Did slain Haitian leader have omen?
HAITIAN President Jovenel Moise began this year by warning that his country was a land of coups, conspiracy and murder. In the days before he was shot dead in a murky international plot last month, he was telling friends that enemies were out to get him.
“He said a lot of people were spending a lot of money to murder him,” said a former Haitian senator and close friend of the late president, of a conversation with Moise the evening of his death. “I told him to stop thinking like that.”
“He said: ‘This is reality’.” Revealing his final text messages with Moise, the politician, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of his safety, said Moise did not identify the plotters.
The assassination decapitated a fragile government in a country repeatedly convulsed by crisis – exacerbated by a major earthquake on August 14 – since the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986.
The conversations painted the president, 53, as a man increasingly isolated and in peril towards the end of
his life. Moise supporters described his downfall as inevitable due to of a corrupt ruling elite closing ranks against a provincial outsider who dared to help Haiti’s majority poor. “Here, when you put things in order, you die,” said Guy Francois, an ally who was Moise’s minister of citizenship.
Critics, by contrast, cast Moise as a political novice who lacked the skills to build consensus, drifted towards autocracy and turned a blind eye to gang violence. “He was a poor choice from the get-go,” said Salim Succar, a lawyer and onetime aide to Moise’s predecessor and former backer, ex-President Michel Martelly.
“He never stood a chance.” Many saw in his killing a microcosm of institutional rot in Haiti, where the government has been hobbled by factional disputes and a dependence on foreign powers still widely viewed as hostile to the country’s very foundation in 1804, when a slave revolt threw off the French colonial yoke.
In the rubbish-strewn centre of Port-au-Prince, the government district is ringed by deserted streets now considered to be gang-controlled territory.
Officials say Moise’s killers took advantage of the porous state of law and order to execute their plot at his personal residence in the Port-auPrince suburb of Petion-Ville.
Moise’s bullet-ridden body was found on July 7 after what the Haitian authorities said was an attack by a commando unit of mostly Colombian mercenaries. His wife, Martine, was injured. Police have not yet identified the mastermind.