#Jovenel Moïse
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memenewsdotcom · 11 months ago
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Indictments in Jovenel Moïse assassination
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famousdeaths · 7 months ago
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Jovenel Moïse is the current President of Haiti, serving since February 7, 2021. She is the first female president and first president born after Haiti's independence.
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netalkolemedia · 7 months ago
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Trois ans après l'assassinat de Jovenel Moïse : un pays toujours en quête de justice et de paix
Le 7 juillet 2021, Haïti a été secoué par l’assassinat brutal de son président, Jovenel Moïse, à son domicile privé dans la commune de Pétion-ville. Trois ans plus tard, la nation est toujours hantée par ce crime et les questions sans réponse qui l’entourent. Cet événement tragique a laissé une marque indélébile sur le paysage politique et social d’Haïti, exacerbant une crise déjà…
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warningsine · 1 year ago
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MIAMI (AP) — A federal judge in Miami on Friday sentenced a retired Colombian army officer to life in prison for his role in plotting to kill Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, which caused unprecedented turmoil in the Caribbean nation.
Germán Alejandro Rivera García, 45, is the second of 11 suspects detained and charged in Miami to be sentenced in what U.S. prosecutors have described as a conspiracy hatched in both Haiti and Florida to hire mercenaries to kidnap or kill Moïse, who was slain at his private home near the Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince on July 7, 2021.
Rivera, also known as “Colonel Mike,” had pleaded guilty in September to conspiring and supporting a plot to kill the Haitian president. According to court documents, he was part of a convoy headed to Moïse’s residence the day of the killing, after he relayed information that the plan was not to kidnap the president but rather kill him.
Rivera faced the maximum penalty of up to life imprisonment and now hopes that his sentence could be reduced in the future as part of a cooperation agreement he has signed with U.S. authorities.
Sometimes U.S. attorneys recommend judges to reduce a sentence if they determine that the convicted person helps with their investigation.
Federal Judge José E. Martínez handed down the sentence at a hearing in Miami that lasted less than 30 minutes.
“Good luck to you, Mr. Rivera,” the judge said after accepting to make a recommendation for the Colombian to remain at a South Florida federal prison, as he requested.
The sentencing came just months after Haitian-Chilean businessman Rodolphe Jaar was sentenced to life in prison in June for his role in Moïse’s killing. Meanwhile, former Haitian senator John Joel Joseph is set to be sentenced in December. Eight more defendants are waiting trial next year in the United States.
Rivera entered the hearing wearing a prisoner’s beige shirt and pants. He was handcuffed and had shackles on his ankles as he listened to the judge’s ruling seated next to his attorney.
The Colombian declined to make statements when the judge asked him if he had anything to say. “Not at the moment, your honor,” Rivera answered.
According to the charges, Rivera, Jaar, Joseph and others, including about 20 Colombian citizens and several dual Haitian-American citizens, participated in the plot. The conspirators initially planned to kidnap the Haitian president, and later changed the plan to kill him. Investigators allege the plotters had hoped to win contracts under a successor to Moïse.
Moïse was killed when assailants broke into his home. He was 53 years old.
Meanwhile, more than 40 suspects in the case remain detained in Haiti and have languished in prison more than two years after the assassination as the newest investigative judge continues his interrogations. Among those arrested after the killing are 18 former Colombian soldiers, who are in custody in Haiti.
The case received a boost last week when police arrested Joseph Félix Badio, a key suspect who once worked at Haiti’s Ministry of Justice and at the government’s anti-corruption unit. He was detained in the capital of Port-au-Prince after more than two years on the run.
Since the assassination, Haiti has experienced a surge of gang violence that led the prime minister to request the deployment of an armed force. In early October, the U.N. Security Council voted to send a multinational force led by Kenya to help fight the gangs.
Kenya has not announced a deployment date.
