So whats the plan?
Haitian President Jovenel Moise has been assassinated
- Thread starter Duece
- Start date
Hell of a mystery especially to a non Haitian....we know Haiti is controlled by the elites and foreign interests (as is every country in the Caribbean with the possible exception of Cuba)...we also know that Moise was appointed by a puppet President and for all intents and purposes seemed to be a puppet himself...he seemed to have US support but there are rumblings that there was beef with some elites...we know this wasn't done by revolutionary forces as they wouldn't have simply killed him, they would try to take over the country as well and let it be known that they did it to try and create a movement
So he was killed by people that want the system to remain as is but had a problem with how Moise was running that system...and now dude is inviting the US in (not the UN strangely) ...are there rumblings from the more progressive forces in Haiti that they want to fill in the power vacuum?....living conditions getting increasingly worse there so people could be looking to the progressives...is the call for US involvement a ploy to shut that down before it begins?
I wish I knew more about Aristide...he seemed progressive...he was certainly taken out of power like he was progressive...kidnapped by the USA late at night and dumped in the middle of Central Africa...but then I hear people say they were disappointed in him....what did Aristide do and what became of his political movement?
So he was killed by people that want the system to remain as is but had a problem with how Moise was running that system...and now dude is inviting the US in (not the UN strangely) ...are there rumblings from the more progressive forces in Haiti that they want to fill in the power vacuum?....living conditions getting increasingly worse there so people could be looking to the progressives...is the call for US involvement a ploy to shut that down before it begins?
I wish I knew more about Aristide...he seemed progressive...he was certainly taken out of power like he was progressive...kidnapped by the USA late at night and dumped in the middle of Central Africa...but then I hear people say they were disappointed in him....what did Aristide do and what became of his political movement?
Well the fucking UN got busted poisoning water out there this
During a disaster too.
Aristide was a preacher who was elected by the people. But a preacher isn't a politician. I think that was his biggest downfall, he was in way over his head. Whenever he tried to do something, anything for the people, the U. S. apposed him and blocked trade during most of his terms. 2 devastating things he let happen during his term that hunts the country today (got rid of the military = makes no sense) (agreed on a deal during Clintons administration for the U.S. export rice to Haiti which killed Haiti's rice economy). When he started talking about France needing to pay Haiti back for what Haiti had to pay for the revolution, That's when the U. S. kidnaped him and got rid of him.
Yeah, no doubt...UN were no angels in Haiti by any means (brought cholera) but usually you would call for the UN if you think peacekeeping help is needed rather than the US directly
quick edit...Just checked...they did ask for help from the UN...UN looking it over...US said no to troops
Last edited:
Appreciate the insight...I think his final sin was trying to raise Haiti's minimum wage...same thing happened to dude in Honduras
Forgot about that...
Yea a lot of that's propaganda I am curious as to
The actual everyday Hatian fams perspective
US vs Haiti on fs1
The Brotherman in that early video said this takes heat off the US for LOSING in Afghanistan...which should be headlining news...we LOST another war but nobody's stating that.
All of this sounds so made up and surreal. It clearly looks like an inside job. These so called assassins should have left a trail of dead bodies. I haven't read that a bodyguard or national police officer was killed or tortured and etc. From my readings Jovenel was ready for coup attempts. He must have know that he was on borrowed time.
They're already pulling up old videos of Sanon talking against the international governments that allowed the corrupt fuckery of the Haitian leaders that they have supported and still support, but never questioned their corrupt acts. It's a fair question, but I don't see how this guy managed to pull this off.
Not sure how much of what's in bold below is relevant or if these guys fit the type of advice Colombia gave Haiti - use our mercenaries to keep the kidnappings in check.
Readings:
Thanks for this
It was for that clown who keeps asking what the US did lol
exactly
That idiot lol
Who Paid for That Mansion? A Senator or the Haitian People?
Valued at $3.4 million, a Haitian senator’s Montreal villa has become a potent emblem of the growing gap between Haiti’s impoverished citizens and its wealthy political elite.
Marie Louisa Célestin, the wife of the Haitian senator Rony Célestin, purchased this waterfront villa outright for $3.4 million. Their lavish lifestyle has prompted widespread accusations of corruption within the local Haitian community.
Marie Louisa Célestin, the wife of the Haitian senator Rony Célestin, purchased this waterfront villa outright for $3.4 million. Their lavish lifestyle has prompted widespread accusations of corruption within the local Haitian community. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Dan BilefskyCatherine Porter
By Dan Bilefsky and Catherine Porter
Published July 10, 2021
Updated July 11, 2021, 7:40 a.m. ET
MONTREAL — He is one of the few lawmakers left in Haiti, a close ally of the assassinated president who has kept his seat while the country’s democratic institutions have been whittled away.
As one of only 10 remaining members in all of Haiti’s Parliament, Rony Célestin, a swaggering figure who styles himself as a self-made multimillionaire, belongs to a tiny circle of leaders with the legal authority to steer the nation out of crisis now that the president is dead.
But to many Haitians, Mr. Célestin is also a symbol of one of their biggest grievances: a ruling class that enriches itself while so many go hungry.
In recent months, as the country erupted in protest over abuse of power by the political elite, Mr. Célestin has been parrying accusations of corruption from Haitian activists over his purchase of a mansion almost 2,000 miles away in Canada.
The sprawling $3.4 million villa, with its sweeping driveway, home cinema, wine cellar and swimming pool overlooking a lake, was among the most expensive homes ever sold in one of Quebec’s most affluent neighborhoods, and the purchase set off a corruption investigation into Mr. Célestin by officials in Haiti.
The villa has become emblematic of the chasm between the gilded lifestyles of Haiti’s elite and the majority of the population, who on average earn less than $2.41 a day. Mr. Célestin’s ownership has incited outrage over capital flight — legal and illicit — that drains money from Haiti and weakens the country’s institutions.
Mr. Célestin vehemently denies any wrongdoing, describing himself as a savvy entrepreneur whose success and donations to the election campaign of the assassinated president, Jovenel Moïse, have afforded him a variety of privileges, including the ability to pay for the villa and get his wife a job at the Haitian consulate in Montreal.
Image
Rony Célestin from a Facebook post in 2017.
Credit...Credit
“I have enough influence, if I wanted to make her an ambassador, that would happen,” he told The New York Times.
But The Times found little or no indication in Haiti of the thriving businesses that Mr. Célestin cites as the source of his great wealth. Some appear to operate on a much smaller scale than he claimed, if at all in some cases.
His lawyer declined to provide details about his businesses with the anticorruption inquiry in Haiti underway. Anger over the mansion became so pitched that some members of Montreal’s Haitian community hid in the bushes around the home in Laval, an affluent suburb, and sneaked onto the grounds, hoping to confront Mr. Célestin and his family.
“Haiti is a poor country where people are dying of hunger, and here you have rich people trying to take their money out of the country and buying mansions in cash,” said Frantz André, a leading Haitian human rights advocate in Montreal, who has led protests outside the Haitian consulate in recent months.
Because Haiti, a country of 11 million people, has so few functioning institutions, Mr. Célestin could help play a pivotal role in the nation’s future. Only 10 senators out of 30 remain in Parliament, and Mr. Célestin is one. The terms of the other 20 expired, and new elections were never called. The lower house of Parliament is entirely vacant, and the head of the nation’s highest court died of Covid-19 in June.
Image
Early morning in downtown Port-Au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, in January 2020.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
That leaves senators like Mr. Célestin among the few remaining elected officials in Haiti, with a powerful say in determining how the country should be led after the brazen assassination of Mr. Moïse on Wednesday.
But critics call the Senate dysfunctional. And as the country has spiraled into turmoil in recent months, members of the political elite have prospered abroad in places like the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada, investing their money — and in some cases laundering it, the authorities say — through real estate.
Despite billions of dollars in reconstruction aid after a devastating earthquake in 2010, the country has not rebuilt, and many contend it is worse off. Armed gangs control many areas, poverty and hunger are rising and officials like Mr. Célestin have been accused of enriching themselves while failing to provide the country with even the most basic services. Transparency International, the anticorruption monitor, ranked Haiti 170th out of 180 countries for perceived levels of corruption in 2020 — tied with North Korea.
In a rare interview in late March, Mr. Célestin, 46, said he amassed his wealth in farming, importing and other legitimate businesses that earned him millions of dollars a month. He gave his wife, Marie Louisa Célestin, the money to buy the mansion in late 2020, he said, so that she and their children could enjoy the “social advantages” of living in Canada.
“I don’t have to justify myself, I’m sick of having to do it,” Mr. Célestin said.
