Haiti Assassination Investigation Still Stalled One Year Later

On July 7, 2021, Haiti woke up to the news that its president, Jovenel Moise, had just been assassinated in his home by an armed commando. A year later, investigations are at an impasse, the instigators and motives for the crime remain unknown, and the political climate in the country continues to deteriorate. That day, the attackers seem to have easily entered the president’s residence, without the elite units tasked with protecting them doing anything to neutralize them. A few hours later, Haitian police showed exceptional speed in arresting about twenty people, including 18 former Colombian soldiers. But subsequent judicial processes, conducted in both Haiti and the United States, have progressed extremely slowly. Since Moise’s death, the presidency has been vacant and there is no scheduled election date to appoint his successor. Five investigating judges succeeded each other in this case and none of them formally charged any of the forty people imprisoned, including the Colombians who allegedly made up the command. To make matters worse, justice is more adrift than ever: for a month now, the prosecutor’s offices in Port-au-Prince have been occupied by one of the many criminal gangs that control entire portions of Haitian territory. Prime Minister under Suspicion The possible involvement of Prime Minister Ariel Henry in the assassination has further slowed the judicial investigation. Appointed just two days before the assassination, Henry is suspected of having had telephone conversations with one of the main defendants a few hours after the attack. Invited by the prosecutor to give explanations, the head of government did not appear and then dismissed the magistrate, appointing a new minister of justice. This led the president’s widow, Martine Moïse, seriously injured during the attack, to categorically refuse to attend the ceremonies of homage to her late husband, officiated by a head of government on which weigh “serious presumptions that he could have assassinated the president of the Republic,” he said. Moise’s death aggravated Haiti’s structural political crisis.The parliament has not been functioning for two years. Since coming to power in 2017, Moise had not called an election. Today Haiti does not have a president either, and the Court of Justice is not operational due to lack of judges. Henry is at the helm of a country where political leaders and institutions lack the legitimacy that holding elections would give them and which is also undermined by insecurity. Meanwhile, the US justice system indicted three people for the murder of Moise, currently detained in Miami.La Haitian judicial police established, in its investigative report, that the plot against the president had been hatched in the state of Florida and that the Colombian mercenaries were recruited by a security company based in Miami. Last January, Mario Palacios, a Colombian national suspected of being one of five armed men who entered the room where the president was killed; and Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian-Chilean, were formally charged. In June, they were joined by former Haitian Senator John Joel Joseph, accused of complicity in the murder. A fourth alleged commando member was arrested at Istanbul airport in November, but Turkish courts on Monday rejected Haiti’s extradition request and ordered his release. In April, a U.S. judge dealt a blow to those who had hoped that the ongoing judicial process in the United States could lead to knowing the backdrops of Moise’s murder by deciding to classify some of the evidence as secret. We recommend you read: The magistrate took that action because the defendants include two former informants of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and a former FBI informant.” We do not welcome the fact that the United States has decided to protect some information. A whole part of this story will remain secret,” said a Haitian judicial source who preferred to remain anonymous. Profepa has already taken to the Chapultepec Zoo the first 4 lions rescued from the refuge in Ajusco

Original source in Spanish