Anatomy of TikTok famous Haitian gangs
As Kenya heads to Haiti in the next three weeks, a gang leader in the Caribbean country is using TikTok to show his influence.
Johnson Andre alias Izo is also using the platform to reach out to youth and those interested in joining his group known as the Five Seconds Gang.
Posing in silver chains and listening to music as he dances while drinking alcohol are some of the videos he shared until early April, when TikTok deleted his account.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, his account, which had a total of 227,000 followers, was suspended.
This followed numerous reports against the account as he recorded himself rapping about killing police officers, cursing Haitian political leaders and his gang brandishing their guns.
In 2022, the United States Treasury Department sanctioned Izo, saying his gang had been involved in more than 1,000 sex-related incidents in one year.
On his deleted TikTok account, he was recorded singing in French, with international media reporting that he said: “Gonna whack them all. Gonna snort cocaine and kill everybody who hates me.”
He also shares videos and photos of members of his gang attacking police officers outside a train station in Haiti and burning a Land Cruiser before fleeing the scene.
Despite being kicked off TikTok, Izo is still advancing his cause on Twitter where he recently opened another account featuring his pictures. He also records himself singing rap music in French.
In some of his posts, he says that the Kenyan mission in Haiti, which is funded by the United Nations (UN), is taking too long to arrive in the Caribbean country.
“They take too long to come. If we have a contact with a body that can work on this file so that they come quickly. Let me know because I am crazy,” he wrote.
He also dismissed the UN mission, wondering why they needed eight countries to fight just one nation.
“The country that lives together is probably more fragile than Russia and China. I see they take eight small countries of garbage mixed together to come and fight in a country where people live together. If I see rubbish living together, I will sell bullets,” reads another post.
Izo is not the only one to have threatened the Kenyan officers.
Another gang leader who has in the past tried to unite the more than 200 Haitian gangs is Jimmy Cherizier, alias Barbecue.
Barbecue, a former police officer in Haiti, said that once the Kenyan officers arrive in Haiti, it will be a ‘massacre’.
Over the weekend, President William Ruto said the officers would be deployed to Haiti in the next three weeks.
This is despite an ongoing court case in which Mr Eukuru Aukot has been cited for contempt of court because the government was busy preparing for the deployment when the court had declared the process unconstitutional.