Former Colombian Soldiers (HENM) Deny Killing Haitian President

Detained in Haiti, Colombians say they thought they were on a DEA mission to arrest President Jovenel Moïse: ‘We were fooled’

July 30, 2021 8:43 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE—The former Colombian soldiers jailed in Haiti in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse say they didn’t kill him and thought they were on a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration mission to arrest the leader, lawyers from the Colombian state, who talked to the men, said Friday.

“They said they didn’t know what happened,” said Luis Andrés Fajardo, the No. 2 in Colombia’s human rights agency. He spoke with most of the 18 men for about three hours at a Haitian prison. “It was a trap,” he recalled several saying.

The former servicemen, ex-special operations soldiers who’d fought guerrillas in Colombia, had been hired by a Miami security company and arrived here between May and June, according to relatives, text messages, and Haitians who interacted with them. But the owner of the company and a group of Haitian businessmen, the police here say, instead took part in a plan to assassinate Mr. Moïse.

In the meetings with the lawyers, in which the servicemen for the first time detailed their account for Colombia’s government, the former soldiers repeated the same phrase over and again: “We were fooled.”

Even so, some of the men didn’t speak or spoke little, preferring to spend the time writing letters for Mr. Fajardo’s delegation to take back to their relatives in Colombia. The men had been tightly handcuffed for 24 hours a day for more than a week, they said, and about half of them were cuffed to each other, Mr. Fajardo said.

The DEA declined to comment. It has previously said that individuals who yelled “DEA” at the time of the killing to gain entrance to the president’s home weren’t acting on behalf of the agency.

Mr. Moïse was killed when gunmen stormed his home in Port-au-Prince in the early hours of July 7. Three of the former Colombian soldiers were killed soon after in a shootout with the Haitian police, authorities here said. The 18 Colombians were captured in the days following the attack.

Police have arraigned or implicated more than 40 people during their investigation. They include a Haitian senator, a supreme court judge, a former cocaine trafficker who became a U.S. informant, and several Miami businessmen. Members of the security team assigned to protect Mr. Moïse are being interrogated, and their leader has been charged. Colombia’s chief of police, Gen. Jorge Vargas, said on July 15 that two of the former servicemen plotted with those planning the operation against the Haitian president, basing their comments on the Haitian investigation.

But no clear motive or mastermind has emerged in an investigation involving three countries. 

The 18 Colombians have been kept in a small, roughly 125-square-foot corridor since their arrest. Investigators from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and Colombia’s government have been in Haiti trying to determine how the crime took place.

Eduardo Florez, a criminal defense lawyer working with the Colombian government’s rights office, said a few of them have minor injuries: an injured foot, stitches in the back of the head. The men had been provided food and water. They told the Colombian lawyers they didn’t want to be transferred from the jail for fear of being killed.

“They are very nervous,” said Mr. Florez, who said they also haven't seen a judge or been formally entered into the court system. “And they are conscious of all that.”

The lawyers from the Colombian human rights delegation are some of the first to gain access to the former servicemen, who haven’t yet been able to secure their own defense attorney. They were able to see them after the Organization of American States and Haiti’s Citizen Protection Office, a human rights body, connected them to relevant officials. A request sent by Colombia’s ambassador to Haiti to the Haitian justice ministry has remained unanswered, Mr. Fajardo added.

On Friday, Colombia’s government expressed concern about the treatment of the men.

The government said Marta Lucía Ramírez, Colombia’s foreign minister, wrote a letter to Haiti’s ambassador in the Andean country, urging Haiti to ensure due process for the Colombians and provide them with legal assistance. Ms. Ramírez said injured detainees haven't received adequate medical treatment and weren’t being guaranteed humanitarian conditions in the jail.

I remind you that your government has the moral and legal obligation to protect detainees under your jurisdiction,” Ms. Ramírez said.

Spokespeople for Haiti’s prime minister and acting president didn’t return requests for comment. Leon Charles, the head of Haiti’s national police, didn’t return calls.

The men have all been repeatedly interviewed by FBI agents and Haitian investigators, the Colombians told Mr. Fajardo.