A son of farmers who grew up in a rural area, Mr. Célestin said he began his business career by importing products in a rented truck, sometimes sleeping on the sacks of sugar and flour he was shuttling. He is now a member of the assassinated president’s Bald Head Haitian party.
“I came from nowhere, and I became who I am with no support,” he said. Referring to his critics, he added: “I don’t have to be scared of a bunch of vagabonds, bastards and criminals.”
But the traces of Mr. Célestin’s business empire on the ground in Haiti differed greatly from the image he painted.
Image
Photographs from the real estate listing of the Célestins’ $3.4 million villa, boasting manicured gardens, an in-ground pool and a wine cellar. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
He said he owned a giant henhouse in the Haitian city of Léogâne with 800,000 hens valued at about $60 million, but did not provide any supporting documentation. A reporter hired by The Times who visited the city could not find such a vast henhouse or anyone who had heard of it. Patrice Dumont, a senator from Léogâne, told The Times that Mr. Célestin’s project had been planned but never begun.
Mr. Célestin said he also had a radio station called Model FM, which he started in a rural region but which grew to the point that he installed it in a suburb of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The station does have a small, discreet office in the suburb of Petionville, with no signs. On the two occasions when The Times visited, the office was closed, or a single person was there who could provide no information about the station — not even an advertising rate sheet.
Mr. Célestin said he also owned a gas company called PetroGaz-Haiti, but by his own description, it appeared to violate legal prohibitions against profiting from state funds. While politicians are permitted to own businesses, the Constitution forbids them from having contracts with the state, which Mr. Célestin said he had had for four years through the company.
With outrage brewing, the Haitian government’s Anti-Corruption Unit launched an investigation into the purchase of the Célestin home in Canada in February. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police force, said it could not disclose whether it was also investigating the transaction. But under Canadian regulations, the purchase should have raised a red flag, said Garry Clement, the former head of an R.C.M.P. unit that investigates money laundering.
As a senator, Mr. Célestin is considered a “politically exposed person” under Canadian money-laundering regulations, which means financial institutions are required to perform due diligence to determine the source of any transferred funds greater than $100,000. These rules would also apply to Mrs. Célestin as the wife of a “P.E.P.,” Mr. Clement explained.
Mr. Célestin said everything about the purchase was above board. “If I wasn’t clean, I would have had a lot of trouble with the banks in Miami,” he added, saying that he routinely transferred between $20 million and $30 million to Turkey to buy iron for what he described as one of his import businesses. “I would be scared if my money wasn’t clean.”
But Mr. Célestin and his lawyer in Montreal, Alexandre Bergevin, declined to answer follow-up questions or provide the names of his import company or his farm. His wife, a counselor at the Haitian consulate in Montreal since 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.
“I am no longer at this level, the one where my wife or I am looking for work to live,” Mr. Célestin said, emphasizing his wealth by adding that his chef in Haiti earned $4,000 a month.
Image
Demonstrators held signs reading ”Down with the bourgeois dictatorship” during a protest against the government of President Jovenel Moïse in March in Port-au-Prince.Credit...Reuters
Despite the investigation into Mr. Célestin in Haiti, many activists there and in Canada were skeptical that it was being conducted in earnest. One said he had asked about the case just last week and was told by officials that they were not following through.
A 2020 report by the State Department on human rights in Haiti said that despite many reports of government corruption, wrongdoers operate with impunity. The country’s Senate has never prosecuted a high-level official accused of corruption as required by the Constitution, the report said.
In 2019, Willot Joseph, a senator with the assassinated president’s party, admitted on the radio that he had accepted a $100,000 bribe from a candidate for prime minister in exchange for a “yes” vote on his nomination.
Three damning reports by the country’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes revealed in lengthy detail that much of the $2 billion lent to Haiti as part of a Venezuela-sponsored oil program, PetroCaribe, had been embezzled or wasted over eight years by a succession of Haitian governments.
Since 2008, all elected officials in Haiti have been legally required to disclose their financial assets upon taking and leaving office. But a 2019 report by the Clear Eyes Foundation, a Haitian human rights group, revealed that few had done so over the previous 10 years, and that there had been no penalties or repercussions.
Over the years, Mr. Célestin has faced multiple accusations of fraud and corruption, both in his election campaigns and in his role as a public servant.
In 2010, when he was elected to Parliament’s lower chamber, the elections were marred by allegations of corruption and fraud. Seven years later, when he won a Senate seat, his opponent said the vote had been rigged.
In 2016, Mr. Célestin was living in a mansion when it was seized by the police during a drug trafficking investigation. Mr. Célestin denied the house had links to a drug dealer and said the accusations had been concocted by political enemies.
Even before the president’s assassination this week, senior Canadian officials had expressed alarm over the deteriorating situation in Haiti and the country’s poor governance.
“We are concerned about corruption, and rising insecurity involving kidnappings,” said John Babcock, a spokesman for Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in an April email. “We are very aware the population is suffering.”
Image
Frantz André, 66, and his son Nicolas André, 23, both rights activists, have attended protests outside Haiti’s Montreal consulate.Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Senior Canadian officials also said Canada had been strengthening legislation to combat money laundering and adding resources to fight it. A 2019 report by the State Department designated Canada a “major money laundering country,” citing weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, putting it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia.
Money laundering experts said too few banks, notaries and real estate agents were reporting suspicious activities in Canada, and that money laundering cases seldom resulted in convictions.
“People think Canada is the Boy Scout of countries, but when it comes to real estate, that is not always the case,” said Andy Yan, an adjunct professor of urban planning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked Mrs. Célestin to make herself available for questioning by the government’s Anti-Corruption Unit, said the consul general in Montreal, Fritz Dorvilier. But Haitian activists say they have little faith in the inquiry.
Image
A park in Montreal North, an area of the city that is home to a large and vibrant Haitian community. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Pierre Espérance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, has called for Mr. Célestin to reveal records documenting his assets and expenses, such as custom slips from his imports of merchandise and his tax returns.
“He must pay a lot of taxes to the state if he is earning millions of dollars a month,” Mr. Espérance said from his office in Port-au-Prince. “He must show us the proof.”
Mr. André, the Montreal-based Haitian human rights advocate, posted photographs of the home’s lavish interior on his Facebook page, urging fellow Haitians to pay the family a visit. “If you are of Haitian origin, this is your home too,” he wrote.
“I suggest you ask for the lake view,” he wrote. “Have a good stay.”
Valued at $3.4 million, a Haitian senator’s Montreal villa has become a potent emblem of the growing gap between Haiti’s impoverished citizens and its wealthy political elite.
Marie Louisa Célestin, the wife of the Haitian senator Rony Célestin, purchased this waterfront villa outright for $3.4 million. Their lavish lifestyle has prompted widespread accusations of corruption within the local Haitian community.
Marie Louisa Célestin, the wife of the Haitian senator Rony Célestin, purchased this waterfront villa outright for $3.4 million. Their lavish lifestyle has prompted widespread accusations of corruption within the local Haitian community. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Dan BilefskyCatherine Porter
By Dan Bilefsky and Catherine Porter
Published July 10, 2021
Updated July 11, 2021, 7:40 a.m. ET
MONTREAL — He is one of the few lawmakers left in Haiti, a close ally of the assassinated president who has kept his seat while the country’s democratic institutions have been whittled away.
As one of only 10 remaining members in all of Haiti’s Parliament, Rony Célestin, a swaggering figure who styles himself as a self-made multimillionaire, belongs to a tiny circle of leaders with the legal authority to steer the nation out of crisis now that the president is dead.
But to many Haitians, Mr. Célestin is also a symbol of one of their biggest grievances: a ruling class that enriches itself while so many go hungry.
In recent months, as the country erupted in protest over abuse of power by the political elite, Mr. Célestin has been parrying accusations of corruption from Haitian activists over his purchase of a mansion almost 2,000 miles away in Canada.
The sprawling $3.4 million villa, with its sweeping driveway, home cinema, wine cellar and swimming pool overlooking a lake, was among the most expensive homes ever sold in one of Quebec’s most affluent neighborhoods, and the purchase set off a corruption investigation into Mr. Célestin by officials in Haiti.
The villa has become emblematic of the chasm between the gilded lifestyles of Haiti’s elite and the majority of the population, who on average earn less than $2.41 a day. Mr. Célestin’s ownership has incited outrage over capital flight — legal and illicit — that drains money from Haiti and weakens the country’s institutions.
Mr. Célestin vehemently denies any wrongdoing, describing himself as a savvy entrepreneur whose success and donations to the election campaign of the assassinated president, Jovenel Moïse, have afforded him a variety of privileges, including the ability to pay for the villa and get his wife a job at the Haitian consulate in Montreal.