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news-paw-haiti-509 · 6 months ago
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inda Thomas-Greenfield en Visite Officielle en Haïti pour Réaffirmer le Soutien Américain
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassadeur des États-Unis aux Nations unies, est arrivée en Haïti tôt ce lundi 22 juillet 2024, à bord d’un avion de l’armée américaine. Sur son compte X, elle a déclaré : “Nous sommes ici pour réaffirmer notre soutien indéfectible à la transition démocratique d’Haïti et à la sécurité de tous les Haïtiens.” Cette visite souligne l’engagement des États-Unis à accompagner…
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presslakay · 7 months ago
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Joverlin, fils de Jovenel Moïse, lance une association de lutte contre l’injustice
À l’occasion du troisième anniversaire de l’assassinat de son père, Joverlin Moïse, fils du feu Président Jovenel Moïse, a lancé virtuellement une association de lutte contre l’impunité et l’injustice. Trois années sont déjà écoulées depuis que les partisans et la famille de Jovenel Moïse, décédé le 7 juillet 2021, en sa résidence privée, réclament justice. Une quête assez difficile alors que le…
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Mag40-Politique Haïti : Walter Wesser Voltaire prise en charge le dossier de l’assassinat du Président Jovenel Moïse
Le juge d’instruction en charge du dossier de l’assassinat du président Jovenel Moïse, Walter Wesser Voltaire, a auditionné, ce lundi, l’ancien premier ministre Joseph Jouthe. Il s’agissait de sa première comparution dans le cadre de ce dossier. « Le juge était dur », a lâché Joseph Jouthe au micro des journalistes à sa sortie du cabinet d’instruction. Il pense que le magistrat instructeur ne…
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justinspoliticalcorner · 1 month ago
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Maria Ramirez Uribe and Amy Sherman at PolitiFact:
SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Underlying 2024’s most outrageous political lie was a truth — some might even argue a confession — voiced by an accomplice: To get media attention, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged, sometimes "I have to create stories." And so, with a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats. With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level.
"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs," Trump said Sept. 10. "The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame." City and county officials said repeatedly that it was not happening.  Rebuttals did not diminish the consequences: Dozens of bomb threats at schools, grocery stores and government buildings. Pleas from locals to leave them alone. A continued lack of constructive debate on immigration and border control issues. After the threats subsided, some Haitians didn’t want to go in public or send their children to school. The police department sent an officer to protect churchgoers at a Haitian Creole Sunday afternoon mass. Haitian restaurant owners and schoolchildren heard taunts from people using Trump’s words. 
"‘Dad, do we eat dogs at the house?’" Jacob Payen, a Haitian Community Alliance spokesperson and business owner, recalled his 7-year-old son asking. The Haitian population in Springfield had swelled since 2021 as people fled Haiti’s violence and instability. City officials estimated 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians had come to this city of about 58,000 residents in 2020, after hearing about jobs and low living costs. Most Haitians live in the U.S. legally under a temporary federal protection President Joe Biden extended. The sudden population surge came with growing pains on housing, health services, road safety and schools. When the local conversation turned to unfounded rumors and fearmongering, Trump and Vance seized an opportunity.
[...]
In choosing the 2024 Lie of the Year, the claims by Vance and Trump about Haitians eating pets stood out. 
It was an absurd statement that Trump raised unprompted on the debate stage. 
And neither Trump nor Vance stopped there. They stuck with the narrative for the rest of the campaign, over the objections of allies who debunked it and pleaded with them to let it go. When challenged by voters and interviewers, Trump said he heard it on TV; Vance said constituents had called his office with the claim.
[...]
Emboldened by Vance’s embrace of the rumor, Trump’s debate outburst cemented lasting consequences, stigmatizing a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. For those reasons, Trump and Vance own the 2024 Lie of the Year.
[...]
Anatomy of a lie: How real strains primed voters for a baseless rumor
Haitians in Springfield fled their home country after their family members were killed, their businesses were burned down and their lives were endangered. The country was thrown into chaos, its capital city controlled by gangs, after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, an earthquake and a tropical storm.  As their population grew in Springfield, the Haitian immigrants filled jobs and opened restaurants and stores.  Some longtime residents grew irritated by the strain on city services, such as wait times for public health services, a housing shortage and rising rents. 
