The Daily - The Assassination of Haiti’s President

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Early on Wednesday morning, a group of men killed President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti in his residence on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince.It was a brazen act. Very rarely is a nation’s leader killed in at home.What does the attack means for Haiti’s future?Guest: Maria Abi-Habib, bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The assassination of Mr. Moïse has rocked his nation, stoking fear and confusion about what is to come. Here is what we know and don’t know.The killing has left a political void and deepened the turmoil and violence that has gripped Haiti for months, threatening to tip one of the world’s most troubled nations further into lawlessness.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the stunning assassination of Haiti's president in his own home. I spoke with my colleague, Maria Abihabib, about what we're learning about the suspects and what the attack may mean for Haiti's future. It's Friday, July 9th. Maria, can you describe exactly what happened on Wednesday morning in Haiti? Wednesday morning in Haiti.

Yes. So at about 1.30 a.m. on Wednesday, a team of about 50 men, some on foot and some in about 7 to 10 4x4s and pickups, stormed the presidential residence of President Jovenel Moïse. They looked very much, you know, like they were maneuvering militarily, which would suggest that they are very highly trained. What do you mean, maneuvering?

Well, you have a column of cars in the middle, and then that column of cars or vehicles is buffered by two columns of men on either side. is buffered by two columns of men on either side. And the way that they're weaving in and out and marching in a protective yet offensive way towards the palace, it really was quite reminiscent when I saw the CCTV footage. It was reminiscent of the embeds I've done with the U.S. military in Afghanistan as they're about to do a raid on a Taliban home, for instance. Wow. So they approach the president's residence and they start screaming DEA, DEA. And what does that mean to them? Like the American drug enforcement agents?

Yeah, that's right. So you have to remember that we're in a region where the DEA is like, is the American government, because this is a place where drugs are trafficked and produced and then shipped off to destinations around the world, the United States, Europe and other places. So screaming out DEA, that is instant name recognition. Like these people, they are trying to make it seem like we are connected to the U.S. government. So the president's guard needs to drop their weapons, surrender, and basically allow this group of 50 highly armed men to enter into the presidential compound. And just to be clear, these were not officials from the DEA in the U.S.? No.

clear, these were not officials from the DEA in the U.S.? No. So this is a kind of ruse. Well, what happens? What do those security guards do when they hear DEA? Well, they basically let these men through. And these men are speaking Spanish and English and don't appear to be Haitian, some of them. So these men charge past, you know, without a shot being fired, it seems, from our sources. Wow.

Charge towards the president's home office, ransack it, rummage through all of his papers. And then, they make their way to President Moise's bedroom, where he and his wife have been sleeping. At this point, it appears that his daughter heard these men marching towards her father's bedroom. She then runs over to her brother's bedroom where she hides with her brother. And a firefight ensues as the men enter President Moise's bedchamber where he and his wife are. President Moise is shot in the eye and in the chest, and it seems that he may have been tortured, according to a local Haitian newspaper, before they killed him. They shoot his wife as well, leaving her in a critical condition,

before fleeing the house. They flee without a shot being fired at them, and they make their way into the heart of Port-au-Prince, where they then disperse as they try to flee Haiti. I mean, this is a remarkable scene that you are describing. Remarkable in that the sitting leader of a nation has just been assassinated. But more remarkable in that this has all occurred without any resistance. I can't think of an episode like this in history.

I mean, I've been a foreign correspondent for all of my career and I've never seen anything like this. Maybe only President Gaddafi of Libya when he was taken out of a sewer by a crowd and then tortured and killed. I mean, you never see a sitting leader killed in his own home in such a brazen way. Usually it's a suicide car bombing or some sort of assassination as said leader is going down the street in a convoy to get from point A to point B. But in their own home, I mean, this is truly amazing in all the worst ways. truly amazing in all the worst ways. Maria, what ends up happening in the hours after this assassination? Are any of these dozens of attackers caught, found, arrested?

