Jovenel Moïse was undoubtedly the most poorly elected president in the history of Haiti, a failed state with powerless and catatonic institutions, dissolved in violence and corruption, plagued by gangs and various traffickers.
Twice, at the end of 2015 then at the end of 2016, against a background of massive abstention (at least 80%), of an apathetic population, pushed by a dubious predecessor (Michel Martelly) who had apparently wanted to make a toy, he had won at the a result of immensely questionable electoral processes, likely to inspire cynicism and disgust.
More than “elected” by his people, this man had been “appointed” by foreign forces in Port-au-Prince (United States, France, Canada, international missions, certain powerful NGOs), exasperated at having no more political interlocutors worthy of the name in Haiti.
Thus portrayed as the toy of his predecessor and of foreign forces, the man had been vilified in a good part of the diaspora, which had made him the absolute devil. Screaming at usurpation, she had refused him the right to remain in his post until February 2022, for a term that was officially to last five years.
He will have finally done four and a half, before being murdered in his sleep, on July 7, 2021, at the age of 53, his wife by his side – who miraculously escaped death and can today testify for the prosecution.
Jovenel Moïse did not have a priori nothing of the martyr. But revelations from New York Times published yesterday – a newspaper which, despite its “wokist” excesses, remains a place of real investigations and international exclusives – make him appear as a hero.
A hero who, according to this article-river which relaunches the affair – at the time when the official investigation is at a standstill -, really wanted to “clean up”, according to the expression of the newspaper (which, by the way, publishes his article in English and French).
He would have done so by attacking head-on the rotten swamp of Haitian political, police and judicial circles, acoquiné – “power” and opposition combined – with the gangs who kidnap passers-by for ransom and the traffickers who use small planes. cocaine from Venezuela to the United States.
He wanted, for example, to purge the customs services which were turning a blind eye, or to order the destruction of “clandestine” airstrips… at known locations.
Moses, according to the New York Times, had drawn up a list of personalities with both hands in drug trafficking. This list, he was preparing to “give” it to the DEA, the American federal anti-drug agency … in a context where local justice, plagued by corruption, made passive resistance to any advance on this front.
The testimony of the widow, Martine Moïse, seems to confirm that the murderers were looking for documents in the president’s house, documents they would have found at the time of their crime.
As for the names mentioned in the article, they include those of the former president Michel Martelly and of Charles (“Kiko”) Saint-Rémy, sulphurous businessman, brother-in-law of the preceding: two men who, according to the New York Times, “Muzzled the presidency” of Jovenel Moïse.
It is also a question of a certain Dimitri Hérard, who was then head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, and who would not have flinched, while, from the presidential couple’s room, there were calls for help desperate. The current Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, was also in telephone contact, just before the events, with some people there.
Of course, we can reconstruct all these events without canonizing the victim, and rather see in them mafia settling of accounts between corrupt “equals”.
But the course of events, as it is exposed by the New York daily, strongly suggests that the president of this unfortunate country, having perhaps once soaked in this swamp, woke up one fine morning saying to himself that it couldn’t go on like this anymore.
If this interpretation is correct, then Jovenel Moïse appears today as a hero and a martyr of Haiti.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist for Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]