Reports: President of Haiti Assassinated at Home

[get these nets]

(CONTINUED)

The Artibonite Valley is one of many parts of the country that were seized by heavily armed criminal gangs during Moïse’s tenure. There are close to a hundred gangs active in Haiti. According to Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, they control more than half of the country. Turf wars, murders, rapes, and kidnappings have recently led to the displacement of more than eighteen thousand people. Seeking refuge, some sleep in public parks and squares while others crowd into churches and gymnasiums, even as coronavirus cases have remained on the rise. During Moïse’s time in office, gangs carried out thirteen massacres in poor opposition neighborhoods. The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Haitian Observatory for Crimes Against Humanity studied three and defined them as crimes against humanity.

Several of the massacres took place in Bel Air, the oldest district in Port-au-Prince, where my family landed in the nineteen-forties, after migrating from the mountains of Léogâne. I lived in Bel Air with my aunt and uncle for eight years, beginning at the age of four, and I continued to visit them there after I moved to the United States. My uncle, a minister, had a church, a school, and, briefly, a medical clinic in Bel Air. But he was forced to flee the neighborhood in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, after soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti and Haitian riot police climbed onto the roof of his church and killed some of his neighbors during one of their deadly raids against young men, some of whom had joined gangs and some of whom had not.


A year ago, nine of the most powerful gangs in Port-au-Prince formed a federation called G9 Family and Allies. Led by a former police officer named Jimmy (Barbecue) Chérizier, G9 recently rebranded as a revolutionary force. Having watched these groups’ evolution over the years, I hope that whatever version of Haiti emerges in Moïse’s wake offers much more appealing opportunities to poor and socially marginalized young men than to work as bodies and guns for hire for gang leaders, politicians, business people, oligarchs, and nefarious international forces, all of whom consider them ultimately disposable—a condition that they and the late President apparently shared.

A week before Moïse’s assassination, another massacre took place in Port-au-Prince. At least fifteen people were killed, including Diego Charles, a radio journalist, and Antoinette Duclaire, a vocal government critic. Just thirty-three years old, Duclaire was among a younger generation of activists, known as Petrochallengers, who are fiercely advocating for Haitian-led solutions to the country’s problems. Earlier this week, I spoke, via WhatsApp, with Vélina Elysée Charlier, Duclaire’s fellow-Petrochallenger and a member of the anti-corruption group Nou Pap Dòmi. She told me that she sees Moïse’s assassination as a denial of government accountability. “We, Haitians, have been robbed of the right to find justice and closure,” she said. “Jovenel was silenced. We will never have answers from him on Petrocaribe and the many massacres. That is a big blow to our fight against corruption and impunity.”

At the head of Haiti’s government for the moment is Claude Joseph, who was serving as Haiti’s interim Prime Minister at the time of Moïse’s death. But others are vying for power. Just two days before the assassination, Moïse had chosen a replacement for Joseph, a neurosurgeon and former Interior Minister named Ariel Henry, who has claimed that he should be in charge. The leader of Haiti’s Senate, Joseph Lambert—one of the few remaining elected officials in the country—got his colleagues to back a plan for him to become President. (Last week, a spokesman for the Biden Administration called Claude Joseph the “incumbent” leader. The U.S. has since sent delegates to work with all parties on brokering a deal.)

Joseph, meanwhile, has vowed to get justice for Moïse and his family. When it comes to criminal inquiries, Haitians are accustomed to hearing the same mantra from officials: L’enquête se poursuit—the investigation continues. (“As they always do, judicial authorities will announce investigations that lead nowhere. We are used to that,” Jacques Desrosiers, the head of the Haitian Journalists Association, said, after the massacre that killed Duclaire and Charles, who was his colleague.) In Moïse’s case, Joseph and Haiti’s national-police chief, Léon Charles, have acted with unprecedented swiftness. Joseph declared a fifteen-day “state of siege” in the country, similar to a period of martial law. Authorities launched an international manhunt in their own back yard, and in less than twenty-four hours killed or apprehended highly trained professional killers, parading them before cameras for all the world to see. They also arrested the supposed mastermind behind the entire operation, a sixty-three-year-old pastor who once filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy but who now apparently flies in private planes with a small army of mercenaries for his personal protection—commandos whom he then, according to the police, ordered to go kill the President so that he, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, sent by God, could save Haiti. (On Thursday morning, the Times reported that Sanon and other subjects of interest in the investigation had met during the past year to discuss Haiti's future.)

