List of drug traffickers jeopardized leader
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was about to name names.
Before being assassinated in July, he had been working on a list of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti’s drug trade, with the intention of handing over the dossier to the U.S. government, according to four senior Haitian advisers and officials tasked with drafting the document.
The president had ordered the officials to spare no one, not even the power brokers who had helped propel him into office, they said — one of several moves against suspected drug traffickers that could explain a motive
for the assassination.
When gunmen burst into Moïse’s residence and killed him in his bedroom, his wife, Martine Moïse — who had also been shot and lay bleeding on the floor, pretending to be dead — described how they stayed to search the room, hurriedly digging through his files.
“‘That’s it,’ ” they finally declared to one another before fleeing, she told the New York Times in her first interview after the assassination, adding that she did not know what the gunmen had taken.
Investigators arrived at the crime scene to find Jovenel Moïse’s home office ransacked, papers strewn everywhere. In interrogations, some of the captured hit men confessed that retrieving the list Moïse had been working on — with the names of suspected drug traffickers — was a top priority, according to three senior Haitian officials with knowledge of the investigation.
The document was part of a broader series of clashes Moïse had with powerful political and business figures, some suspected of narcotics and arms trafficking. Moïse had known several of them for years, and they felt betrayed by his turn against them, his aides say.
In the months before his death, Moïse took steps to clean up Haiti’s customs department, nationalize a seaport with a history of smuggling, destroy an airstrip used by drug traffickers and investigate the lucrative eel trade, which has recently been identified as a conduit for money laundering.
The Times interviewed more than 70 people and traveled to eight of Haiti’s 10 departments, or states, to interview politicians, Moïse’s childhood friends, police officers, fishermen and participants in the drug trade to understand what happened in the last seven months of the president’s life that may have contributed to his death. Many of them now fear for their lives as well.
“I would be a fool to think that narco-trafficking and arms trafficking didn’t play a role in the assassination,” said Daniel Foote, who served as the U.S. special envoy to Haiti before stepping down last month.
The investigation into Moïse’s killing has stalled, American officials say, and if the assassination is not solved, many Haitians fear it will add to the mountain of impunity in the country, further emboldening the criminal networks that have captured the state.