I was interviewed by The Times (UK) about the assassination of Haiti president Jovenel Moïse. The original article can be read here.
Haiti’s president is dead — but why did it take a hit squad of 28?
The ‘assassins’ had no escape plan and rumours circulate that they were scapegoats for an outlandish plot by Jovenel Moïse’s enemies
A neighbour, a man in his twenties who gave his name only as Rosemond, said he was woken by a series of explosions as the rampage began. At first he assumed it was an earthquake, a dread that haunts all Haitians. “Then my mum called me to tell me that the president had been murdered,” he said.
Political violence may be commonplace in Haiti, but the worst of it has long been aimed at its people, not its leaders. Even the despised despot François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who commanded his own murder squad, died of natural causes, in 1971. So too did his playboy-dictator son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, who once raced his Ferrari past the house where Moïse died. No serving Haitian president has been killed since 1915.
Murdering a head of state is “the final taboo” of modern Haitian politics, said author Michael Deibert. “And now even that line has been crossed.”
The killing has led to days of chaos. For at least 24 hours, gun battles raged around the upmarket suburb of Pétion-Ville, as police and locals hunted the mercenaries. Two suspects were killed. A further 11 broke into the nearby embassy of Taiwan where they were later arrested. Two men, who had the same pale skin as the mercenaries, narrowly escaped being lynched when they were spotted by an angry crowd. Pleading innocence, they were dragged to the police, one with a bloodied rope around his neck.
On Friday large crowds thronged the US embassy, desperate to believe unfounded rumours that their powerful neighbour was about to hand out visas on humanitarian grounds. The US has snubbed a request from Haiti for military assistance.
Speculation about who arranged the assassination, who carried it out and who stands to benefit has run wild.
The Haitian authorities say that Moïse was murdered by a hit squad of 28 men, 26 of whom were Colombian nationals, including 13 veterans of the Colombian armed forces, whose former members are in demand around the world as highly accomplished, cheaper alternatives to British and American mercenaries.
Most of the men had arrived in Haiti in early June. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, many of them were under the impression they were to provide protection to senior government figures on a three-month trial, for $2,700 a month. They kept in touch with their families. One complained to his wife about the bad food he was being served.
But at about 1am on Wednesday, according to police, these men appeared by the president’s home. Moïse, 53, is understood to have been working in his study when they arrived.
A video taken by one neighbour shows armed men on the street outside, with at least one shouting, in English: “DEA operation!”. This has encouraged a theory that the mercenaries managed to dupe the president’s security by pretending they were US drug enforcement agents with an order to arrest, not kill, Moïse.
Once inside the mansion, according to police, the assassins showed no mercy. Moïse was shot 12 times and his left eye was gouged out. His body was left face-up on the floor, his blue trousers and white shirt soaked in blood. His wife Martine was also shot, but survived, and has been flown to a Miami hospital. She may yet become a vital witness. The couple’s daughter Jomarlie, one of their three children, escaped by hiding in a bedroom, emerging at 4pm the next day.
“This was a highly co-ordinated attack by a highly trained and heavily armed group,” said interim prime minister Claude Joseph. Days before the attack he had been told that he was being replaced.
Some of the captured men have since denied that they were part of any murder plot. The two Haitian-Americans in the group claim they were recruited as unwitting translators.
The suggestion, circulating in both Colombia and Haiti, is that the group was never an elite assassination unit, and was instead duped into appearing like one. The theory is that the former soldiers were scapegoats for a planned killing of the president by his internal enemies, who killed Moïse shortly before they arrived, or during the initial mayhem.
“Anything, and I mean anything, is possible in Haiti,” Luis Moreno, a former US diplomat in Port-au-Prince, and later ambassador to Jamaica, said. He added that when he first heard about the attack he began to suspect there was more to it than might appear.
“There are too many guys. Why would you need 26 guys on site?” he said. ”And how do you not have an escape plan?”
Rumours as to who might have masterminded the plot to kill Moïse have focused on shadowy oligarchs and criminals who still make fortunes in Haiti. They may have felt that he was not a man they could deal with. “He was not a team player,” one businessman in Port-au-Prince conceded.
Deibert said that whoever stands to lose or gain from the assassination, nothing much will change in Haiti, a country he portrays as ruled by a tiny elite, with democracy little more than a veneer. “The system that Jovenel Moïse sat atop of was bigger than him. It predated and will outlast him,” he said.
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