Almost two years ago, the Haitian president Jovenel Moise was assassinated in his home at night. Reports were chaotic; some saying the assassins were not Haitian and that they were speaking Spanish.
Since then, Haiti has deteriorated into literal anarchy. All of the elected government has resigned, and violent gangs are running the cities.
But who was behind the assassination and subsequent deaths and chaos Haiti has been thrown into since?
Sadly, the U.S. Department of Justice has arrested 11 men in Florida who were indicted for conspiring to and assassinating the Haitian president.
Why would Floridians want to kill the Haitian president?
Here's what the indictment alleges.
The principles in the case are:
- Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, a Colombian national and permanent resident of the U.S.
- Antonio Intriago of Miami
- Walter Veintemilla of Weston
- Frederick Bergman of Tampa
Ortiz and Intriago own Counter Terrorist Unit Federal Academy and Counter Terrorist Unit Security (collectively, CTU), Veintemilla owned a financing company called Worldwide, and Bergman was an individual of means who provided financing and shipping ballistic materials to Haiti. The men were also working with a Haitian American named Christian Emmanuel Sanon.
The alleged plot was that they would institute a coup d'etat, removing the Haitian president and installing Sanon in his place.
Sanon would then reportedly hire CTU for security and infrastructure contracts, with Worldwide providing financing for the contracts.
Bergman reportedly got involved shipping ballistic jackets to Haiti by falsifying export documents and arranging for the provisions of ammo and weaponry in the country.
The group then allegedly attempted a failed kidnapping of the president first, and then they discovered that Sanon wouldn't be eligible to be president had they succeeded anyway.
They reportedly regrouped and found a corrupt Haitian judge who was happy to play the role of patsy president, and shifted their plot to an easier deliverable: assassination.
CTU allegedly provided some Colombian mercenaries to take out the president, which they did. Needless to say, the plot to install a patsy president didn't quite work out, as the country fell into anarchy.
At the indictment Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division said,
...a central tenet of every democracy in the world is that those who want to change their government, must do so peacefully — through ballots, not bullets. These defendants thought they could secure immunity for their crimes. We will now deliver justice in a U.S. courtroom.
If convicted, the men could serve between 20 years to life in prison. There's no word on the possibility of them being extradited to Haiti, which would be a small mercy considering the way things are going there.