Image
Rony Célestin from a Facebook post in 2017.
Credit...Credit
“I have enough influence, if I wanted to make her an ambassador, that would happen,” he told The New York Times.
But The Times found little or no indication in Haiti of the thriving businesses that Mr. Célestin cites as the source of his great wealth. Some appear to operate on a much smaller scale than he claimed, if at all in some cases.
His lawyer declined to provide details about his businesses with the anticorruption inquiry in Haiti underway. Anger over the mansion became so pitched that some members of Montreal’s Haitian community hid in the bushes around the home in Laval, an affluent suburb, and sneaked onto the grounds, hoping to confront Mr. Célestin and his family.
“Haiti is a poor country where people are dying of hunger, and here you have rich people trying to take their money out of the country and buying mansions in cash,” said Frantz André, a leading Haitian human rights advocate in Montreal, who has led protests outside the Haitian consulate in recent months.
Because Haiti, a country of 11 million people, has so few functioning institutions, Mr. Célestin could help play a pivotal role in the nation’s future. Only 10 senators out of 30 remain in Parliament, and Mr. Célestin is one. The terms of the other 20 expired, and new elections were never called. The lower house of Parliament is entirely vacant, and the head of the nation’s highest court died of Covid-19 in June.
Image
Early morning in downtown Port-Au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, in January 2020.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times
That leaves senators like Mr. Célestin among the few remaining elected officials in Haiti, with a powerful say in determining how the country should be led after the brazen assassination of Mr. Moïse on Wednesday.
But critics call the Senate dysfunctional. And as the country has spiraled into turmoil in recent months, members of the political elite have prospered abroad in places like the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada, investing their money — and in some cases laundering it, the authorities say — through real estate.
Despite billions of dollars in reconstruction aid after a devastating earthquake in 2010, the country has not rebuilt, and many contend it is worse off. Armed gangs control many areas, poverty and hunger are rising and officials like Mr. Célestin have been accused of enriching themselves while failing to provide the country with even the most basic services. Transparency International, the anticorruption monitor, ranked Haiti 170th out of 180 countries for perceived levels of corruption in 2020 — tied with North Korea.
In a rare interview in late March, Mr. Célestin, 46, said he amassed his wealth in farming, importing and other legitimate businesses that earned him millions of dollars a month. He gave his wife, Marie Louisa Célestin, the money to buy the mansion in late 2020, he said, so that she and their children could enjoy the “social advantages” of living in Canada.
“I don’t have to justify myself, I’m sick of having to do it,” Mr. Célestin said.
A son of farmers who grew up in a rural area, Mr. Célestin said he began his business career by importing products in a rented truck, sometimes sleeping on the sacks of sugar and flour he was shuttling. He is now a member of the assassinated president’s Bald Head Haitian party.
“I came from nowhere, and I became who I am with no support,” he said. Referring to his critics, he added: “I don’t have to be scared of a bunch of vagabonds, bastards and criminals.”
But the traces of Mr. Célestin’s business empire on the ground in Haiti differed greatly from the image he painted.
Image
Photographs from the real estate listing of the Célestins’ $3.4 million villa, boasting manicured gardens, an in-ground pool and a wine cellar. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
He said he owned a giant henhouse in the Haitian city of Léogâne with 800,000 hens valued at about $60 million, but did not provide any supporting documentation. A reporter hired by The Times who visited the city could not find such a vast henhouse or anyone who had heard of it. Patrice Dumont, a senator from Léogâne, told The Times that Mr. Célestin’s project had been planned but never begun.
Mr. Célestin said he also had a radio station called Model FM, which he started in a rural region but which grew to the point that he installed it in a suburb of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The station does have a small, discreet office in the suburb of Petionville, with no signs. On the two occasions when The Times visited, the office was closed, or a single person was there who could provide no information about the station — not even an advertising rate sheet.
Mr. Célestin said he also owned a gas company called PetroGaz-Haiti, but by his own description, it appeared to violate legal prohibitions against profiting from state funds. While politicians are permitted to own businesses, the Constitution forbids them from having contracts with the state, which Mr. Célestin said he had had for four years through the company.
With outrage brewing, the Haitian government’s Anti-Corruption Unit launched an investigation into the purchase of the Célestin home in Canada in February. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police force, said it could not disclose whether it was also investigating the transaction. But under Canadian regulations, the purchase should have raised a red flag, said Garry Clement, the former head of an R.C.M.P. unit that investigates money laundering.
As a senator, Mr. Célestin is considered a “politically exposed person” under Canadian money-laundering regulations, which means financial institutions are required to perform due diligence to determine the source of any transferred funds greater than $100,000. These rules would also apply to Mrs. Célestin as the wife of a “P.E.P.,” Mr. Clement explained.
Mr. Célestin said everything about the purchase was above board. “If I wasn’t clean, I would have had a lot of trouble with the banks in Miami,” he added, saying that he routinely transferred between $20 million and $30 million to Turkey to buy iron for what he described as one of his import businesses. “I would be scared if my money wasn’t clean.”
But Mr. Célestin and his lawyer in Montreal, Alexandre Bergevin, declined to answer follow-up questions or provide the names of his import company or his farm. His wife, a counselor at the Haitian consulate in Montreal since 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.
“I am no longer at this level, the one where my wife or I am looking for work to live,” Mr. Célestin said, emphasizing his wealth by adding that his chef in Haiti earned $4,000 a month.
Image
Demonstrators held signs reading ”Down with the bourgeois dictatorship” during a protest against the government of President Jovenel Moïse in March in Port-au-Prince.Credit...Reuters
Despite the investigation into Mr. Célestin in Haiti, many activists there and in Canada were skeptical that it was being conducted in earnest. One said he had asked about the case just last week and was told by officials that they were not following through.
A 2020 report by the State Department on human rights in Haiti said that despite many reports of government corruption, wrongdoers operate with impunity. The country’s Senate has never prosecuted a high-level official accused of corruption as required by the Constitution, the report said.
In 2019, Willot Joseph, a senator with the assassinated president’s party, admitted on the radio that he had accepted a $100,000 bribe from a candidate for prime minister in exchange for a “yes” vote on his nomination.
Three damning reports by the country’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes revealed in lengthy detail that much of the $2 billion lent to Haiti as part of a Venezuela-sponsored oil program, PetroCaribe, had been embezzled or wasted over eight years by a succession of Haitian governments.
Since 2008, all elected officials in Haiti have been legally required to disclose their financial assets upon taking and leaving office. But a 2019 report by the Clear Eyes Foundation, a Haitian human rights group, revealed that few had done so over the previous 10 years, and that there had been no penalties or repercussions.
Over the years, Mr. Célestin has faced multiple accusations of fraud and corruption, both in his election campaigns and in his role as a public servant.
In 2010, when he was elected to Parliament’s lower chamber, the elections were marred by allegations of corruption and fraud. Seven years later, when he won a Senate seat, his opponent said the vote had been rigged.
In 2016, Mr. Célestin was living in a mansion when it was seized by the police during a drug trafficking investigation. Mr. Célestin denied the house had links to a drug dealer and said the accusations had been concocted by political enemies.
Even before the president’s assassination this week, senior Canadian officials had expressed alarm over the deteriorating situation in Haiti and the country’s poor governance.
“We are concerned about corruption, and rising insecurity involving kidnappings,” said John Babcock, a spokesman for Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in an April email. “We are very aware the population is suffering.”
Image
Frantz André, 66, and his son Nicolas André, 23, both rights activists, have attended protests outside Haiti’s Montreal consulate.Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Senior Canadian officials also said Canada had been strengthening legislation to combat money laundering and adding resources to fight it. A 2019 report by the State Department designated Canada a “major money laundering country,” citing weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, putting it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia.
Money laundering experts said too few banks, notaries and real estate agents were reporting suspicious activities in Canada, and that money laundering cases seldom resulted in convictions.
“People think Canada is the Boy Scout of countries, but when it comes to real estate, that is not always the case,” said Andy Yan, an adjunct professor of urban planning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked Mrs. Célestin to make herself available for questioning by the government’s Anti-Corruption Unit, said the consul general in Montreal, Fritz Dorvilier. But Haitian activists say they have little faith in the inquiry.
Image
A park in Montreal North, an area of the city that is home to a large and vibrant Haitian community. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times
Pierre Espérance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, has called for Mr. Célestin to reveal records documenting his assets and expenses, such as custom slips from his imports of merchandise and his tax returns.