“Who’s writing this script?” my filmmaker friend in New York asked as we, like so many of our Haitian and diaspora friends and family, pored over each new twist and development, and debated every detail. “The only part I believe is that the President is dead,” a pregnant friend in Port-au-Prince said. She is very worried about the country she’s bringing her child into. Others, like the Petrochallenger Charlier, simply feel numb. “The population is emotionless, indifferent,” she told me. “We’re so used to people dying.” Of course, Moïse’s family, like all Haitian families, deserves justice for the appalling crime that took his life and left Martine Moïse wounded. I hope that they will get justice. As so many I’ve recently spoken to in Haiti have put it, if the President was not safe in his own home, then no one is safe. L’enquête se poursuit.

 

[get these nets]

I think it was Sam. There have been attempted hits on the leader since then, but I think he was the last sitting leader to get killed.

116 years ago today.

 

[ZoeGod]

This video highlights the political dysfunction in Haiti in a nutshell. Too many damn political parties. Also the ending is hilarious.

 

[mson]

This video highlights the political dysfunction in Haiti in a nutshell. Too many damn political parties. Also the ending is hilarious.

My mother always says this. They need to make a rule against numerous parties running for office.

 

[mson]

You have to go back to the birth of Haiti as a nation altogether. This nation was born from the insurrection of enslaved people against their masters, against one of the most wealthy colonies of one of the most powerful imperial nations in the world at the time [France]. That was terrifying to nations that relied on a slave economy, including the United States.

People talk about Haiti’s indemnity to France [in which, following the Haitian Revolution, France forced Haiti to pay it 150 million francs to compensate for enslavers’ loss of income, in exchange for France’s recognition of the former colony’s independence] and about how that debt was managed and financed through international and US banks.

So we actually owe a debt to Haiti for having kneecapped this young country from the very get-go, economically and then also politically. You have to think about the US military interventions in Haiti, including our military occupation in the early 20th century. We supported dictatorial regimes and then undermined democratic regimes that were trying to stand up against the US. We had economic policies that were very extractive.



We have to actually think about this in the kind of long scope of how not just the United States but much of the world has cast out this country and created the conditions where Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.



Biden is turning back Haitian migrants at sea, echoing a shameful chapter in US history

 

[get these nets]

This video highlights the political dysfunction in Haiti in a nutshell. Too many damn political parties. Also the ending is hilarious.

2 seconds in......Pale Fo

Instant mark of a person who is not be taken seriously. MFers sitting RIGHT next to him, but he's yelling.

I know this is going to be funny.

 

[get these nets]

My mother always says this. They need to make a rule against numerous parties running for office.

Everybody has to get their slice of the cake. Same reason why there are so many Haitian American churches.

 

[mson]

Everybody has to get their slice of the cake. Same reason why there are so many Haitian American churches.

Well that's probably also for tax purposes. Corner front church with only 5 members in the congregation.

 

[get these nets]

‘They Thought I Was Dead’: Haitian President’s Widow Recounts Assassination
Struck by gunfire, Martine Moïse lay bleeding as the assassins who killed her husband ransacked her room. Now, she says, the F.B.I. must find the mastermind behind the attack.

• July 30, 2021

MIAMI — With her elbow shattered by gunfire and her mouth full of blood, the first lady of Haiti lay on the floor beside her bed, unable to breathe, as the assassins stormed the room.

“The only thing that I saw before they killed him were their boots,” Martine Moïse said of the moment her husband, President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti, was shot dead beside her. “Then I closed my eyes, and I didn’t see anything else.”

She listened as they ransacked the room, searching methodically for something in her husband’s files, she said. “‘That’s not it. That’s not it,’” she recalled them saying in Spanish, over and over. Then finally: “‘That’s it.’”

