MIAMI – With his elbow shattered by bullets and his mouth full of blood, the first lady di Haiti is lying on the floor next to her bed and can’t breathe, while the killers burst into the room. “The only thing I saw before they killed him was their boots,” he says Martine Moïse speaking of the moment when her husband, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, was shot dead next to her. “Then I closed my eyes and didn’t see anything else.” She listened as they ransacked the room, methodically searching for something among her husband’s papers. “It’s not that. It’s not that,” he remembers they kept saying in Spanish. Then, finally: “This is it.” At that point the killers went away: one stepped out on her foot; another shone a flashlight at her eyes. “When they left, they thought I was dead,” she says.
In her first interview after the president’s assassination on July 7, 47-year-old Moïse describes the excruciating pain of seeing her husband, the man she shared 25 years of life with, killed before her eyes. She did not want to relive the deafening sound of gunfire, the shaking walls and windows, the terrifying certainty that her children would be killed, the horror of seeing her husband’s dead body, the efforts to stand up after the killers ‘they had gone. “All that blood,” he says softly. But she felt the need to speak up, she says, because she didn’t believe the investigation into the bombing had answered the central question that torments her and countless Haitians: who ordered and financed her husband’s murder.
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Police have arrested a large number of people linked to the murder, including 18 Colombians and several Haitians and Haitian-Americans, and are still looking for more. Among the suspects are former Colombian special forces soldiers, a former judge, a defense equipment salesman, a mortgage and insurance salesman in Florida, and two commanders of the president’s protection team. According to the police, the plot has been carefully studied and revolves around a 63-year-old doctor and pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who allegedly conspired to hire Colombian mercenaries in order to kill the president and seize power.
But those who contest the government’s proposed explanation say none of the people named in the investigation had the means to finance the bombing alone. And Martine Moïse, like many Haitians, is convinced that there is certainly someone else behind them, who gave the orders and made the money available. She wants to know what happened to the 30 or 50 men who normally stood guard outside the president’s residence whenever her husband was home. None of the guards were killed or injured, he says. “I don’t understand how it is possible that no one was hit.”
At the time of his death, the 53-year-old Jovenel Moïse he was embroiled in a political crisis. Protesters accused him of wanting to remain in office even beyond the expiration of his mandate, of controlling local criminal gangs and of governing by decree by emptying the institutions. Moïse was also in constant conflict with a part of the country’s oligarchy, including the family that controls the national electricity grid. Although many describe the president as an autocratic leader, Martine Moïse says his fellow citizens should remember him as a man who did not bow to the rich and powerful. And now he wants to know if it was one of these rich and powerful who ordered his execution. “Only the oligarchs and the system could kill him.”
Dressed in black, with her arm around her neck and bandaged, she gives us an interview in an unspecified location in South Florida. Surrounded by her children, bodyguards, Haitian diplomats and other advisors, she speaks in a very low tone of voice, little more than a whisper. She and her husband were asleep when the sound of gunfire made them jump to their feet, she recalls. She says she ran to wake up her two children, in their early twenties, urging them to hide in a bathroom. Her husband picked up the phone and called for help. “I asked him:” Love, who are you calling? “, He says. “He told me:” I found it Dimitri Hérard; I found Jean Laguel Civil”“, she says, citing the names of the two senior officials responsible for the president’s security.” “They told me they are on their way.” “But the killers entered the house quickly, apparently without encountering opposition. Jovenel told her to lie on the floor to don’t be hit. “” You’ll be safe there, “” she remembers saying. It was the last words.
Then a barrage of bullets went through the door, hitting her first. Wounded in her hand and elbow, she lay on the floor. None of the killers spoke Creole or French: only Spanish. They communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room. “They were looking for something, and they found it.” But he doesn’t know what it was. The men her husband called for help have now been under arrest. Martine is pleased that many of the alleged conspirators have been captured, but that’s not enough. The Colombian mercenaries who were arrested, he says, did not come to Haiti to “play hide and seek” and he wants to know who paid for everything. She believes the money came from wealthy Haitian oligarchs who saw business jeopardized by the president’s attacks on lucrative contracts they could count on, she says. Cites a powerful Haitian businessman who wanted to run for president, Reginald Boulos, as a person who had something to gain from the death of her husband, even if she does not explicitly accuse him of ordering the murder.
Martine Moïse says she is seriously considering running for the presidency, but she has to treat her injured arm first. She has already undergone two surgeries and the doctors are now thinking of implanting some nerves of her foot in her limb. He says that perhaps he will never regain the use of his right arm again, and that he can only move two fingers. “Jovenel had a vision”, he concludes, “we Haitians will not let him die”. (Translation by Fabio Galimberti) Copyright 2021 The New York Times
The original article can be found at the link
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/world/americas/haiti-assassination-martine-moise-interview.html
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