“He must pay a lot of taxes to the state if he is earning millions of dollars a month,” Mr. Espérance said from his office in Port-au-Prince. “He must show us the proof.”
Mr. André, the Montreal-based Haitian human rights advocate, posted photographs of the home’s lavish interior on his Facebook page, urging fellow Haitians to pay the family a visit. “If you are of Haitian origin, this is your home too,” he wrote.
“I suggest you ask for the lake view,” he wrote. “Have a good stay.”
Haiti’s Power Vacuum Escalates Kingmakers’ Battle for Control
The contest for power is taking place on two levels. One battle pits current politicians against one another; the other is among power brokers vying for control behind the scenes.
The late President Jovenel Moïse, center right, with Senate President Joseph Lambert, center left, in 2018. Most of the country’s remaining lawmakers have declared that Mr. Lambert should become provisional president.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Natalie Kitroeff and Catherine Porter
July 10, 2021
The assassination of Haiti’s president has thrown the nation into disarray, spawned shootouts on the streets and left terrified citizens cowering in their homes. But behind the scenes a bigger, high-stakes battle for control of the country is already accelerating.
The fault lines were drawn long before President Jovenel Moïse was killed. For more than a year before his death, the president had been attacking his political rivals, undermining the nation’s democratic institutions and angering church and gang leaders alike.
Then the president was gunned down in his home on Wednesday — and the power play burst into the open, with the interim prime minister claiming to run the country despite open challenges by other politicians.
But even as that battle over who inherits the reins of government plays out in public, analysts say a more complex, less visible battle for power is picking up speed. It is a fight waged by some of Haiti’s richest and most well-connected kingmakers, eager for the approval of the United States, which has exercised outsized control over the fate of the Caribbean nation in the past.
How it will all play out is unclear.
Elections were planned for September, but many civil society groups in Haiti worry that going ahead with them would only sharpen the political crisis. They question whether it would even be feasible to hold legitimate elections given how weak the nation’s institutions have become, and some civil society leaders are expected to meet Saturday to try to devise a new path forward.
Image
Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, on Friday. The nation has been thrown into chaos since the president was assassinated on Wednesday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Many fear that Haitians themselves may not have much of a say in the matter.
“This whole system is founded on the idea that legitimacy is determined by outside factors,” said Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “So while politicians in Port-au-Prince fight for power, the rest of the country will continue to be ignored.”
The first to assert the right to lead the nation was the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, who called a state of siege immediately after the attack and has spent the past several days trying to parlay general words of support for Haiti from the United States into the appearance, at least, of a mandate to govern. But his legitimacy has been directly challenged by the country’s last remaining elected officials, who are trying to form a new transitional government to replace him.
Eight of the 10 remaining senators in Haiti signed a resolution calling for a new government to replace Mr. Joseph. As “the only functioning elected officials of the republic,” they wrote on Friday, they were the only ones who could “exercise national sovereignty.”
Image
Claude Joseph speaking in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Credit...Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press
The lawmakers declared that Senate President Joseph Lambert should become provisional president and that Mr. Joseph should be replaced as prime minister by Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon and politician who had named by Mr. Moïse to take the position but who was not yet sworn in.
The others jockeying for control, behind the scenes, includes Michel Martelly, the former Haitian president, and Reginald Boulos, a prominent businessman. Both have been testing the waters in Washington recently as they explore potential bids for the presidency.
In May, Mr. Boulos, one of Haiti’s richest men and a former ally of Mr. Moïse, hired two U.S. lobbying firms to represent him. This month, according to a federal filing, Mr. Boulos retained another firm, run by Arthur Estopinan, a lobbyist who served as the chief of staff for U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
In an interview, Mr. Estopinan said he was helping Mr. Boulos “get his message out” in Washington, but that the focus had shifted recently.
“The assassination of the president happened, so obviously now that has taken center stage because everyone wants to know, you know, who was the culprit,” Mr. Estopinan said. “Obviously you have to leave politics aside for now that the Haitian people are mourning.”
In late June, Mr. Martelly, the former Haitian president, made his own trip to Washington, according to two people familiar with the visit who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The purpose was to interview lobbyists as he mulled another run at Haiti’s presidency, one of the people said.
Mr. Martelly, a former pop singer, left the presidency in 2016 without an immediate successor after the election — eventually won by Mr. Moïse — was stalled amid allegations of fraud. Known as Sweet Micky, Mr. Martelly was criticized for not holding elections for five years and for ruling the country like an autocrat, though he maintained that he “faced the impossible” in taking charge after the 2010 earthquake that flattened much of Haiti.
Image
Former president Michel Martelly in Port-au-Prince in 2016. Credit...Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press
In the meantime, Mr. Joseph and his fellow ministers have continued to insist that they are leading the government.
“This is part of the chaos certain people are trying to create in the country,” said Mathias Pierre, the country’s minister for elections, referring to the efforts to unseat Mr. Joseph. “For us, this is a second attempt to assassinate the president. We are doing what we have to do to establish stability and prepare for elections.”
On Friday, the top prosecutor in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, summoned five top businessmen and politicians to report for questioning in connection with the assassination. Analysts said everyone on that list was perceived to be an enemy of Mr. Moïse, including Mr. Boulos, who helped get the slain president elected, but later became his nemesis.
Mr. Boulos, who owns supermarkets, hotels and car dealerships, recently came under investigation by the government’s anti-corruption unit, which many saw as politically motivated. Mr. Boulos, who denied any involvement in the killing, said he had seen the summons only on social media so far.
“I have not seen it and it has not been delivered to me,” he said via WhatsApp message Saturday morning. “My lawyers will try to confirm it and advise me then.”
The leadership question is especially murky because the nation’s democratic institutions have been hollowed out, leaving no clear options for settling disputes over who should be the rightful leader.
Image
Reginald Boulos, center, in Port-au-Prince in February. Credit...Reginald Louissaint Jr/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Haiti is a parliamentary democracy with almost no parliament. The Senate is at one-third its usual size, and the lower house is entirely vacant because the members’ terms expired last year. Mr. Moïse had governed by decree for about a year.
Beyond that, the judiciary has been virtually nonexistent for the past year, with judges often on strike to protest the political upheaval and rampant violence. And the head of the nation’s highest court, who might have offered guidance, died of Covid-19 in June.
Making matters worse, Haiti appears to have two Constitutions, and the dueling documents say different things about what to do if a president dies in office.
The 1987 version deems that if the presidency is vacant for any reason, the country’s most senior judge should step in.
But in 2012, the Constitution was amended, and the new one directed that the president be replaced by a council of ministers, under the guidance of the prime minister. Except if, as was the case with Mr. Moïse, the president was in the fourth year of office. In that case, Parliament would vote for a provisional president — but there is barely any parliament left.
Following a plea by Haiti for the United States to send forces to the country to protect key infrastructure, the Pentagon said it was “analyzing” the request, though there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch troops.
American officials have been keenly eyeing who wins the loyalty of the nation’s security forces, but even that may be a tricky litmus test.
Haiti’s police have been thrown into tumult following the assassination, engaging in pitched gun battles with people they say are suspects.
Image
Police patrolling the streets in Port-au-Prince on Friday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Four of the men within the president’s security detail have been called in for questioning. Outside observers and many Haitians are increasingly suspicious that at least some of those who were supposed to protect the president were in on the attack, given how little resistance the assailants encountered from the president’s guards.
Most of the suspects in custody are Colombian, and Haitian officials have pointed to “foreign involvement” in the assassination. But the sister of the one of the Colombians accused in the plot said her brother had told her that he had not gone to Haiti to kill anyone — but rather had traveled to the Caribbean nation after receiving a job offer to protect a “very important person.”
His message came shortly before he died himself in the bloody aftermath of the assassination, one of three people killed in confrontations with the authorities.
“What I am 100 percent sure of is that my brother was not doing what they are saying, that he was hurting someone,” said Yenny Carolina Capador, 37, of her brother, Duberney Capador, 40.
At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, the day of the president’s assassination, Ms. Capador began receiving calls and texts from her brother, she said. He told her that he was in danger, holed up in a home with bullets flying around him. At times, Ms. Capador could hear the gunfire in the background.
Ms. Capador said her brother told her nothing about an assassination, and instead told her that he had arrived “too late” to save the “important person” he claimed he was hired to protect.
Questions have been swirling in Washington about how the United States will react if Haitian civil society leaders push for a path out of the turmoil that contradicts the plans of the sitting government.
“It’s going to be an amazing drama about how the U.S. responds,” said Representative Andy Levin, of Michigan, co-chairman of the House Haiti Caucus and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “So far we have resisted the idea of a transition to democracy that’s not, like, whoever happens to be sitting there in office.”