The killers filed out. One stepped on her feet. Another waved a flashlight in her eyes, apparently to check to see if she was still alive.

“When they left, they thought I was dead,” she said.

In her first interview since the president’s assassination on July 7, Mrs. Moïse, 47, described the searing pain of witnessing her husband, a man with whom she had shared 25 years, being killed in front of her. She did not want to relive the deafening gunfire, the walls and windows trembling, the terrifying certainty that her children would be killed, the horror of seeing her husband’s body, or how she fought to stand up after the killers left. “All that blood,” she said softly.

The president’s funeral in Cap-Haitien, days after gunmen entered the couple’s official residence and attacked them in their bedroom.
But she needed to speak, she said, because she did not believe that the investigation into his death had answered the central question tormenting her and countless Haitians: Who ordered and paid for the assassination of her husband?

The Haitian police have detained a wide array of people in connection with the killing, including 18 Colombians and several Haitians and Haitian Americans, and they are still seeking others. The suspects include retired Colombian commandos, a former judge, a security equipment salesman, a mortgage and insurance broker in Florida, and two commanders of the president’s security team. According to the Haitian police, the elaborate plot revolves around a 63-year-old doctor and pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who officials say conspired to hire the Colombian mercenaries to kill the president and seize political power.

But critics of the government’s explanation say that none of the people named in the investigation had the means to finance the plot on their own. And Mrs. Moïse, like many Haitians, believes there must have been a mastermind behind them, giving the orders and supplying the money.

She wants to know what happened to the 30 to 50 men who were usually posted at her house whenever her husband was at home. None of his guards were killed or even wounded, she said. “I don’t understand how nobody was shot,” she said.

Martine Moïse, the first lady of Haiti, this month at a memorial for her assassinated husband, Jovenel Moïse.
At the time of his death, Mr. Moïse, 53, had been in the throes of a political crisis. Protesters accused him of overstaying his term, of controlling local gangs and of ruling by decree as the nation’s institutions were being hollowed out.

Mr. Moïse was also locked in battle with some of the nation’s wealthy oligarchs, including the family that controlled the nation’s electrical grid. While many people described the president as an autocratic leader, Mrs. Moïse said her fellow citizens should remember him as a man who stood up to the rich and powerful.

And now she wants to know if one of them had him killed.

“Only the oligarchs and the system could kill him,” she said.

Dressed in black, with her arm — now limp and perhaps useless forever, she said — wrapped in a sling and bandages, Mrs. Moïse offered an interview in South Florida on the agreement that The New York Times not reveal her whereabouts. Flanked by her children, security guards, Haitian diplomats and other advisers, she barely spoke above a whisper.

She and her husband had been asleep when the sounds of gunfire jolted them to their feet, she recalled. Mrs. Moïse said she ran to wake her two children, both in their early 20s, and urged them to hide in a bathroom, the only room without windows. They huddled there with their dog.

Her husband grabbed his telephone and called for help. “I asked, ‘Honey, who did you phone?’” she said.

Mrs. Moïse said investigators have yet to answer the central question of the case: Who ordered and paid for the assassination of her husband?Credit...Matias Delacroix/Associated Press
“He said, ‘I found Dimitri Hérard; I found Jean Laguel Civil,’” she said, reciting the names of two top officials in charge of presidential security. “And they told me that they are coming.”

But the assassins entered the house swiftly, seemingly unencumbered, she said. Mr. Moïse told his wife to lie down on the floor so she would not get hurt.

“‘That’s where I think you will be safe,’” she recalled him saying.

It was the last thing he told her.

A burst of gunfire came through the room, she said, hitting her first. Struck in the hand and the elbow, she lay still on the floor, convinced that she, and everyone else in her family, had been killed.

None of the assassins spoke Creole or French, she said. The men spoke only Spanish, and communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room. They seemed to find what they wanted on a shelf where her husband kept his files.

“They were looking for something in the room, and they found it,” Mrs. Moïse said.

She said she did not know what it was.