In August 2023, a tragedy deepened the resentment: Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian who is in the U.S. legally and lacked a valid driver’s license, drove a minivan into a school bus, injuring about 20 children and killing Aiden Clark, 11. It was the first day of school. Joseph was found guilty of vehicular homicide and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to prison. Angry residents attended city commission meetings over the next year to ask questions about how so many Haitians ended up in Springfield. They said the Haitians didn’t know driving laws or cultural norms and didn’t speak English.  Local leaders acknowledged the road dangers and overburdened public services. They described steps they and the state had taken to mitigate the strains, such as hiring interpreters and launching drivers’ education classes. City Manager Bryan Heck said Springfield had struggled with housing scarcity for years before the Haitians arrived. 
On July 8, Heck sent a letter to the leadership of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, copying Vance, requesting federal help. The next day, at a banking committee meeting, Vance highlighted Springfield’s housing shortage and demands on hospital and school services among the "very real human consequences" of immigration. Trump announced Vance as his running mate about a week later. 
Discussion of real tension quickly turned to hearsay molded by racist tropes. The earliest rumors PolitiFact found of Haitians stealing and eating pets and geese came in August amid a neo-Nazi group’s protest. On Aug. 10, a dozen people carrying swastika flags marched downtown, protesting the city’s Haitian immigrants. The national white supremacist group Blood Tribe, which has opposed immigration around the country, posted on Gab, a social networking platform used by far-right groups, to take credit for the march. "Once haitians swarm into a town animals start to disappear," an anonymous user commented.  That post garnered only a few likes and comments.  On Aug. 26, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office received a call from someone who said he saw four Haitians carrying geese. Wildlife officials found no evidence to corroborate the claim.
On social media the same day, users amplified similar claims with thirdhand accounts. In an Aug. 26 Facebook post, a woman said her work partner’s brother-in-law saw a Haitian man cut the heads off geese in front of children. She tagged Springfield resident Anthony Harris, who told the story at a city commission meeting the next day, adding that the man ate the beheaded geese. On a private Facebook group about crime in Springfield, a resident said Haitians stole and ate a neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat. (The woman later took down the post and said she regretted it.) In the first week of September, verified accounts on X, sent the claim viral when they posted a screenshot of the Facebook post.  "Springfield is a small town in Ohio. 4 years ago, they had 60k residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town," End Wokeness, a pro-Trump X account with more than 3 million followers, posted Sept. 6. "Now ducks and pets are disappearing." End Wokeness’ X post, which has 5 million views, included a photo of a Black man holding what appears to be a dead goose. The photo was taken in Columbus, Ohio, about 48 miles east of Springfield, according to a July Reddit post. 
PolitiFact names the “they’re eating the pets” lie in Springfield, Ohio amplified by then-Senator and VP-elect JD Vance and “President”-elect Donald Trump as its 2024 Lie Of The Year. The pet-eating hoax served to fuel anti-Haitian prejudice.
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beardedmrbean · 2 months ago
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At least 110 mostly elderly people have been brutally murdered by gang members in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, according to a human rights group.
The National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH) said a local gang leader had targeted them after his son fell ill and subsequently died.
The gang leader reportedly consulted a voodoo priest who blamed elderly locals practising "witchcraft" for the boy's mystery illness.
The United Nations said the number of people killed in Haiti so far this year in spiralling gang violence had reached "a staggering 5,000".
Warning: This story contains details some readers may find upsetting
While details from the massacre are still emerging, the UN's human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the number of people killed over the weekend "in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang" at 184.
The killings happened in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of the capital.
According to reports, gang members seized scores of residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, rounded them up and then shot or stabbed them to death with knives and machetes.
Residents reported seeing mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.
RNDDH estimated 60 were killed on Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the gang leader's son had died of his illness.
While RNDDH said that all the victims were over 60, another rights group said some younger people who had tried to protect the elderly had also been killed.
Local media said that elderly people believed to be practitioners of voodoo had been singled out because the gang leader had been told his son's illness had been caused by them.
Rights groups said the man who had ordered the killings was Monel Felix, also known as Mikano.
Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the port of the capital.
According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but hard for the security forces to penetrate.
Local media said that residents had been prevented from leaving Wharf Jérémie by Mikano's gang, so news of the deadly killings was slow to spread.