We don't know much. This is still an active crime scene. This is still an active investigation. It's now been, I don't know, 36 hours or so since the killing. However, what we do know is that Haiti's government starts closing down all ports of entry. So it closes its airport, it closes some of its seaports, it closes its land border with the Dominican Republic

as the two nations share an island. Eventually, six men are arrested and four are killed in confrontations with the police. And what's happening is that people across Port-au-Prince, which is the capital of Haiti, are finding foreigners, you know, hiding in the gutters, hiding in abandoned buildings. And there's like, yeah, there's a vigilante form of justice that's happening where they're marching them. They're tying them up and marching them to the police station. The police also find some of these suspected assassins themselves. And what has emerged today is one name of a U.S. national, a U.S. citizen with Haitian roots.

And they also say that there could be another American citizen. Wow. American citizens are suspects in this assassination. Yes, that's right. One of them from Florida. Hmm. Do we know much more about them than that simple fact? Well, one of the men

that we have come to learn his identity, this is a man who went back and forth to Haiti quite a bit. He also seemed to really care about the fate of Haitians. In one of his Instagram photos, he is rejoicing over the fact that he was able to raise money and donated labor to fix a local bathroom because Haiti has a very, very huge problem with sanitation. So we don't know much more than what we've been given, which is that foreigners are definitely a part of this assassination.

Well, recognizing that this is very much still a fluid and fast-moving situation, and that we're talking to you on Thursday night around 6 p.m., and that a lot of new information might come forward in the next few hours and days, forward in the next few hours and days, I wonder what we should know about this assassinated president and this moment in Haiti that would put what just happened into a larger context. And let's start with Haiti itself. Sure. So Haiti was formed as a slave colony for France. Then in the late 1700s, the slaves of Haiti decided to rise up en masse and defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's forces and achieved their independence. However, it didn't just stop there. Just because they were independent didn't mean that everything

was easy for Haitians and that it was able to build up a democratic system overnight. In fact, it actually had to deal with about 200 years of foreign interference, whether it was from the United States or France, everything from dictatorships that were sponsored by foreign powers or even coups. So Haiti lived with this very, very tumultuous history for about 200 years. And then in 2010, just as things are kind of seeming to go well for Haiti, you know, a handful of successful elections that were free and fair, this devastating earthquake rocks Haiti and basically destroys large swaths of Port-au-Prince

and other parts of the country, killing about a quarter million people. An extraordinary catastrophe. Yes. And at that point, UN peacekeeping troops come in and foreign aid is just funneled into this country. Billions of dollars. Haiti has received about $13 billion in the 11 years since the earthquake. And a lot of that is going to, you know, foreign contractors, American contractors, and some of that is propping up the government. However,

there is this argument that we've seen across the world, which is, is aid actually detrimental? Because at the end of the day, it's just creating a complicated or twisted lifeline to countries like Haiti, where these foreign countries, especially the United States, they kind of tie the fate of their assistance to a player, a political force that they think can actually deliver. And what ends up happening is you're not building a system. You're not building up institutions like the judiciary or the police. You're just pumping in money that is kind of almost like allowing the country to subsist. It's almost like putting the country in a coma. And there's no incentive for some of these government officials to actually take on the reforms that a country like Haiti needs to build up institutions. foreign assistance, the institutions that fuel the state, from the police to the healthcare to judiciary, they've actually just become even more hollowed out from before the aid

started to flow. So in the case of Haiti, aid becomes detrimental because the government becomes reliant upon it. The foreign powers become reliant on an increasingly, as you describe it, kind of comatose government that has no incentive to change and improve because it's just waiting for the next check. Because it's just waiting for the next check. Basically. And actually, the problem is if things get worse, then they know that foreign governments are going to be too worried about turning off the spigots and aid will continue to flow. The wallets will just open that much more.

And Maria, how does President Moise, who has just been assassinated, how does he fit into this dynamic that you're describing? What do we need to know about him? So this is a man who's known as the banana man. He comes from a family that owned a banana plantation, and he's tapped by his predecessor to become president. And he runs in 2016, and only 18% of eligible voters turn out. And he receives 600,000 votes. And that's just enough to put him over the edge

and win the presidency. So not exactly a mandate. Doesn't have a mandate. And there are many accusations of fraud leveled at his campaign. And it basically delays him from taking the presidency for about a year until all of the accusations are sorted. And eventually the international community gives that election a clean bill