“At this moment, I felt that I was suffocating because there was blood in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “In my mind, everybody was dead, because if the president could die, everybody else could have died too.”

President and Mrs. Moïse in 2019.Credit...Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
The men her husband had called for help, she said — the officials entrusted with his security — are now in Haitian custody.


And while she expressed satisfaction that a number of the accused conspirators have been detained, she is by no means satisfied. Mrs. Moïse wants international law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I., which searched homes in Florida this week as part of the investigation, to track the money that financed the killing. The Colombian mercenaries who were arrested, she said, did not come to Haiti to “play hide and seek,” and she wants to know who paid for it all.

In a statement on Friday, the F.B.I. said it “remains committed to working alongside our international partners to administer justice.”

Mrs. Moïse expected the money to trace back to wealthy oligarchs in Haiti, whose livelihoods were disrupted by her husband’s attacks on their lucrative contracts, she said.

Mrs. Moïse cited a powerful Haitian businessman who has wanted to run for president, Reginald Boulos, as someone who had something to gain from her husband’s death, though she stopped short of accusing him of ordering the assassination.

Mr. Boulos and his businesses have been at the center of a barrage of legal cases brought by the Haitian government, which is investigating allegations of a preferential loan obtained from the state pension fund. Mr. Boulos’ bank accounts were frozen before Mr. Moïse’s death, and they were released to him immediately after he died, Mrs. Moïse said.

Police officials gather evidence around the presidential residence in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.
In an interview, Mr. Boulos said that only his personal accounts, with less than $30,000, had been blocked, and he stressed that a judge had ordered the release of the money this week, after he took the Haitian government to court. He insisted that, far from being involved in the killing, his political career was actually better off with Mr. Moïse alive — because denouncing the president was such a pivotal part of Mr. Boulos’s platform.

“I had absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with his murder, even in dreams,” Mr. Boulos said. “I support a strong, independent international investigation to find who came up with the idea, who financed it and who executed it.”

Mrs. Moïse said she wants the killers to know she is not scared of them.

“I would like people who did this to be caught, otherwise they will kill every single president who takes power,” she said. “They did it once. They will do it again.”

She said she is seriously considering a run for the presidency, once she undergoes more surgeries on her wounded arm. She has already had two surgeries, and doctors now plan to implant nerves from her feet in her arm, she said. She may never regain use of her right arm, she said, and can move only two fingers.

“President Jovenel had a vision,” she said, “and we Haitians are not going to let that die.”

Protests and riots erupted the day before the president’s funeral.

 

[Mega]

Mrs. Moïse said she wants the killers to know she is not scared of them.

“I would like people who did this to be caught, otherwise they will kill every single president who takes power,” she said. “They did it once. They will do it again.”

She said she is seriously considering a run for the presidency, once she undergoes more surgeries on her wounded arm. She has already had two surgeries, and doctors now plan to implant nerves from her feet in her arm, she said. She may never regain use of her right arm, she said, and can move only two fingers.

“President Jovenel had a vision,” she said, “and we Haitians are not going to let that die.”

 

[Mega]

Mr. Moïse was also locked in battle with some of the nation’s wealthy oligarchs, including the family that controlled the nation’s electrical grid. While many people described the president as an autocratic leader, Mrs. Moïse said her fellow citizens should remember him as a man who stood up to the rich and powerful.

And now she wants to know if one of them had him killed.

“Only the oligarchs and the system could kill him,” she said.


Mrs. Moïse expected the money to trace back to wealthy oligarchs in Haiti, whose livelihoods were disrupted by her husband’s attacks on their lucrative contracts, she said.

@Mirin4rmfar @LeVraiPapi . Meme bagay nou tap di egzakteman.