The group forms part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls much of the Haitian capital.
Haiti has been engulfed in a wave of gang violence since the assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel Moïse.
Data gathered by GI-TOC shows there was a decline in the murder rate between May and September of this year, after rival gangs had reached an uneasy truce.
But attempts by the gangs to expand their territory beyond their strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, with ordinary residents rather than rival gang members being increasingly targeted.
On 3 October, 115 locals were killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite department.
That massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist attempts by Gran Grif to extort locals.
If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend's killings in Cité Soleil, would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.
With gangs in control of an estimated 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large swathes of the countryside, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their homes.
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 700,000 people - half of them children - are internally displaced across the country.
Gang members often use sexual abuse, including gang rape, to sow terror among the local population.
In a report published two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino wrote that "the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape girls of women without fearing any consequences".
Attempts by the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission to quell the violence have so far failed.
The international police force arrived in Haiti in June to bolster the Haitian National Police but is underfunded and lacks the necessary equipment to take on the heavily armed gangs.
Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) - the body created to organise elections and re-establish democratic order - appears to be in turmoil.
The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and seems to have made little progress towards organising elections.
"They reign over a mountain of ashes," GI-TOC's Romain Le Cour Grandmaison writes of the council in his report.
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fuckyeahmarxismleninism · 6 months ago
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By Bethony Dupont
The ballyhooed elections will be nothing more than a scam to parachute in new neocolonial overseers and “legalize” their rule while deepening the Haiti masses’ impoverishment and servitude. Worse yet, the foreign and local bourgeoisies will accuse their victims of being responsible for their own pauperization and the ensuing social woes.
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mariacallous · 11 months ago
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On March 5, Haiti’s acting prime minister took off on a chartered Gulfstream jet from a New Jersey airport with nowhere to go.
Ariel Henry—Haiti’s unelected leader since July 2021—had spent weeks traveling in Africa and the Americas trying to rally international support for his country, which has been mired in chronic poverty, political instability, and an insurgency of criminal groups led by a former Haitian police officer turned gang leader, Jimmy Chérizier, known as “Barbecue.”
While Henry was out of the country, Barbecue and his allies coordinated an armed assault calling for Henry’s ouster. They stormed police stations and prisons, released around 3,700 inmates, and attacked the airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, making it too dangerous for Henry to land there.
Instead, Henry tried to negotiate a plan to land in neighboring Dominican Republic, but he was rebuffed at the last minute by the government there, according to U.S. officials, Caribbean officials, and regional experts familiar with the matter. Other Caribbean countries reacted coolly to the prospect of hosting Henry as his support domestically and abroad began collapsing. Finally, he landed in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, where he remained in limbo until March 12, when he announced his intention to resign.
The chaos and uncertainty of Henry’s final flight as prime minister underlined the political tumult that has gripped Haiti—and the tepid response to Haiti’s downward spiral by an overstretched international community reluctant to tackle yet another crisis.
If Haiti isn’t yet formally deemed a failed state, it’s well on its way. Government institutions and basic services have broken down and gang violence has sparked one of the worst humanitarian and refugee crises in the Western Hemisphere.
“It’s an extremely dangerous situation,” said Bocchit Edmond, Haiti’s former foreign minister who now runs the Haitian Observatory of International Relations think tank. “Without a change, we are facing a possibility of an entire nation becoming a big open-air jail run by gangs.”
Yet what that change should look like—and who might be willing and able to step in to make it happen—remains as unclear now as it has for more than two years.
Haiti’s near collapse has led to frantic meetings among regional leaders in recent weeks and heated debates between the Biden administration and Congress over what role, if any, the United States should play in the unfolding emergency in its own backyard. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Jamaica on Monday to meet with Caribbean leaders on the issue, and he pledged an additional $100 million in U.S. funds to finance the deployment of a multinational force to help stabilize the country.
