elsewhere as it stands? I would like to go back. Things are happening so quickly right now. And, you know, with this foreign intervention, our hope was to make a feature film. And at the moment, we're trying to take what we've got and cut it into a shorter film with the hope that that will, you know, entice some interest in funding to do a longer project that would see us back multiple times over the next year.

year and a half that's that's very much our goal uh as i've said it's very difficult place to work beyond just being dangerous also very expensive right um to get around and um

work with the right people. And so we're looking for support on that front. But yeah, if it does come together, I think this could be our next big project. And it does feel ripe for it, I think, with all that's going on. And then, of course, the connection to migration to the U.S., right? Haitians make up a huge tranche of migrants coming to the southern border. That's being weaponized by the right.

at this time. And so show what these people are up against back home, you know, that these aren't arbitrary claims they're making for asylum, but their lives are very much at risk and they're fleeing what amounts to hell so much so that they're willing to travel to South America and cross, you know, more than a dozen borders over land.

and run that gauntlet to get to the U.S. border and have a chance at entry into the U.S. So, you know, the more light that can be. I've always felt it's important to really... Yeah, very true. I think anyone who is questioning those motives should just... I mean, beyond reading your story, they should just go on Wikipedia for Haiti and read the history section because it is really...

I mean, since 1804 when they shook off the French, but not really. I mean, they had to pay billions of dollars of reparations. It's just one disaster slash period of turmoil after another. And

This does seem like it's all reached a bit of an idea, but it's insane. I mean, I wonder if the sort of experiences in, say, El Salvador is starting to make people wonder whether, you know, extremely heavy handed anti-gang tactics are the way to go. I mean, they haven't worked in plenty of other places. I mean, you know, they were going to send the military in Cape Town and obviously stuff's happened in Rio that's been a disaster there.

I don't know. It gets, yeah, it's, it's hard to see where, where, um, the Bahamas Barbados and Chad can help. Yeah. I mean, I, I mentioned the story, but at some point I think there were people making inquiries into getting the Wagner group, getting mercenaries over there, you know, with no concern for human rights, blast up, uh, you know, the, the slums and, um,

you know as it gets worse who knows i think you know the thing in haiti right now is just the the state right the police are are outnumbered outgunned um they're just in no position um to to go and and pull something like off like we saw bukele doing in el salvador right just go neighborhood by neighborhood and roll these guys up and throw them to prison and you know el salvador um

pretty basic weaponry, sometimes homemade guns where, you know, these, these kids in Haiti just have, uh, M14s, AR-15s, Galils, um, I mean, real hardcore military hardware. So it's, um, it's hard to imagine without like a total bloodbath and a lot of people would die. The optics, you know, would be terrible. Um,

I don't know what a solution looks like without maybe in some way involving some of this lead-up. It's probably a longer-term demobilization effort, but that's going to require a lot of money, a lot of patience, and creating viable alternatives that appeal to these kinds of young men we're talking about who the gangs prey on for recruitment, trying to draw them away to other alternatives. With

just the general apathy from foreign countries to Haiti to get, you know, meaningfully involved after all these different, um, you know, failures. Uh, yeah, I don't see where that comes from at this point. So yeah, I hate to sound like invariably bleak, but, uh, I think it's maybe that's it. Maybe it's just calling it for what it is. And, um, something comes out of the ashes. No, I, I think that's incredibly important. You don't, you don't need that.

over optimistic you know footnote or kicker or whatever i mean i was going to say actually to to end our conversation i wanted to bring you back to lordy because as you you close out the story you come back to him and he has finally mustered the cash to to pay for his son's funerals although in local custom he's he's not supposed to attend because it's considered bad luck although i'm not sure what worst luck you could ever go through but um

It really is like bleak the way that the story ends. But I think that's incredibly important because there is, like you say, there's kind of an apathy or a nihilism that just is riven through everything from the international response to the kids on the streets, to the politicians and everything that's going on. How, I guess to ask you a kind of journalistic question, how important do you think it is to retain that realistic image

peg to a story and not fall into the idea of well we've got to make something sunny at the end of this because i think a lot of stories do do that and it kind of pisses me off from time to time it's not necessarily how things are in life yeah 90 percent rain and then a little bit of sunshine at the very end and i think a lot of that was kind of drilled into our heads at some point so you got to leave the reader with with something you can't come all this way and walk away

you know, just, just completely broken. Um, no, I think it's important to, to play it as it lays. And, um, you know, in this case, it was just echoed to me from everybody I talked to, whether, you know, people on the street to academics in the U S there was just no more pretending, you know, we've been through all of those things and the grand talk and the promises. And, um, this is where we've got. And, um,

My hope was that at least at some base level, human level, the story would stir some compassion in people. I don't think I needed to do that by appealing to a folk. I could do it by just appealing to their sense of decency or being a parent, just a concerned human for a story that I think a lot of people can relate to. If you've never had experience with gangs, having a child and having that

losing that child. That's pretty universal.

uh, whatever the place or the culture. And so that was what I really wanted people to take away. And yeah, my story, you know, there's not much coming out of Haiti now it's a drop in a bucket, but the hope is that, um, there's follow-up reporting and it's not just completely lost in the shuffle as it's been for so long. And, um, you know, hopefully more people will come to do this kind of work and, uh, it'll spark some kind of a shift and,

I think if that's done at a broad enough level, it eventually finds its way into policy and into the halls of power where those kinds of decisions are made. Yeah. Now, I would like to see a lot more coverage of Haiti. Also, you know, Sudan, Myanmar, the other conflicts that are roiling around the world that perhaps aren't getting the column inches that they desperately need. So many. I mean, if you believe in the media, really, in the sort of base...

causes of the media then then we should be looking into this stuff a lot a lot more but yeah i guess that's our job to convince people to send us these places no it's getting harder as we both know but i think there's so much of the world that that's just ignored undercovered and yeah it's it's up to us to find ways to um connect the dots and get news organizations and you know viewers interested i often think it's it's the news organizations that are the trouble a lot of the gatekeepers and

their idea of what matters and what is in the interest of an American or Western viewer or reader, whereas

I've always believed really strongly in the storytelling. You know, if the story is strong, people will, will follow wherever that is. And let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, I, I totally agree. Um, and I will be saying something to that effect next week to an editor about the country of Tuvalu. So we'll see if that goes down. Um,

But yeah. Um, thanks so much for joining me. Um, Jason really enjoy your work and, uh, yeah, thanks. Thanks for spending time and, and, and good luck in, uh, I think you're just about to jet off up country to, to, to the Northwest coast of the U S as well. Right. Yeah. Up to Portland doing a followup film on the, the opioid crisis there. Um, so yeah, it should, should be equally depressing and, um,

you know this is this is where we are it's it's a different front it's the home front and uh you know in some ways it's it's equally um troubling just uh where where things are going in in this country at the moment but we'll save that for another conversation yes we will um well have a safe trip up there and uh yeah i hope to to have you back on the show when you when you're back in there with your family i love to thanks for having me cheers

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