To call Haiti a fragile state before last week’s assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse would be generous. A cycle of delayed elections, public frustration, and fraying political legitimacy coupled with raging insecurity, rapidly increasing worries about food, and an ongoing and unchecked pandemic amounts to a whole lot more than fragile.
But the small Caribbean nation found a way to plunge further into chaos after a group of what appeared to be highly trained and heavily armed gunmen stormed the presidential residence in Port-Au-Prince and shot Moïse to death. Haitian First Lady Martine Moïse was shot multiple times and was airlifted to a Florida hospital, where she remains in critical condition. Some two dozen people suspected of involvement in the assassination have been arrested, three of them Haitian-born with U.S. ties.
