Leader killed over list of drug traffickers
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 narcotrafficking 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.
A central figure on Moïse’s list was Charles Saint-Rémy, known as Kiko, two of the Haitian officials tasked with helping draft the dossier said. Saint-Rémy, a Haitian businessman, has long been suspected by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration of involvement in the drug trade. Notably, he is also the brother-in-law of former President Michel Martelly, who lifted Moïse out of political obscurity and tapped him to be his successor.
Martelly, who is considering another run for the presidency, and Saint-Rémy were hugely influential in Moïse’s government, with a say in everything from who got public contracts to which Cabinet ministers got appointed, according to Haitian officials inside and outside his administration. But Moïse came to feel that they and other oligarchs were stifling his presidency, his aides say.
American officials say that they are looking closely at Moïse’s efforts to disrupt the drug trade and challenge powerful families as motives in the assassination, and they note that Saint-Rémy emerged as a possible suspect early in the investigation. But they caution that Moïse threatened many of the economic elite, including a number of people with deep criminal connections.
Martelly and Saint-Rémy did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.
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.
When Moïse was chosen by Martelly in 2014 to be his successor, Martelly introduced the nation to a supposed outsider with peasant origins, a man of the countryside who had lifted himself out of poverty by running banana plantations.
Martelly’s associates said he first met Moïse during a conference and was struck by the entrepreneur’s business acumen.
But the story was misleading: Moïse had mostly grown up in the capital, several of the original board members of his banana plantation say it was a failure, and Moïse was already a close associate of Saint-Rémy and at least one other suspected drug trafficker.