The Biden administration is urging Congress to unlock even more funds. Two powerful Republican lawmakers—Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—argue that the administration doesn’t have adequate plans for how it would use those funds. They also charge that the administration let its Haiti policy fester in indecision for too long, exacerbating the country’s current predicament.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has faced chronic instability for decades, fueled in part by devastating natural disasters and international aid mishaps, including a U.N. mission that brought a deadly cholera outbreak to the country as well as sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children by U.N. peacekeepers, and a 2010 earthquake that killed an estimated 300,000, followed by bungled international relief efforts that sparked a cycle of mismanagement and stunted development projects.
In 2021, then-President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a group of gunmen in his home, sparking the current political crisis in the country. (A Haitian judge last month indicted three prominent individuals—Moïse’s widow, an ex-prime minister, and a former Haitian chief of police—for involvement in the assassination, charges they have denied as baseless political reprisals.) Henry took over as acting president shortly after and soon began pleading with foreign powers for a military intervention to address the country’s spiraling instability.
Gangs have taken control of much of Port-au-Prince, and rights groups say the gangs have used rape and torture as weapons against the civilian population. Thousands of Haitians have been killed and kidnapped.
“It is difficult to overstate the gravity of the political, security, human rights and humanitarian situation in Haiti today,” the U.N. mission in Haiti wrote in a report to the U.N. Security Council in January, a copy of which was obtained by Foreign Policy. The violence has led to a surge in Haitians fleeing the country; the report noted that the number of Haitians fleeing to Central America with the aim of making it across the U.S. southern border increased 23-fold in 2023—from 1,550 people in July to 35,500 people in October.
The U.S. Embassy in Haiti this week evacuated some diplomats and nonessential personnel as well as deployed a specialized detachment of U.S. Marines to bolster the embassy’s security. Gen. Laura Richardson, commander of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers in a hearing on Thursday that the U.S. military had plans ready to evacuate U.S. citizens if the crisis worsened.
“It’s absolute chaos. People are crying out for even some basic level of security,” said Nicole Widdersheim, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “We need to see the international community doing something very rapid to bring security and stability and protection from the violence.”
The international community, meanwhile, procrastinated on the matter for over two years, officials and experts said.
After Moïse’s assassination, the United States balked at the prospect of leading a multinational force. In 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden privately asked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if Canada would take the lead, current and former officials said. Canada declined, but it offered to contribute $100 million to help fund such a force. No other country in South or Central America stepped up. Haiti, coordinating with the Biden administration, then turned to Africa. Kenya agreed to lead a mission and deploy 1,000 police officers to Haiti as part of an effort that would be coordinated and bankrolled mostly by the United States.
That plan stalled when Kenyan opposition politicians challenged the program’s legality. The U.S. government, meanwhile, already overstretched by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, let Haiti fall by the wayside, current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy. Biden didn’t nominate a U.S. ambassador to Haiti until May 2023, nearly two years after Moïse’s assassination. Biden’s nominee, career diplomat Dennis Hankins, was confirmed to the post by the U.S. Senate on Thursday.
“A lot of countries at the beginning were reluctant to take the lead, though Haiti needs urgent help,” Edmond said. But, he added, “At the end of the day, we also need to take our own responsibilities for our own country. I don’t think I will throw the blame only on the international community.”
Henry’s resignation announcement was quietly seen as a relief by some U.S. and regional officials, but it also created new challenges as the region tries to cobble together a temporary governance structure from afar to lead Haiti out of its crisis.
His announcement came after quiet pressure from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), officials said, as well as repeated threats from gang leaders should he return to the country. (The White House has denied reports that it also pressured Henry to resign.)
Now, CARICOM is helping craft a new presidential transitional council composed of seven voting members and two observers, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by Foreign Policy. Candidates for the council would be put forward by at least five active Haitian political parties with input from CARICOM-screened civil society organizations. Once appointed, the new council, in theory, would help restore legitimacy to Haiti’s absent government and lead the country on a path toward stability and, eventually, elections. Henry has said he’ll officially step down once the new council is in place.
Almost immediately, though, current and former officials said, those efforts hit a wall as Haitian elites began wrangling with CARICOM officials over who should make the final cut, and some potential member candidates voiced fear for their families’ lives if they joined the council. On Friday, Blinken said that most of the parties have named their representatives for the council but that several still have not.
