Amy Wilentz

Why Haiti’s president was assassinated

Police respond to protests in Port-au-Prince following the assassination of the Haitian president (Photo by Richard Pierrin/Getty Images)

There was a time when Haiti was at the centre of the New World. It was one of the richest islands on the globe, producing cane sugar for the sweet tooth of Europe. It cultivated coffee, cotton and rice, and it produced rum. The Pearl of the Antilles, the island stood at the gateway to all the resources of South and Central America. Mexico, with all its gold, lay just beyond Haiti’s northernmost cape. Great powers of the era — France, Britain, Germany, and the United States — vied for political and military control.

Now Haiti is failed state. Failed by the West after centuries of violence and resource extraction and failed by its own leaders who have also enriched themselves off the backs of their compatriots. Last week, the country’s president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. A group of gunmen stormed his home in the capital Port-au-Prince. He was shot at least 12 times.

Moïse will not be missed. But Haitians will see unsettling parallels with the removal of their first democratically elected president. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted not once but twice in military coups greenlighted by France and the US. Aristide had preached a heady programme of popular liberation theology, of decent poverty rather than starvation, illiteracy, and unemployment. Needless to say, that programme has not yet been realised. 

‘The beneficiaries of the death of Moïse are, if history is any guide, everyone except the fallen president. His assassination will provoke a feast’

Aristide’s ideas threatened the stranglehold that eleven families, collectively known as Haiti’s ‘business mafia’, have on the economy. These families were the power players during the post-earthquake electoral fiddling (monitored by the US and the Organization of America States) that brought Haitians first Michel Martelly and then Moïse himself, neither one elected in anything resembling free and fair elections. While the world has watched as Haiti is tormented by one crisis after another, for the eleven families, not much has changed.

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