PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Days before he was assassinated inside the second-floor bedroom of the home that served as his official residence, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was warned of threats to his life, several sources have confirmed to the Miami Herald, including one of the individuals who told him foreign mercenaries were in the country.
The warnings were among several hints of a plot developing against Moïse, a distrustful and unpopular leader who four weeks earlier, on June 10, 2021, wrote in a notebook about a tentative coup d’etat and the need to track down the full name of a certain pastor named “Sanon,” who was rumored to have presidential aspirations.
But Moïse, who had stopped going to his presidential offices on the grounds of the demolished National Palace in the weeks before his killing, supposedly due to fears of getting COVID-19, didn’t seem to take any obvious precautions. He didn’t inform his prime minister or police chief, both men told the Herald, and he didn’t call a special meeting of the government’s security apparatus.
“He thought he knew everything, that he had all the contacts,” Léon Charles, Haiti’s former police director said, adding that he cannot explain Moïse’s reaction. “As chief of police, every time I called him and said, ‘President, I have this information,’ he would say ‘Léon, don’t worry. My people know about it.’ Maybe he thought he was in control.”
With Haitians and the world no closer to learning the truth, Moïse’s killing could well become Haiti’s own version of the John F. Kennedy assassination, a presidential murder mystery where doubts and conspiracy theories abound and persist for years.
As Haiti marks on Friday the second anniversary of the July 7, 2021, assassination that sent the country spiraling into an unprecedented wave of lawlessness, many unanswered questions remain. Among them: Why Moïse didn’t act with urgency, who orchestrated his killing and why. A group of armed Colombians commandos stormed his residence in the middle of the night. The 53-year-old president was tortured and shot a dozen times; his wife, Martine, was injured.
Despite the arrests of about 50 suspects — including 11 in Miami — the brazen murder continues to fuel multiple theories and accusations. Even Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations claimed on Thursday that the assassination was “committed with foreign interference.”
‘As if he had a secret plan’
One of the people who warned Moïse of a possible threat to his life told the Herald he didn’t know how seriously to take the information, but he told the president nevertheless. He has no idea what the president did with the warning, said the man, who asked to remain anonymous because he fears for his safety.
Another person who spoke to the president about threats was former Haiti Sen. Jacques Sauveur Jean. He and the president were close, and during a phone conversation on the night of July 6, 2021, just hours before the killing, Moïse spoke to him about a plan to have him assassinated, Jean said. Moïse told him that “so many people were interested in participating” in his assassination that millions had been collected for the plot, Jean said.
“I was supposed to call him back at 11 p.m.,” Jean said. “He told me that if I call at 11 p.m. and don’t get him, ‘Make sure in the morning we call one another.’ When I called him back at 11 p.m., he didn’t answer.”
A police log of the president’s calls shows that the two men spoke on July 6 around 8 p.m. The call lasted 42 minutes. Determining how much money was involved in the murder is one of the challenges in the case, investigators say. As part of his inquiry, the investigative judge assigned to the inquiry, Walther Voltaire, ordered police to look into banking and government transactions leading up to the day of the assassination.
Jean said the president didn’t say who wanted him dead, but that the president always thought such threats came from those he had crossed as president.
“I used to ask the president if he had information about threats, why didn’t he go public,” Jean said. “He would say, 'I’m going to get them.' He thought he had enough collaborators to arrest all of them, and they wouldn’t get a chance to kill him.”
It was, Jean said, “as if he had a secret plan.”
Two investigations, different objectives
The murder led to investigations by three countries: the U.S., where prosecutors say part of the crime was planned in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale area; Colombia, where the 22 commandos lived, and Haiti, where the plot started off as an arrest-and-kidnapping of the president before inexplicably mushrooming into an assassination.
The U.S. and Haiti investigations have different objectives. The U.S. has honed in on the role of several U.S. citizens and South Florida residents, including three Haitian Americans who were brought to Miami to stand trial after their arrests in Port-au-Prince. The question of who masterminded the attack remains one for Haiti to solve.
Initially, FBI agents wanted to investigate who masterminded the assassination, but federal prosecutors nixed the idea, wanting a more focused probe. Now a gag order by a Miami federal judge prevents defense attorneys from sharing evidence with any third parties including Haitian authorities, stymieing efforts by Voltaire, the fifth investigative judge in Haiti assigned to the inquiry, to get to the bottom of the slaying.
Moïse’s politics a possible motive
Moïse, a political unknown when he was handpicked by former President Michel Martelly, promoted himself as a banana farmer. He was, however, controversial from the start. After his 2015 election — which had to be rerun because of allegations of massive fraud — he failed to hold timely elections, which led to his ruling by decree after he dismissed most of the country’s parliament.