Edmond said many Haitians are skeptical of the plan and “don’t believe it’s the right solution.” Edmond said he believes a better alternative would be for the Haitian Supreme Court to take temporary control and appoint a technocrat as prime minister to strengthen Haiti’s national police forces and lead the country into elections.
Meanwhile, Henry’s resignation has put on hold the U.S.- and U.N.-backed plan for Kenya to deploy a police force to Haiti to help restore order to the country. Kenyan President William Ruto said he remained committed to the plan but that it would only occur after the transitional council was established. It’s unclear whether Henry’s resignation will create new legal hurdles for Ruto to carry out the deployment.
Biden administration officials also considered offers from Senegal and Rwanda to lead the security assistance force, but those proposals were ultimately rejected in favor of Kenya, current and former U.S. and Haitian officials said. Rwanda faces widespread criticisms over its checkered record on human rights and authoritarian bent, and Senegal is currently mired in its own political crisis over delayed elections. However, Kenya’s police have also been accused of committing abuses at home by human rights groups, including the use of excessive force and the killing of more than 100 people in 2023.
The planned Kenyan operation, even if it is able to commence, faces significant practical and logistical challenges, U.S. officials and congressional aides said. For starters, neither Kenya, the United States, nor other regional powers have stated what the rules of engagement would be for Kenyan forces once they are deployed to the country, where they face the daunting task of quelling powerful and heavily armed gangs and a weakened and embattled local police force.
There is also the broader question of whether adding more police will solve the deeper systemic issues that led to the current situation. “The police cannot make significant inroads against gangs absent a broader political breakthrough,” Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, argued in Foreign Policy last July. “In Haiti, gang members are not independent warlords operating apart from the state. They are part of the way the state functions—and how political leaders assert power.”
An unclassified U.S. intelligence assessment released this week predicted that Haitian gangs “will be more likely to violently resist a foreign national force deployment to Haiti because they perceive it to be a shared threat to their control and operations” and that Haiti’s national police have been “unable to counter gang violence and [have] been plagued by resource issues, corruption challenges, and limited training.”
Any deployment of Kenyan forces would also require substantial logistical support from the U.S. military, U.S. officials and congressional aides familiar with the matter said. Administration officials have told Congress that once given the green light, Kenyan police could be deployed to Haiti in a matter of 45 to 60 days in ideal conditions—and without U.S. boots on the ground. But Haiti has no clear base or logistics hub for the Kenyan police to be deployed to, particularly after gangs seized control of major power centers in Port-au-Prince.
Another complicating factor is the funding mechanism. After balking for nearly two years on proposals to deploy their own forces to Haiti, the U.S. and Canadian governments have both pledged to fund the Kenyan-led force, but no funding mechanism has been set up yet to do that. A multinational police mission in Haiti could cost an estimated $500 million to $800 million per year, State Department officials have told congressional oversight committees.
Risch has held up an estimated $40 million of the first tranche of U.S. funding for the Kenya-led mission. “[A]fter years of discussions, repeated requests for information, and providing partial funding to help them plan, the administration only this afternoon sent us a rough plan to address this crisis,” Risch said in a joint statement with McCaul. The administration “owes Congress a lot more details in a more timely manner before it gets more funding,” they said.
John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, said the situation is getting worse in the meantime. “The violence has been increasing, not decreasing, as well as the instability. And, of course, the Haitian people are the ones that are suffering as a result,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Edmond said that even if the Kenya-led mission gets underway, the United States has a “moral obligation to consider, before the arrival of the Kenyan forces, a way to help the national police forces that are now being overwhelmed by the gangs.”
“The United States is the leader of the free world. Haiti is a member of that world, one of the closest neighbors to the U.S. There is a moral obligation here to step in.”
Widdersheim said the United States can’t dodge responsibilities. “Half measures won’t be good enough this time,” she said. “The U.S. government hasn’t in the past seemed to care enough to truly invest in Haiti’s long-term development, and it’s to our detriment because nothing ever sticks; we just get stuck doing half measures that always fail.”
