A federal grand jury has indicted one of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders and a U.S. citizen accused of conspiring with him to violate U.S. sanctions and fund gang activities in the troubled Caribbean country, the U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Jimmy Chérizier, best known as “Barbecue,” is a leader of a gang federation called Viv Ansanm that the U.S. designated as a foreign terrorist organization in May.

Chérizier lives in Haiti, and the U.S. is offering up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Chris Landberg, a senior U.S. State Department official, said Chérizier’s “reign of terror and mass violence against Haiti must end.”

But Jake Johnston, author of “Aid State” and international research director at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, questioned the government’s reason for offering a bounty.

“This is a guy who is giving international media interviews regularly. I don’t think the issue is being able to find him,” Johnston said, adding that the indictment doesn’t represent a threat to Chérizier since he lives in Haiti. “It’s hard to see how it’ll have much of an effect.”

Chérizier is a former elite police officer who was fired in December 2018 and was later accused of organizing large-scale massacres in the slums of Grand Ravine in 2017, in La Saline in 2018 and in Bel-Air in 2019.

More than 100 people were killed in the massacres, which Chérizier has denied organizing.

“Haiti is a hotspot right now … there is incredible violence going on there,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Tuesday, calling La Saline killings “notorious because (Chérizier) both planned and participated” in the slaughter.

In June 2020, Chérizier created the “ G9 Family and Allies,” an alliance that grew from nine gangs in lower Delmas and the Cite Soleil and La Saline slums to include more than a dozen gangs, according to a U.N. Security Council report.

The alliance was blamed for the killings of some 145 people in Cite Soleil and the rape of multiple women.

In December 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department issued civil sanctions against Chérizier and others accused of being involved in the massacres.

The G-9 alliance later became part of the Viv Ansanm gang federation created in September 2023 that saw the merging of Haiti’s two biggest gangs that were once bitter enemies: G-9 and G- Pèp.

Since then, the federation has taken control of 90% of Port-au-Prince. It launched multiple attacks on key government infrastructure in February 2024 and raided Haiti’s two biggest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates. It also forced Haiti’s main international airport to close for nearly three months.

The surge in violence led to the resignation of former Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was locked out of his country while on an official visit to Kenya.

The gang federation continues to attack once peaceful communities in Port-au-Prince, and it is accused of helping gangs in Haiti’s central region.