A small group of Colombian commandos-for-hire knew of the plot to assassinate the president of Haiti, Colombian President Ivan Duque said Thursday, while his top police official identified two of the alleged leaders.
Eighteen Colombians are among 23 people who have been apprehended in the dragnet that followed the July 7 murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moise. Several have said they were hired through a Doral, Florida-based company, CTU Security, led by Venezuelan emigre Antonio Intriago, who appears to have gone into hiding.
Breaking a relative silence on the events in Haiti, President Duque told La FM radio in Colombia that his administration is providing good leads in the investigation to the middle-of-the-night assassination inside Moise’s private residence in the hills above Port-au-Prince. His wife, first lady Martine Moise, was wounded and is currently recovering at a Miami hospital. No one else, including any of the president’s 23-member security detail that night, was killed or apparently shot.
“Everything suggests that an important group of persons arrived in Haiti on a ‘blind hook,’ taken on a supposed protection mission and … a smaller group apparently had detailed information about the criminal operation and the intention to kill the president of Haiti,” Duque said.
The Colombian president revealed that one soldier — who was present in Haiti and returned to Colombia — has given testimony for the assassination’s investigation. Haitian authorities said 26 Colombians were involved in the armed assault; three were killed.
Duque’s revelations came on the same morning that Colombian National Police Chief Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas Valencia held a news conference that was equally explosive. Highlights of his presentation were tweeted out from his Twitter account.
Three more Colombians are being sought in connection with the assassination, Vargas said, in addition to the three “neutralized,” or dead, and 18 captured. He did not reveal their names, but said the three had met with Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian doctor from South Florida who is in custody in Port-au-Prince and has been called one of the alleged “intellectual authors” of the killing.
Vargas also shed light on the leadership of the group that traveled to Haiti through the Dominican Republic. He said a former army captain, German Alejandro Rivera Garcia, was wired $50,000 from the United States. He did not say by whom, although Haitian authorities, in a news conference late Wednesday, identified the Doral security company’s owner and a South Florida lender, Walter Vientemilla, as persons of interest. Neither man returned phone calls Thursday afternoon.
The Colombian police chief did not say whether Rivera actually was in Haiti or whether he is the ex-soldier who returned home and is cooperating with the investigation. Vargas also identified as one of the group’s leaders Duberney Capador, a Colombian killed in a firefight with Haitian police during the manhunt for Moise’s killers.
Vargas said Capador entered Haiti via the Dominican Republic on May 10, months before the assassination. Capador’s sister has told Colombian media she believes her brother was tricked.
Haiti has remained relatively calm since Moise’s death, with the exception of ongoing clashes at the southern end of Port-au-Prince. Those confrontations have displaced thousands of families and cut off access to the southern region of the country since June 1. Fears continue to mount about armed gangs taking advantage of the political turmoil.
Despite a request by the current acting government for U.S. troops, President Joe Biden on Thursday ruled that out for now.
Biden administration officials earlier in the day had said they were working with the Haitian government to narrow its requests, which initially focused on securing ports and election infrastructure.
“We are looking at everything we can possibly do that will be responsive to the investigation and to augment the Haitian national police’s capability to maintain security and have a successful investigation,” one official said.
Eight FBI agents are currently in Haiti, the senior U.S. official said.
“The Department of Justice criminal division, national security division and the Southern District of Miami are actively involved in helping the Haitian national police with every element of the investigation, including trying to trace the origin of weapons, and finding a possible U.S. link in any potential charges that could be filed in the United States,” the official said. “If charges in the United States can be brought, they will be brought.”
The official noted that the U.S. has “to tread carefully in Haiti because what the U.S. does carries a lot of impact. And so we have been very careful to make sure we’re supporting Haitian solutions to Haitian challenges.”
On the day of the armed assaults, neighbors in Pelerin 5, where the president’s home is located, heard people citing that a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operation was taking place and Haitian police found a hat with DEA in one of the homes it searched. One of four Haitian nationals wanted in the crime is also accused of fabricating a DEA logo, police have said. The State Department and DEA officials have vehemently denied that the DEA was involved in the president’s assassination.
Moise’s death has deepened an already crippling political crisis in Haiti, where three men — the president of the senate, the current acting prime minister and the prime minister designated by Moise days before his death — are all vying to take charge of the country and take it to general elections before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, a group of civic leaders and opposition groups have started their own negotiations to come up with a different candidate and are increasingly speaking of a transition rather than immediate elections.
While Haitians have accused the United States and the United Nations of endorsing one candidate over the other and ignoring civil society, the White House official contended that the Biden administration has “been very careful not to endorse any one political actor, though some tried to get the United States to back them.” The official said the government seeks to “make very clear that, given what is an apparent fatigue in the international community for Haiti, that what will really re-energize international support for Haiti would be a kind of coalition approach, where these actors — even if they’re on opposing sides — are coming together, kind of developing a unity coalition forward.”
Reviewing the Haitian police effort to apprehend the alleged assassins, interim police chief Leon Charles said Thursday that authorities are questioning all 23 individuals in custody.
There are also members of the presidential security team who are being questioned and four high-ranking officers have been relieved of duties and placed in isolation, Charles said, including the leader of the presidential security team, Dimitri Herard. Herard, who is currently the subject of a U.S. arms trafficking investigation, heads the General Security Unit of the National Palace. He has not been formally arrested and his fate, Charles said, depends on the next step in the administrative police probe.
On Thursday, Charles denounced a report coming out of Colombia linking Haiti’s acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, to the assassination.
The national police are benefiting from the technical assistance of the FBI and others, including the Colombian police. The information and evidence gathered, Charles said, “have not revealed any link to the prime minister in place.”
Meanwhile, addressing reports that the Miami-area company CTU Security may have had a contract with the Haitian government to provide security contractors, the head of the Haitian judicial police said investigators have found no such contract.
The revelations in Colombia put more pressure on the FBI and others in South Florida to explain the roles of Sanon, Intriago and two other South Florida men captured early on: a maintenance man named James Solages and a former DEA informant, Joseph G. Vincent. Haitian police also have two other men in custody: Gilbert Dragon, a soft-spoken former rebel leader who played a key role in the bloody 2004 coup that ousted former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and businessman Reynaldo Corvington. Corvington ran his own security company in Haiti called Corvington Courier & Security Services.
Intriago ran security training classes from his Doral operations, and was a wholesaler and retailer of body armor and other protective gear, sold to the Sweetwater police force among others. He also faced three eviction notices in the past decade and at least one lawsuit from a supplier for non-payment.
Still unclear is the degree to which Intriago knew of what was being planned. Haitian police said he made multiple trips there in recent months.
Also unclear is how the operation was financed. One ex-Colombian soldier who spoke with Caracol radio said he was unable to join the group but shared parts of a WhatsApp thread for the recruitment of commandos. In that thread, the person offering the work in an unidentified Central American nation said the United States would be paying their salaries.
When the assault on the presidential residence began, a man shouted through a loudspeaker that it was a DEA operation.
Some of the Colombian commandos have said they believed they were involved in an operation to arrest the Haitian president, perhaps with the goal of turning him over to the DEA or some other U.S. agency. The DEA has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the events.