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newhistorybooks · 10 months ago
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“This book presents a brilliant analysis of the neoliberal policies imposed on Haiti by international institutions. Dupuy skillfully connects decades of extractive foreign interventions in Haiti, from the US occupation to the aftermath of Jovenel Moïse’s assassination. Haiti since 1804 points the way toward a future in which Haitians might finally regain sovereignty over their own economy and government."
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thefreethoughtprojectcom · 5 months ago
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Two plotters of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse were exposed as DEA informants. Another was unmasked as an FBI informant.
Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-corruption/assassin-of-haitian-president-reportedly-linked-to-us-intelligence
#TheFreeThoughtProject
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ptseti · 10 months ago
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WHY HAITI IS A THREAT TO THE U.S. Why does the US keep meddling in Haiti? Given the disastrous results of its interventions up to now, it’s almost as if it wants the island nation to fail. So-called UN peacekeeping missions have led to cholera, child abuse and civilian deaths, while Washington seems incapable of letting Haitians chose their own leaders. In this clip, Brian Concannon, the executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, argues that a strong Haiti poses a direct threat to US interests. The fear is that the spirit of freedom that led the island’s slaves to break their chains in 1804 is still strong and could spread. Little wonder, then, Washington has had a hand in removing Haitian leaders it doesn’t like: they might start demanding reparations at the UN and giving other oppressed nations ideas! The US, lacking all credibility in Haiti, has now roped Kenya into fronting its next intervention to ‘restore order’ on the island, where gun violence (involving US-made guns!) has spiralled out of control. The envisioned deployment of Kenyan police - now in doubt after the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry (widely seen as a Western puppet installed after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021) - would be illegal under both Kenyan and Haitian law, but Washington stumped up $300 million for the mission all the same.
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anarchotahdigism · 11 months ago
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Haiti’s government declared a state of emergency and nighttime curfew late Sunday in an effort to regain control of the streets after a huge popular uprising over the weekend saw armed fighters storm the country’s two biggest prisons.
The 72-hour state of emergency took effect immediately. The government said it would set out to find the escapees from prison. “The police were ordered to use all legal means at their disposal to enforce the curfew and apprehend all offenders,” said a statement from Finance Minister Patrick Boivert, acting prime minister.
Prime Minister Ariel Henry traveled abroad last week to try to salvage international bourgeois support for bringing in a US-backed security force to pacify the country in its conflict with increasingly militant organizations countrywide." ... "But the siege Saturday night of the National Penitentiary came as a shock even to Haitians accustomed to living under the constant pressure due to colonial misrule. Almost all of the estimated 4,000 inmates fled in the jailbreak, leaving the usually criminally overcrowded facility empty Sunday with no prison guards in sight and plastic sandals, clothing and furniture strewn across the concrete patio. Three bodies with gunshot wounds lay at the prison entrance." ... "Among the few dozen who chose to stay in the prison are 18 former Colombian soldiers accused of working as mercenaries in the July 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Amid the clashes Saturday night, several of the Colombians shared a video pleading for their lives.
'Please, please help us,” one of the men, Francisco Uribe, said in the message widely shared on social media. “They are massacring people indiscriminately inside the cells.' " .... "A second Port-au-Prince prison containing about 1,400 inmates was also overrun. Gunmen also occupied the nation’s top soccer stadium in a highly symbolic display of defiance Internet service for many residents was down as Haiti’s top mobile network said a fiber-optic cable connection was slashed during the rebellion." .. "The rebellion is significant since the president, who is US-backed and unelected, has been organizing an international occupation force to impose its will on the country. There has been no notable progress on social issues, economic issues, or reparations for US and French destruction of the country.
The violence must be understood in this context."
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presslakay · 1 year ago
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Assassinat de Jovenel Moïse | Un quatrième accusé condamné à la prison à vie aux États-Unis
Après avoir plaidé coupable de complicité dans le dossier relatif à l’assassinat du président Jovenel Moïse, Joseph Vincent, un ancien informateur de la DEA, a été condamné, vendredi 9 février 2024, à la prison à vie, aux États-Unis. Le dossier de l’assassinat du feu Président haïtien continue de faire son chemin au niveau de la justice américaine. Si en Haïti, aucune des personnes accusées…
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