With protests growing over allegations of corruption and whether he was overstaying his time in office, Moïse scheduled elections for Sept. 26, 2021. In the months leading up to his assassination, he was trying to decide whom to back as president and whom to choose as prime minister, his seventh.
Could his political moves have been a motive? Voltaire, the Haitian investigative judge, appears to be investigating the possibility. He has summoned a number of high-profile businessmen and former politicians for questioning, hoping they will provide insight into what was happening around Moïse at the time of his death. Some of the witnesses are well-known political opponents of the president.
Voltaire accompanied FBI agents to the dead president’s residence, where among the evidence agents found were notebooks Moïse kept.
Voltaire works much like a grand jury. He has faced uncooperative witnesses despite calling some to his chambers at least five times, and setting up confrontations between suspects who have given contradictory testimony.
While the U.S. has charged the suspects in its custody, Haiti has yet to issue any formal charges against the dozens of suspects it has jailed, including 17 Colombians and the head of Moïse’s presidential detail.
Among those who have refused to appear before Voltaire is the president’s widow, Martine Moïse, who last month filed a civil suit against the jailed U.S. suspects in Miami-Dade circuit court.
Access to U.S. evidence
Pierre Esperance, a human rights activist whose office has been monitoring developments in the Haitian case, believes the U.S. Justice Department should give Voltaire access to suspects in U.S. custody, in particular to three who fled after the attack and were later arrested in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic before being brought to Miami.
“This is important in order for the judge to be able to carry out his investigation,” said Esperance, whose National Human Rights Defense Network is based in the Haitian capital.
The three suspects have never been questioned by Haitian authorities. Two of them, former Haiti Sen. John Joël Joseph, who is also known as Joseph Joël John, and Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian Chilean businessman and convicted cocaine trafficker recently sentenced to life in prison for his role in the plot after cutting a plea deal, are believed to be cooperating with U.S. investigators.
Esperance considers Joseph key to untangling the questions surrounding the murder, while he believes a third suspect, retired Colombian soldier Mario Antonio Palacio Palacios, known as “Floro,” can also provide insight. Palacios was in hiding for months in Haiti before making his way to Jamaica, where he was eventually arrested on charges of illegally entering the country. Palacios told U.S. investigators that he learned on July 6 that the mission had changed from arresting Moïse to killing him.
“The American justice system should collaborate and give the judge access to all the suspects it has in its custody and these three in particular,” Esperance said. “We believe this will allow the Haitian investigation to move forward more quickly. Also the judge himself has collaborated greatly with the FBI, and the justice system. There should be reciprocity.”
Gag order feeds conspiracy theories
The U.S. court’s gag order and another previous decision by the courts to shield some information from public view has fueled the conspiracy theories about what the U.S. government knows in the case, now scheduled to go to trial in May.
“My fear is the longer this thing takes and goes on, the less evident it seems to me that we will find out who really killed President Moïse,” said Claude Joseph, who was prime minister when Moïse was killed. “It’s a time issue.”
The former prime minister, who asked for an international tribunal in the days after the murder and for a deployment of U.S. troops to Haiti, says he still believes that the U.S. justice system will bring to light what happened that night and the motive behind the assassination.
“It seems to me we are going to find out some truth about what happened,” he said. “But at the same time, here in Haiti nothing is moving. I wonder, if we were to rely on our justice system, would we find the truth about what happened? I’m not too certain when it comes to Haiti.”
Charles, the former police chief, says he believes that the truth can be uncovered in Haiti digging deeper into the relationships between the suspects. This includes the ties between Dimitri Hérard, who was in charge of Moïse’s presidential guards, Sanon and Walter Veintemilla, an Ecuadorian national and financier who purchased the tickets for the Colombians to travel to Haiti.
U.S. investigators don’t appear to think Sanon was central to the murder conspiracy. He’s not charged with that offense but rather with smuggling bullet-proof vests to the Colombian commandos and conspiring with others in a military expedition against Haiti, according to a revised indictment filed last month. But Charles still believes Sanon is a key figure in the assassination plot along with Haitian politicians close to the deceased president and individuals who are part of Haiti’s drug network. Despite the obstacles Voltaire has faced, Charles said he believes he “has enough information to connect the dots.”
Moïse, he said, had no shortage of threats, even if he didn’t share them with him.
“It could be former friends who were not happy with him, and eternal enemies, people who were against him from the beginning,” Charles said.
Jean, the former senator, agreed. He said the president didn’t identify the people who wanted him dead, but he always thought such threats came from those whom he had singled out while governing.
“He was always looking at these people as his principal enemies and for him, the threat came from there.”
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(Miami Herald staff writer Jay Weaver contributed to this story.)
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