The contest for power is taking place on two levels. One battle pits current politicians against one another; the other is among power brokers vying for control behind the scenes.
The late President Jovenel Moïse, center right, with Senate President Joseph Lambert, center left, in 2018. Most of the country’s remaining lawmakers have declared that Mr. Lambert should become provisional president.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Natalie Kitroeff and Catherine Porter
July 10, 2021
The assassination of Haiti’s president has thrown the nation into disarray, spawned shootouts on the streets and left terrified citizens cowering in their homes. But behind the scenes a bigger, high-stakes battle for control of the country is already accelerating.
The fault lines were drawn long before President Jovenel Moïse was killed. For more than a year before his death, the president had been attacking his political rivals, undermining the nation’s democratic institutions and angering church and gang leaders alike.
Then the president was gunned down in his home on Wednesday — and the power play burst into the open, with the interim prime minister claiming to run the country despite open challenges by other politicians.
But even as that battle over who inherits the reins of government plays out in public, analysts say a more complex, less visible battle for power is picking up speed. It is a fight waged by some of Haiti’s richest and most well-connected kingmakers, eager for the approval of the United States, which has exercised outsized control over the fate of the Caribbean nation in the past.
How it will all play out is unclear.
Elections were planned for September, but many civil society groups in Haiti worry that going ahead with them would only sharpen the political crisis. They question whether it would even be feasible to hold legitimate elections given how weak the nation’s institutions have become, and some civil society leaders are expected to meet Saturday to try to devise a new path forward.
Image
Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, on Friday. The nation has been thrown into chaos since the president was assassinated on Wednesday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Many fear that Haitians themselves may not have much of a say in the matter.
“This whole system is founded on the idea that legitimacy is determined by outside factors,” said Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “So while politicians in Port-au-Prince fight for power, the rest of the country will continue to be ignored.”
The first to assert the right to lead the nation was the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, who called a state of siege immediately after the attack and has spent the past several days trying to parlay general words of support for Haiti from the United States into the appearance, at least, of a mandate to govern. But his legitimacy has been directly challenged by the country’s last remaining elected officials, who are trying to form a new transitional government to replace him.
Eight of the 10 remaining senators in Haiti signed a resolution calling for a new government to replace Mr. Joseph. As “the only functioning elected officials of the republic,” they wrote on Friday, they were the only ones who could “exercise national sovereignty.”
Image
Claude Joseph speaking in Port-au-Prince on Thursday. Credit...Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press
The lawmakers declared that Senate President Joseph Lambert should become provisional president and that Mr. Joseph should be replaced as prime minister by Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon and politician who had named by Mr. Moïse to take the position but who was not yet sworn in.
The others jockeying for control, behind the scenes, includes Michel Martelly, the former Haitian president, and Reginald Boulos, a prominent businessman. Both have been testing the waters in Washington recently as they explore potential bids for the presidency.
In May, Mr. Boulos, one of Haiti’s richest men and a former ally of Mr. Moïse, hired two U.S. lobbying firms to represent him. This month, according to a federal filing, Mr. Boulos retained another firm, run by Arthur Estopinan, a lobbyist who served as the chief of staff for U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
In an interview, Mr. Estopinan said he was helping Mr. Boulos “get his message out” in Washington, but that the focus had shifted recently.
“The assassination of the president happened, so obviously now that has taken center stage because everyone wants to know, you know, who was the culprit,” Mr. Estopinan said. “Obviously you have to leave politics aside for now that the Haitian people are mourning.”
In late June, Mr. Martelly, the former Haitian president, made his own trip to Washington, according to two people familiar with the visit who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The purpose was to interview lobbyists as he mulled another run at Haiti’s presidency, one of the people said.
Mr. Martelly, a former pop singer, left the presidency in 2016 without an immediate successor after the election — eventually won by Mr. Moïse — was stalled amid allegations of fraud. Known as Sweet Micky, Mr. Martelly was criticized for not holding elections for five years and for ruling the country like an autocrat, though he maintained that he “faced the impossible” in taking charge after the 2010 earthquake that flattened much of Haiti.
Image
Former president Michel Martelly in Port-au-Prince in 2016. Credit...Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press
In the meantime, Mr. Joseph and his fellow ministers have continued to insist that they are leading the government.
“This is part of the chaos certain people are trying to create in the country,” said Mathias Pierre, the country’s minister for elections, referring to the efforts to unseat Mr. Joseph. “For us, this is a second attempt to assassinate the president. We are doing what we have to do to establish stability and prepare for elections.”
On Friday, the top prosecutor in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, summoned five top businessmen and politicians to report for questioning in connection with the assassination. Analysts said everyone on that list was perceived to be an enemy of Mr. Moïse, including Mr. Boulos, who helped get the slain president elected, but later became his nemesis.
Mr. Boulos, who owns supermarkets, hotels and car dealerships, recently came under investigation by the government’s anti-corruption unit, which many saw as politically motivated. Mr. Boulos, who denied any involvement in the killing, said he had seen the summons only on social media so far.
“I have not seen it and it has not been delivered to me,” he said via WhatsApp message Saturday morning. “My lawyers will try to confirm it and advise me then.”
The leadership question is especially murky because the nation’s democratic institutions have been hollowed out, leaving no clear options for settling disputes over who should be the rightful leader.
Image
Reginald Boulos, center, in Port-au-Prince in February. Credit...Reginald Louissaint Jr/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Haiti is a parliamentary democracy with almost no parliament. The Senate is at one-third its usual size, and the lower house is entirely vacant because the members’ terms expired last year. Mr. Moïse had governed by decree for about a year.
Beyond that, the judiciary has been virtually nonexistent for the past year, with judges often on strike to protest the political upheaval and rampant violence. And the head of the nation’s highest court, who might have offered guidance, died of Covid-19 in June.
Making matters worse, Haiti appears to have two Constitutions, and the dueling documents say different things about what to do if a president dies in office.
The 1987 version deems that if the presidency is vacant for any reason, the country’s most senior judge should step in.
But in 2012, the Constitution was amended, and the new one directed that the president be replaced by a council of ministers, under the guidance of the prime minister. Except if, as was the case with Mr. Moïse, the president was in the fourth year of office. In that case, Parliament would vote for a provisional president — but there is barely any parliament left.
Following a plea by Haiti for the United States to send forces to the country to protect key infrastructure, the Pentagon said it was “analyzing” the request, though there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch troops.
American officials have been keenly eyeing who wins the loyalty of the nation’s security forces, but even that may be a tricky litmus test.
Haiti’s police have been thrown into tumult following the assassination, engaging in pitched gun battles with people they say are suspects.
Image
Police patrolling the streets in Port-au-Prince on Friday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Four of the men within the president’s security detail have been called in for questioning. Outside observers and many Haitians are increasingly suspicious that at least some of those who were supposed to protect the president were in on the attack, given how little resistance the assailants encountered from the president’s guards.
Most of the suspects in custody are Colombian, and Haitian officials have pointed to “foreign involvement” in the assassination. But the sister of the one of the Colombians accused in the plot said her brother had told her that he had not gone to Haiti to kill anyone — but rather had traveled to the Caribbean nation after receiving a job offer to protect a “very important person.”
His message came shortly before he died himself in the bloody aftermath of the assassination, one of three people killed in confrontations with the authorities.
“What I am 100 percent sure of is that my brother was not doing what they are saying, that he was hurting someone,” said Yenny Carolina Capador, 37, of her brother, Duberney Capador, 40.
At 6 a.m. on Wednesday, the day of the president’s assassination, Ms. Capador began receiving calls and texts from her brother, she said. He told her that he was in danger, holed up in a home with bullets flying around him. At times, Ms. Capador could hear the gunfire in the background.
Ms. Capador said her brother told her nothing about an assassination, and instead told her that he had arrived “too late” to save the “important person” he claimed he was hired to protect.
Questions have been swirling in Washington about how the United States will react if Haitian civil society leaders push for a path out of the turmoil that contradicts the plans of the sitting government.
“It’s going to be an amazing drama about how the U.S. responds,” said Representative Andy Levin, of Michigan, co-chairman of the House Haiti Caucus and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “So far we have resisted the idea of a transition to democracy that’s not, like, whoever happens to be sitting there in office.”
Haitian officials called for U.S. military assistance. Some Haitians say, ‘No, No & No.’
Intellectuals, activists and others say the country needs to find a solution on its own, and that international intervention has damaged their country.