and says Moise won fair and square. And he takes up the presidency a year later in 2017. And when we think about this notion of aid and what it's doing to Haiti, how should we think about President Moise? Well, he is living on the lifeline of foreign assistance. And that assistance is everything from dollars that are being pumped into Haiti to technical assistance like foreign training of the police forces, which then in turn protect him and his government. So he is a huge beneficiary. But he's also a man

with a vision, however fraud it might be. He talks a lot about the oligarchy and the fact that they're benefiting from paying very little tax and cheating the government. He says he wants to rein them in. And he kind of becomes an enemy of a section of the oligarchy, which is, you know, basically a handful of families run Haiti. It's a very impoverished place and a handful of families basically own everything and are in charge of the GDP. So once he's elected president, he pitches himself as a kind of populist, taking on the rich, entrenched forces in Haiti. Yeah, a reformer. But then... In 2019, an internal government report finds that millions of aid dollars have gone missing under his government. And large-scale protests rack Haiti.

For days now, over a week, they have had this country on lockdown. No schools, no businesses, nothing is moving. And these protests are demanding that Moise step down. Jovenel is a thief. He has to go. And face trial for the alleged millions of dollars that have gone missing in aid money. And does that happen? No, there is no trial. There's no accountability. He continues to run the country, and he's never requested to answer to these alleged crimes. And this is exactly what Haitians say is the problem with their country,

which is that bad actors continue doing bad things. And it's the Haitian people that pay the price, and they get to walk off scot-free. Then in January of 2020, Parliament's term expires and President Moise does not call an election. And at this point, Haiti is left with 11 elected representatives, 10 senators and the president to represent 11 million Haitians. That's one elected official per million Haitians. And this leaves the country with even further hollowed out institutions. And while the political crisis deepens, Haiti's economy continues to deteriorate. And while the political crisis deepens, Haiti's economy continues to deteriorate.

And this is also happening in tandem with the pandemic, which is taking an already very devastated economy and putting it on the brink of actual collapse. At this point, by some estimates, some 60% of Haitians are underemployed and half of the country is facing severe malnourishment. Then, on top of everything else... Clashes between a small number of protesters and police forces erupted near the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in Haiti. President Moïse refuses to step down when his term expires in February of this year.

The opposition in the country says President Jovenel Moïse's mandate ended on February 7th. He says his five-year term expires in 2022. And demands that he has an extra year in power. At this point, the streets of Port-au-Prince erupt in just even larger demonstrations than usual, which is saying a lot for a country where demonstrations are a hallmark of the nation. And President Moise also announces that he's going to write an entirely new constitution and proceeds to handpick a committee to write this Constitution without any input

from anybody else. So it's such a pleasure to meet with you, and thank you so much for agreeing to the interview. At this point, in February of this year, President Moise and I actually sit down for an interview over Zoom. Thanks again. How are you doing? Are you doing well? We'll be right back. So I guess let's start a little bit with, you know, just kind of what you're hoping to achieve with this new constitution. I think that's a good place to start. For the new constitutions, as you know, when we started on power in 2017, we worked with...

In my interview with President Moise, he seemed to be very well aware of the fact that he was not a loved man. And it was a bit of a sad interview. I mean, he lamented the fact that he was not a loved man. And it was a bit of a sad interview. I mean, he lamented the fact that he had no mandate. He acknowledged that he only won with 600,000 votes. It will be better for us if we can get two million minimum participation on the elections. But I was never had that. I was never had more than 20% of the level of participation.

And he said that Haiti was just a very weak state and he wanted to make things better. The public institutions, they are facing very complicated situations. The fighting I'm doing today is not a fighting against political groups. No, no, no. The fighting I'm doing today is not a fighting against political groups. No, no, no. The fighting I'm doing is the fighting to get the freedom for the state. Because the state is under the hand of the corrupt oligarch. And he felt like he needed to take on the oligarchy.

They try to control everything. They try to control the president. They try to control everything. They try to control president. They try to control prime ministers, ministers, parliament, judge, everything. But no way we can work like that. The government needs some freedoms. And strengthen the institutions around the presidency and around the executive so that future presidents could run with more institutional backing

and more power at their hands to make things work. Because this is a country that just does not work as it's constituted at the moment. As a president, I can tell you the Asian people are suffering. It is a country, we have more than 200 years of independence, but the problem is from 1806, after the assassinations of the father of the nations, to 2021, we are facing a very complicated situation.