 

[ade]

I wonder what happens to the First Lady and her kids now. Will they have to now move out of the President's residence? There is a new acting leader now so won't they now have to stay in the President's residence? Or maybe the fact that is was a crime scene will prevent anyone from staying there since there probably needs to be an extensive investigation

30-50 guards and nobody was even harmed. They all need to be detained. An obvious inside job

 

[ZoeGod]

There is rumors that PNH is stalling Colombian authorities from seeing the bodies of the two dead Colombian mercenaries. The rumor is because their gunshot wounds is not from the shootout rather from close range gun shot wounds. One of the Colombians killed is the leader of the whole operation that had he lived would have given a lot of information on who hired them. Also the cars they were were mysteriously burned. We don’t know if it’s from the Haitian populace or by the police. Already there is shady shyt going on with the investigation.

 

[intruder]

Find it interesting that she so boldly naming names
And how would she know? I'm sure she got inside info but still I don't think the mercenaries knew who paid for the attack

Martine Moïse cite Boulos comme probable assassin de son mari et envisage de se porter candidate à la présidentielle

Martine Moïse cite Boulos comme probable assassin de son mari et envisage de se porter candidate à la présidentielle
By
Rezo Nodwes
-
30 juillet 2021
2
4090

Vendredi 30 juillet 2021 ((rezonodwes.com))–

Dans une interview accordée au journal New York Times, Martine Moïse, actuellement en Floride aux États-Unis, a cité le nom de l’entrepreneur et homme d’affaires Réginald Boulos comme quelqu’un qui avait quelque chose à gagner de la mort de son mari, bien qu’elle n’ait pas voulu l’accuser d’avoir ordonné l’assassinat.

La veuve du président Jovenel Moïse affirme que l’enquête sur le financement de ce crime remontera à coup sûr aux riches oligarques d’Haïti, dont les moyens de subsistance ont été perturbés par les attaques de l’ex-Chef de l’État contre leurs contrats lucratifs.

Boulos, de son coté, a rejeté d’un revers de main cette accusation, déclarant que sa carrière politique était en fait mieux avec M. Moïse vivant – parce que dénoncer le président était un élément central de sa plate-forme politique.

« Je n’avais absolument, absolument, absolument rien à voir avec son meurtre, même dans les rêves », a déclaré M. Boulos. « Je soutiens une enquête internationale solide et indépendante pour trouver qui a eu l’idée, qui a financé son assassinat et qui l’a exécuté. »

Martine Joseph Moïse a également déclaré qu’elle envisage sérieusement de se présenter à la présidence, – de Banana Republic, avec les cartes Dermalog – une fois qu’elle subira d’autres interventions chirurgicales sur son bras blessé. Elle a déjà subi deux interventions chirurgicales et les médecins prévoient maintenant d’implanter des nerfs de ses pieds dans son bras, a-t-elle déclaré. Elle pourrait ne jamais retrouver l’usage de son bras droit, a-t-elle dit, et ne peut bouger que deux doigts.

« Le président Jovenel avait une vision », a-t-elle dit, « et nous, les Haïtiens, n’allons pas la laisser mourir », alors qu’actuellement, selon la FAO, presque la moitié de la population haïtienne crève de faim. Les haitiens sont devenus plus pauvres qu’ils ne l’étaient avant l’arrivée de Jovenel Moïse au Palais National.

Lors de son bref passage en Haïti pour inhumer son mari assassiné, la veuve du président Moïse a soigneusement évité la protection offerte par les forces de police haïtienne et a préféré débarquer avec des agents de sécurité étrangers, lourdement armés, apparemment aux frais du trésor public.

Elle n’a non plus fait aucune déclaration à la presse haïtienne et les autorités judiciaires n’ont pas encore révélé si elle ou ses enfants ont fait leur déposition comme témoins de l’assassinat de Jovenel Moïse « trahi et abandonné », selon ses propres citations.

 

[intruder]

There is rumors that PNH is stalling Colombian authorities from seeing the bodies of the two dead Colombian mercenaries. The rumor is because their gunshot wounds is not from the shootout rather from close range gun shot wounds. One of the Colombians killed is the leader of the whole operation that had he lived would have given a lot of information on who hired them. Also the cars they were were mysteriously burned. We don’t know if it’s from the Haitian populace or by the police. Already there is shady shyt going on with the investigation.

To be expected.

And this is interesting... Apparently the mercenaries were looking for something in the house . And they found whatever it was...