U.S. Marines patrolling outside Haiti’s presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in 2004.Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Elian Peltier
July 10, 2021
Intellectuals and members of Haiti’s civil society quickly criticized a call by Haitian officials for the United States to send in troops, citing earlier interventions by foreign powers and international organizations that further destabilized Haiti and left a trail of abuses.
“We do not want any U.S. troops on Haiti’s soil,” Monique Clesca, a Haitian pro-democracy activist and former United Nations official, said in a post Friday on Twitter. “The de facto prime minister Claude Joseph does not have any legitimacy to make such a request in our name. No, No & No.”
Many in Haiti had argued that President Jovenel Moïse was no longer legitimately in office at the time of his assassination this week. Mr. Joseph, who said that he was in charge after the killing of Mr. Moïse, has also faced widespread criticism after taking over the country on Tuesday.
Yet, despite the sudden uncertainty brought by Mr. Moïse’s assassination, some residents and intellectuals argue the many questions raised by his killing give them a long-awaited opportunity to reform Haiti’s institutions.
“We never have a chance to figure out the rules of the game ourselves,” said Melodie Cerin, a resident of Port-au-Prince and the co-editor of Woy Magazine, an online publication. “That’s what’s most frustrating to Haitians. We’re put aside each time we’re trying step up.”
A senior Biden administration official said on Friday that there were no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at the moment — and regardless, Haitians have argued that they need to find a solution to the country’s instability on their own.
Operations by outside powers like the United States, and by international organizations like the United Nations, have often added to the instability, they say.
“The solution to the crisis must be Haitian,” said André Michel, a human rights lawyer and opposition leader, calling for a broader institutional debate that would gather politicians, Haiti’s civil society and its diaspora.
Many have also argued that a foreign intervention would simply not work.
“It’s like coming back with a toolbox, but the box has the wrong tools in it,” Ms. Clesca said in a telephone interview. “What needs to be in the toolbox are voices from Haiti.”
Some criticism has focused on the contested legacy of a U.N. peacekeeping mission that intervened in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. Peacekeepers brought cholera to the country, and numerous instances of rape and sexual abuse, including of girls as young as 11, have been documented.
“This is outrageous,” Marlene Daut, a professor of American and African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, said this week in response to a Washington Post editorial that called for a new international peacekeeping force in Haiti. The editorial described the previous U.N. peacekeeping mission as having brought “a modicum of stability.”
Ms. Clesca said the United Nations now had a disastrous reputation in Haiti. “One needs to be coherent, the United Nations’s nickname is ‘cholera’ or ‘Minustah babies,’” Ms. Clesca said, a reference to the French acronym for the peacekeeping operation in Haiti.
For others, their opposition has been rooted in the way in which the killing of Mr. Moïse has echoed events of the past. “The last U.S. occupation was preceded by the assassination of another Haitian president, under the guise of wanting to restore order, similar to what is happening now,” Woy Magazine wrote in a newsletter this week, alluding to the 1915 assassination of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The United States then occupied Haiti until 1934.
“What followed,” Woy Magazine’s Valérie Jean-Charles wrote, “was years of weakening of Haitian institutions and the senseless killings of many Haitians.”
Intellectuals, activists and others say the country needs to find a solution on its own, and that international intervention has damaged their country.
U.S. Marines patrolling outside Haiti’s presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in 2004.Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Elian Peltier
July 10, 2021
Intellectuals and members of Haiti’s civil society quickly criticized a call by Haitian officials for the United States to send in troops, citing earlier interventions by foreign powers and international organizations that further destabilized Haiti and left a trail of abuses.
“We do not want any U.S. troops on Haiti’s soil,” Monique Clesca, a Haitian pro-democracy activist and former United Nations official, said in a post Friday on Twitter. “The de facto prime minister Claude Joseph does not have any legitimacy to make such a request in our name. No, No & No.”
Many in Haiti had argued that President Jovenel Moïse was no longer legitimately in office at the time of his assassination this week. Mr. Joseph, who said that he was in charge after the killing of Mr. Moïse, has also faced widespread criticism after taking over the country on Tuesday.
Yet, despite the sudden uncertainty brought by Mr. Moïse’s assassination, some residents and intellectuals argue the many questions raised by his killing give them a long-awaited opportunity to reform Haiti’s institutions.
“We never have a chance to figure out the rules of the game ourselves,” said Melodie Cerin, a resident of Port-au-Prince and the co-editor of Woy Magazine, an online publication. “That’s what’s most frustrating to Haitians. We’re put aside each time we’re trying step up.”
A senior Biden administration official said on Friday that there were no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at the moment — and regardless, Haitians have argued that they need to find a solution to the country’s instability on their own.
Operations by outside powers like the United States, and by international organizations like the United Nations, have often added to the instability, they say.
“The solution to the crisis must be Haitian,” said André Michel, a human rights lawyer and opposition leader, calling for a broader institutional debate that would gather politicians, Haiti’s civil society and its diaspora.
Many have also argued that a foreign intervention would simply not work.
“It’s like coming back with a toolbox, but the box has the wrong tools in it,” Ms. Clesca said in a telephone interview. “What needs to be in the toolbox are voices from Haiti.”
Some criticism has focused on the contested legacy of a U.N. peacekeeping mission that intervened in Haiti from 2004 to 2017. Peacekeepers brought cholera to the country, and numerous instances of rape and sexual abuse, including of girls as young as 11, have been documented.
“This is outrageous,” Marlene Daut, a professor of American and African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, said this week in response to a Washington Post editorial that called for a new international peacekeeping force in Haiti. The editorial described the previous U.N. peacekeeping mission as having brought “a modicum of stability.”
Ms. Clesca said the United Nations now had a disastrous reputation in Haiti. “One needs to be coherent, the United Nations’s nickname is ‘cholera’ or ‘Minustah babies,’” Ms. Clesca said, a reference to the French acronym for the peacekeeping operation in Haiti.
For others, their opposition has been rooted in the way in which the killing of Mr. Moïse has echoed events of the past. “The last U.S. occupation was preceded by the assassination of another Haitian president, under the guise of wanting to restore order, similar to what is happening now,” Woy Magazine wrote in a newsletter this week, alluding to the 1915 assassination of Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The United States then occupied Haiti until 1934.
“What followed,” Woy Magazine’s Valérie Jean-Charles wrote, “was years of weakening of Haitian institutions and the senseless killings of many Haitians.”
Biden Administration Shows Little Appetite for Haiti’s Troop Request
Pentagon officials noted that the request was broad and did not specify the number or types of forces needed.
Haitians asking for asylum in front of the U.S. Embassy on Saturday.
Haitians asking for asylum in front of the U.S. Embassy on Saturday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Michael CrowleyMichael D. ShearEric Schmitt
By Michael Crowley, Michael D. Shear and Eric Schmitt
July 10, 2021
WASHINGTON — Haiti’s request for U.S. troops to help stabilize the country following the assassination of its president presents a difficult choice for President Biden: send forces to aid a neighbor even as he is trying to pare down America’s military footprint overseas, or refrain and risk allowing the chaos unfolding there to escalate into a refugee crisis.
Thus far, administration officials have expressed caution about any deployment to Haiti, reflecting the fast pace of events since attackers killed President Jovenel Moïse in his home on Wednesday, but also a broader shift in American attitudes toward military interventions as the 20-year war in Afghanistan winds down.
Biden administration officials, while sympathetic to the humanitarian misery unfolding some 700 miles south of Florida, and mindful of a potential mass exodus of Haitian refugees like one that occurred in the 1990s, nevertheless show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited American force into the midst of politically-based civil strife and disorder.
The administration has said it will send officials from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to Port-au-Prince to assess how they might help assist the government’s investigation into the murky circumstances of Mr. Moïse’s killing.
But Pentagon officials were taken off guard by the Haitian request late Friday. While they said it would be dutifully reviewed, there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch U.S. troops.
“We are aware of the request and are analyzing it,” John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a telephone interview on Saturday, noting that the request was broad and did not specify numbers or types of forces needed.
One senior administration official put it more bluntly late Friday: “There are no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at this time.”
For Mr. Biden, the prospect of a deployment of American forces amid the chaotic aftermath of the brutal killing runs against his core instinct to consolidate America’s overseas military presence, not expand it. The request from the Haitians came just hours after Mr. Biden delivered remarks defending his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year mission that came to be ill-defined and entangled with dysfunctional Afghan politics.
For now, Biden officials are focused on other ways to assist Haiti with its security needs short of military forces. That could include stepped up training and assistance for Haiti’s police and military provided by the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security.
Whether that can make a real difference is questionable in a country where endemic poverty and corruption have largely proved impervious to billions of dollars in international aid over decades. Haiti is “infested” by gangs, as its ambassador to Washington put it this week, the violence has worsened since Mr. Moïse’s assassination, with many residents afraid to leave their homes.