But the issue with many of these people in power is that sometimes they come into power with the best of intentions. And once they're there, they really feel like they are the solution. To give a better life for the Asian people. This is the goal, but this is the fighting I'm doing now. The fight I'm doing now. But what they don't realize is that sometimes they're actually the problem. Everything that you have just described would seem to put his assassination potentially in a slightly more complicated light.

You just described him as a man who is increasingly loathed by his people, who is violating democratic norms and seeking to overstay his very term. I wonder how much you and the people you're talking to when you're reporting are reflecting on that as they try to puzzle through the motives of potential assassins. There's multiple theories that are circulating. One is, oh, perhaps this was the Al-Agharki that was very upset with the fact that he was trying to hold them accountable and do things like pay their fair share of taxes. This also, according to other theories, could be just an internal government power struggle. But we are very short on the answers.

And that's what we hope to try to unfold in the days and weeks to come. And that's what we hope to try to unfold in the days and weeks to come. Well, given the lack of democratic norms that you just laid out, I'm curious, who has taken power since President Moise was killed? Has there been any kind of orderly transition of power? No. In fact, two deputies are now dueling for the leadership of the country. And because President Moise was part of this very long, years-long hollowing out of Haiti's institutions, nobody really has any good answers for who should actually lawfully lead this country. And Haiti is now left with no functioning presidency, no functioning parliament, and no functioning Supreme Court, because the head of the Supreme Court died recently of COVID,

and President Moise suspended several of the judges on the bench. Wow. A huge vacuum. A huge vacuum. And sometimes in such chaos, solutions will be found. But most of the people I'm speaking to feel that chaos only worsens the situation and allows for these, you know, non-state actors, these gangs that basically run the streets to become even more powerful. So Maria, if you're a Haitian right now, and you're living through this moment where you don't know who your leader is right now, and you don't even know who exactly has just killed your president, what are you thinking and what are you feeling at this moment? Fear of the unknown. Because the majority of people on the street,

what they're talking about is the fact that they don't know what tomorrow is going to hold. And in a country where every year seems to be worse than the year that preceded it, everybody's always afraid of tomorrow. Entire neighborhoods are gathered around TVs, if they can afford them, or radio stations, listening and eager for any update to the ongoing manhunt for these assassins.

And even though President Moise was not a loved man, at the end of the day, he was their president. And Haitians are very tired of their country constantly being in some form of turmoil or some sort of foreign intervention. And the fact that 50 or so heavily armed men, some foreigners, it seems, were able to just saunter into the president's residency and assassinate the president in cold blood just makes Haitians that much more anxious about tomorrow and whether or not they have a country that will finally be able to stand on its own two feet. Maria, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

We have a lot of political turbulence in that country. I think it's the violence, the problem is the violence, it's instability. To prepare the future of the nation, you cannot do it without politics. After my four years in power, I can tell you a lot about that. The politics is very important to change the way things are doing in this country. We are working to get an agreement for peace and stability because we need peace and stability in this country to give the better future for the Asian people. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. After 20 years, a trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan national security and defense forces. 2,448 Americans killed,

20,722 more wounded, and untold thousands coming home with unseen trauma to their mental health. I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different outcome. In a speech on Thursday, President Biden defended his decision to withdraw U.S.

forces from Afghanistan despite major territorial gains by the Taliban, arguing that America could not afford the human cost or strategic distraction of fighting a war there, and that it was now up to the people and government of Afghanistan to chart their own future. We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. And it's the right and the responsibility of Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country. Over the past two months, as the withdrawal has neared its completion, the Taliban has seized at least 150 of Afghanistan's 421 districts,

creating fear that it could eventually retake control of the entire country. And, facing growing criticism over its approval of a new drug for Alzheimer's, the FDA has significantly narrowed its recommendation for who should take the drug. Instead of recommending the drug for anyone with Alzheimer's, the FDA now says it should be prescribed to those with mild memory or thinking problems, a far smaller group. The FDA approved the drug, despite a fierce debate about whether it actually works. Today's episode was made by Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Michael Simon Johnson, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Lisa Chow, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you on Monday.