On Saturday, dozens of men, women and children seeking to flee the country packed into a courtyard of the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Port-au-Prince, as competing claims to power by the interim prime minister and a group of senators seeking to establish an alternative government remained unresolved.
The sense of chaos has been exacerbated by the continuing mystery over who was behind the attack on Mr. Moïse’s residence. The authorities have arrested at least 20 people, most of them former Colombian soldiers, but have not shed much light on the plot. Investigators have summoned four of the president’s chief security officers for questioning next week.
Given the uncertainty over who is leading the country and its already weak institutions, the risk is that conditions could deteriorate further, setting off a mass refugee flight by sea for Florida. That would pose a humanitarian and political crisis for Mr. Biden, who is already trying to manage a surge of migrants crossing into the United States at the Mexico border.
The prospect of a refugee crisis weighed heavily on President Barack Obama when he deployed troops and $100 million in aid to Haiti after a devastating earthquake there in 2010.
But even limited military deployments come with risks. A small American peacekeeping deployment to Somalia in 1992 led to an October 1993 gun battle in the streets of Mogadishu during which 18 American soldiers and at least hundreds of Somalis were killed in a political crisis for President Bill Clinton. The episode was later memorialized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
Biden officials are not insensitive to the plight of Haitians who have struggled for decades to escape poverty, corruption and political dysfunction; many served in the Obama administration when thousands of U.S. troops were dispatched for several months to provide security.
That deployment was considered a success even if it did little to resolve Haiti’s deep-seated problems. But it did run “the risk of mission creep,” according to a 2013 study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation, which said that Haiti would have welcomed the mission “to continue indefinitely” and that it “could easily have evolved” into a longer commitment.
Mr. Biden would confront other problems with the deployment of American soldiers. It is one thing to send troops to the aftermath of an epic natural disaster. It is another to step into an environment of political chaos, intrigue and dueling claims to power — not to mention marauding armed gangs. Many Haitians, well aware of their country’s history of colonialism and slavery, already complain that their politics are shaped by mostly white foreign powers.
In 1915, the assassination of a Haitian president led President Woodrow Wilson to direct U.S. Marines to invade the country, beginning a two-decade American occupation, and years of unrest.
Some prominent Haitians were quick to denounce their government’s request.
“Absolutely not. We do not want U.S. troops, U.S. boots, U.S. uniforms, none of that,” Monique Clesca, a Haitian writer and civil society activist, told CNN on Saturday. “Because in Haiti, Haitians have been traumatized by the occupation of the country during 34 years by the United States, we do not want U.S. intervention or troops or anything.”
“The international community is complicit in what is going on in Haiti,” Ms. Clesca added.
Another disincentive for Biden is the seemingly vague nature of Haiti’s request, including what it is American troops would be expected to do.
“The best approach in Haiti is for the United States to turn to either the United Nations, the Organization of American States or a coalition of Latin American nations for a stability force ,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and a former head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command.
“But going into the island is very unlikely from a military standpoint, especially as we are wrapping up operations in Afghanistan,” he added.
It was under the auspices of the United Nations that the United States sent troops to Somalia in 1992, and Haiti in 1994, when Mr. Clinton approved an American force to depose a military junta on the island and restore a democratically-elected president.
For decades, the United States has sought to assist Haiti as part of the “Core Group,” an ad hoc collection of ambassadors and envoys from major Western nations and international bodies like the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
But multinational missions come with their own risks and political baggage: U.N. peacekeepers based in the country from 2004 to 2017 introduced cholera and were reported to have committed widespread rape and sexual abuse.
At the same time, Mr. Biden may also face pressure to act, especially if Haiti’s political and security situation further deteriorates.
Demands for Mr. Biden to help Haiti quickly began to build among the small community of Haitian Americans and Haitian refugees living in the United States, including in the politically important state of Florida.
About 1 million Haitians live in the United States, according to 2018 census estimates, many of them having fled earlier periods of violence and instability in their country. In the last decade, about 56,000 Haitians have been living in the United States under a program called Temporary Protected Status, which was first granted in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.
The Department of Homeland Security renewed the T.P.S. designation this year, citing “serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Now, activists are pushing Mr. Biden to ensure that America does not stand on the sidelines as the country descends further into chaos.
One development that would intensify pressure on Mr. Biden to act would be if Haitians began fleeing the country in numbers resembling the wave of refugees that headed toward Florida in the early 1990s. President George H.W. Bush detained some refugees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, drawing liberal outrage, and Mr. Clinton later directed the Coast Guard to repatriate Haitians intercepted at sea.
Admiral Stavridis said that a Haitian refugee wave could change the Biden administration calculus, adding that the military has developed contingency plans to handle a sudden influx of people.
Pentagon officials noted that the request was broad and did not specify the number or types of forces needed.
Haitians asking for asylum in front of the U.S. Embassy on Saturday.
Haitians asking for asylum in front of the U.S. Embassy on Saturday.Credit...Valerie Baeriswyl/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Michael CrowleyMichael D. ShearEric Schmitt
By Michael Crowley, Michael D. Shear and Eric Schmitt
July 10, 2021
WASHINGTON — Haiti’s request for U.S. troops to help stabilize the country following the assassination of its president presents a difficult choice for President Biden: send forces to aid a neighbor even as he is trying to pare down America’s military footprint overseas, or refrain and risk allowing the chaos unfolding there to escalate into a refugee crisis.
Thus far, administration officials have expressed caution about any deployment to Haiti, reflecting the fast pace of events since attackers killed President Jovenel Moïse in his home on Wednesday, but also a broader shift in American attitudes toward military interventions as the 20-year war in Afghanistan winds down.
Biden administration officials, while sympathetic to the humanitarian misery unfolding some 700 miles south of Florida, and mindful of a potential mass exodus of Haitian refugees like one that occurred in the 1990s, nevertheless show no immediate enthusiasm for sending even a limited American force into the midst of politically-based civil strife and disorder.
The administration has said it will send officials from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security to Port-au-Prince to assess how they might help assist the government’s investigation into the murky circumstances of Mr. Moïse’s killing.
But Pentagon officials were taken off guard by the Haitian request late Friday. While they said it would be dutifully reviewed, there is little appetite among senior military leaders to dispatch U.S. troops.
“We are aware of the request and are analyzing it,” John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a telephone interview on Saturday, noting that the request was broad and did not specify numbers or types of forces needed.
One senior administration official put it more bluntly late Friday: “There are no plans to provide U.S. military assistance at this time.”
For Mr. Biden, the prospect of a deployment of American forces amid the chaotic aftermath of the brutal killing runs against his core instinct to consolidate America’s overseas military presence, not expand it. The request from the Haitians came just hours after Mr. Biden delivered remarks defending his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan after a 20-year mission that came to be ill-defined and entangled with dysfunctional Afghan politics.
For now, Biden officials are focused on other ways to assist Haiti with its security needs short of military forces. That could include stepped up training and assistance for Haiti’s police and military provided by the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security.
Whether that can make a real difference is questionable in a country where endemic poverty and corruption have largely proved impervious to billions of dollars in international aid over decades. Haiti is “infested” by gangs, as its ambassador to Washington put it this week, the violence has worsened since Mr. Moïse’s assassination, with many residents afraid to leave their homes.
On Saturday, dozens of men, women and children seeking to flee the country packed into a courtyard of the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Port-au-Prince, as competing claims to power by the interim prime minister and a group of senators seeking to establish an alternative government remained unresolved.
The sense of chaos has been exacerbated by the continuing mystery over who was behind the attack on Mr. Moïse’s residence. The authorities have arrested at least 20 people, most of them former Colombian soldiers, but have not shed much light on the plot. Investigators have summoned four of the president’s chief security officers for questioning next week.
Given the uncertainty over who is leading the country and its already weak institutions, the risk is that conditions could deteriorate further, setting off a mass refugee flight by sea for Florida. That would pose a humanitarian and political crisis for Mr. Biden, who is already trying to manage a surge of migrants crossing into the United States at the Mexico border.
The prospect of a refugee crisis weighed heavily on President Barack Obama when he deployed troops and $100 million in aid to Haiti after a devastating earthquake there in 2010.
But even limited military deployments come with risks. A small American peacekeeping deployment to Somalia in 1992 led to an October 1993 gun battle in the streets of Mogadishu during which 18 American soldiers and at least hundreds of Somalis were killed in a political crisis for President Bill Clinton. The episode was later memorialized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”
Biden officials are not insensitive to the plight of Haitians who have struggled for decades to escape poverty, corruption and political dysfunction; many served in the Obama administration when thousands of U.S. troops were dispatched for several months to provide security.
That deployment was considered a success even if it did little to resolve Haiti’s deep-seated problems. But it did run “the risk of mission creep,” according to a 2013 study by the nonpartisan RAND Corporation, which said that Haiti would have welcomed the mission “to continue indefinitely” and that it “could easily have evolved” into a longer commitment.
Mr. Biden would confront other problems with the deployment of American soldiers. It is one thing to send troops to the aftermath of an epic natural disaster. It is another to step into an environment of political chaos, intrigue and dueling claims to power — not to mention marauding armed gangs. Many Haitians, well aware of their country’s history of colonialism and slavery, already complain that their politics are shaped by mostly white foreign powers.
In 1915, the assassination of a Haitian president led President Woodrow Wilson to direct U.S. Marines to invade the country, beginning a two-decade American occupation, and years of unrest.
Some prominent Haitians were quick to denounce their government’s request.
“Absolutely not. We do not want U.S. troops, U.S. boots, U.S. uniforms, none of that,” Monique Clesca, a Haitian writer and civil society activist, told CNN on Saturday. “Because in Haiti, Haitians have been traumatized by the occupation of the country during 34 years by the United States, we do not want U.S. intervention or troops or anything.”
“The international community is complicit in what is going on in Haiti,” Ms. Clesca added.
Another disincentive for Biden is the seemingly vague nature of Haiti’s request, including what it is American troops would be expected to do.
“The best approach in Haiti is for the United States to turn to either the United Nations, the Organization of American States or a coalition of Latin American nations for a stability force ,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star admiral and a former head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command.
“But going into the island is very unlikely from a military standpoint, especially as we are wrapping up operations in Afghanistan,” he added.
It was under the auspices of the United Nations that the United States sent troops to Somalia in 1992, and Haiti in 1994, when Mr. Clinton approved an American force to depose a military junta on the island and restore a democratically-elected president.
For decades, the United States has sought to assist Haiti as part of the “Core Group,” an ad hoc collection of ambassadors and envoys from major Western nations and international bodies like the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
But multinational missions come with their own risks and political baggage: U.N. peacekeepers based in the country from 2004 to 2017 introduced cholera and were reported to have committed widespread rape and sexual abuse.
At the same time, Mr. Biden may also face pressure to act, especially if Haiti’s political and security situation further deteriorates.
Demands for Mr. Biden to help Haiti quickly began to build among the small community of Haitian Americans and Haitian refugees living in the United States, including in the politically important state of Florida.
About 1 million Haitians live in the United States, according to 2018 census estimates, many of them having fled earlier periods of violence and instability in their country. In the last decade, about 56,000 Haitians have been living in the United States under a program called Temporary Protected Status, which was first granted in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.
The Department of Homeland Security renewed the T.P.S. designation this year, citing “serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Now, activists are pushing Mr. Biden to ensure that America does not stand on the sidelines as the country descends further into chaos.
One development that would intensify pressure on Mr. Biden to act would be if Haitians began fleeing the country in numbers resembling the wave of refugees that headed toward Florida in the early 1990s. President George H.W. Bush detained some refugees at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, drawing liberal outrage, and Mr. Clinton later directed the Coast Guard to repatriate Haitians intercepted at sea.
Admiral Stavridis said that a Haitian refugee wave could change the Biden administration calculus, adding that the military has developed contingency plans to handle a sudden influx of people.
Colombian accused in assassination plot told sister he was there to protect, not to kill.
Duberney Capador, one of the Colombians killed in Haiti after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.Credit...Yenni Carolina Capador
By Julie Turkewitz
The sister of the one of the Colombians accused in the plot to assassinate President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti said he told her that he had not gone to Haiti to kill anyone — but rather had traveled to the Caribbean nation after receiving a job offer to protect a “very important person.”
His message came shortly before he died himself in the bloody aftermath of the assassination, one of three people killed in confrontations with the authorities.
In an interview, Yenny Carolina Capador, 37, said that her brother, Duberney Capador, 40, was a 20-year veteran of the Colombian military who spent years fighting Colombia’s left-wing guerrillas. He had retired in 2019 and was living on a family farm with his mother. He had two children.
“What I am 100 percent sure of is that my brother was not doing what they are saying, that he was hurting someone,” Ms. Capador said. “I know that my brother went to take care of someone. Because my brother was a very loyal man, a man with many values. I know it.”
Mr. Capador arrived in Haiti in May, his sister said, after receiving a job offer from a security company. Ms. Capador did not know the name of the company, but her brother soon sent her a picture from Haiti in which he wore a dark uniform embroidered with the letters “CTU.” His dream was to save money to improve the family farm, and to fund his children’s education, she said.
The siblings spoke often, and Mr. Capador said that he was spending his days training with others at a country house. On Monday, he sent her pictures of a group barbecue.
Then, early Wednesday, a deadly attack on the Haitian president was launched.
A few hours later, around 6 a.m., Ms. Capador began receiving calls and texts from her brother, she said. He told her that he was in danger, holed up in a home with bullets flying around him. At times, Ms. Capador could hear the gunfire in the background.
Ms. Capador said her brother told her nothing about an assassination, and instead told her that he had arrived “too late” to save the “important person” he claimed he was hired to protect.
Image
A screenshot of a text exchange between Yenny Carolina Capador and her brother, Duberney Capador. In it, Ms. Capador asks her brother in Spanish how he is and tells him that everything will be ok.Credit...Yenni Carolina Capador
According to Mr. Capador, she said, “they arrived half an hour after the man had died.”
The siblings exchanged messages all day long, and he begged her not to tell their mother that he was in danger.
“God bless you,” Ms. Capador wrote in a text message on Wednesday evening.
“Amen,” he wrote back at 5:51 p.m.
She never heard from him again.
Duberney Capador, one of the Colombians killed in Haiti after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.Credit...Yenni Carolina Capador
By Julie Turkewitz
- July 10, 2021, 2:40 p.m. ET
The sister of the one of the Colombians accused in the plot to assassinate President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti said he told her that he had not gone to Haiti to kill anyone — but rather had traveled to the Caribbean nation after receiving a job offer to protect a “very important person.”
His message came shortly before he died himself in the bloody aftermath of the assassination, one of three people killed in confrontations with the authorities.
In an interview, Yenny Carolina Capador, 37, said that her brother, Duberney Capador, 40, was a 20-year veteran of the Colombian military who spent years fighting Colombia’s left-wing guerrillas. He had retired in 2019 and was living on a family farm with his mother. He had two children.
“What I am 100 percent sure of is that my brother was not doing what they are saying, that he was hurting someone,” Ms. Capador said. “I know that my brother went to take care of someone. Because my brother was a very loyal man, a man with many values. I know it.”
Mr. Capador arrived in Haiti in May, his sister said, after receiving a job offer from a security company. Ms. Capador did not know the name of the company, but her brother soon sent her a picture from Haiti in which he wore a dark uniform embroidered with the letters “CTU.” His dream was to save money to improve the family farm, and to fund his children’s education, she said.
The siblings spoke often, and Mr. Capador said that he was spending his days training with others at a country house. On Monday, he sent her pictures of a group barbecue.
Then, early Wednesday, a deadly attack on the Haitian president was launched.
A few hours later, around 6 a.m., Ms. Capador began receiving calls and texts from her brother, she said. He told her that he was in danger, holed up in a home with bullets flying around him. At times, Ms. Capador could hear the gunfire in the background.
Ms. Capador said her brother told her nothing about an assassination, and instead told her that he had arrived “too late” to save the “important person” he claimed he was hired to protect.
Image
A screenshot of a text exchange between Yenny Carolina Capador and her brother, Duberney Capador. In it, Ms. Capador asks her brother in Spanish how he is and tells him that everything will be ok.Credit...Yenni Carolina Capador
According to Mr. Capador, she said, “they arrived half an hour after the man had died.”
The siblings exchanged messages all day long, and he begged her not to tell their mother that he was in danger.
“God bless you,” Ms. Capador wrote in a text message on Wednesday evening.
“Amen,” he wrote back at 5:51 p.m.
She never heard from him again.
Accused assassin did not tell his sister of his plans to murder the Haitian president
Bought the $3.4 million villa outright which simply shows how much they been stealing to where they forget that they suppose to hide that kind of shit
Colombian dude is the fall guy
Accused assassin did not tell his sister of his plans to murder the Haitian president
why even call your sister at all if you’re an assassin/paid killer?
Who was Papa Doc...is he hated there? Brah