“There is one thing in all this that is bizarre…they are all in the same room,” the lawyer said. “Normally, in an investigation, if you want to know the truth, you have to separate them.”

In their comments to the lawyers, the men said they had been serving an arrest warrant for the president.

After the president was killed and Haitian authorities responded, putting out a call for the public to help find foreign-speaking gunmen, 11 of the Colombians fled to the Taiwanese embassy. Mr. Fajardo said they still believed they were on a legitimate, government mission. The Taiwanese embassy said it allowed Haitian police to arrest them.

At one point during the lawyer’s visit, Haitian police came in and handed out paper and pens to the men to write letters back home to their families.

“I’m innocent,” wrote one prisoner in a letter to his family which he handed to the lawyers to take back to Colombia.

Mr. Fajardo said the prisoners recalled signing a document in French that they didn’t understand.

Mr. Florez said he thinks the men gave up the right to speak to a lawyer when they talked to the FBI.

The men were hired by CTU, a Miami-based security firm, Haitian authorities have said. A lawyer for its owner, Antonio Intriago, said his client would issue a statement soon. “Our client is innocent and is working to clear his name,” he wrote in an email.

In their Haitian jail, some of the former Colombian soldiers seemed to cling to hope that the company that hired them would resolve the impasse, Mr. Fajardo said.

“They said, ‘What is going to happen to the company we are working for,’ ” he said. “They thought it is going to get them a lawyer and everything.”

—José de Córdoba in Mexico City and Jenny Carolina González in Bogotá, Colombia, contributed to this article.

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (August 1st, 2021)
Ex. 16, 2-4 +12-15; Ps. 78; Eph. 4, 17, 20-24; Jn. 6, 24-35 By +Guy Sansaricq.

The crowd stunned by the miracle of the multiplication of the breads follows Jesus to the other side of the lake longing for more favors. Jesus begins by scolding them: “You run after me because you have eaten bread and are filled! Run rather after the food that lasts forever, the bread the Father has given you!”

Is it not true that we strain ourselves for passing goods yet find no time for what is permanent and eternal?

The work of God, He continued, is that you believe in the one He sent! Jesus Himself is the supreme treasure we should all long for. For 2000 years millions have found this teaching to be true. What about you? Then, referring to the manna, often called the bread from heaven Jesus stated: “I am the real bread that comes from heaven to give life to the world. I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never hunger; he who believes in me will never thirst!

From this point on, Jesus speaks about the real presence of his body and blood in the bread and wine of the Mass. Ps. 4 warns us that we tend to “love what is worthless and chase after lies.” Jesus is calling us to seek Him who is infinitely superior to all earthly food.”
Learn to seek and find TRUE JOY in your COMMUNION WITH JESUS’ BODY AND BLOOD!!

‘They Thought I Was Dead’: Haitian President’s Widow Recounts Assassination

Struck by gunfire, Martine Moïse lay bleeding as the assassins who killed her husband ransacked her room. Now, she says, the F.B.I. must find the mastermind behind the attack.

July 30, 2021Updated 9:04 a.m. ET

Martine Moïse, first lady of Haiti, in Florida on Thursday. Her husband’s assassins also shot her in the arm.

Maria Alejandra Cardona for The New York Times

MIAMI — With her elbow shattered by gunfire and her mouth full of blood, the first lady of Haiti lay on the floor beside her bed, unable to breathe, as the assassins stormed the room.

“The only thing that I saw before they killed him were their boots,” Martine Moïse said of the moment her husband, President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti, was shot dead beside her. “Then I closed my eyes, and I didn’t see anything else.”

She listened as they ransacked the room, searching methodically for something in her husband’s files, she said. “‘That’s not it. That’s not it,’” she recalled them saying in Spanish, over and over. Then finally: “‘That’s it.’”

The killers filed out. One stepped on her feet. Another waved a flashlight in her eyes, apparently to check to see if she was still alive.

“When they left, they thought I was dead,” she said.

In her first interview since the president’s assassination on July 7, Mrs. Moïse, 47, described the searing pain of witnessing her husband, a man with whom she had shared 25 years, being killed in front of her. She did not want to relive the deafening gunfire, the walls and windows trembling, the terrifying certainty that her children would be killed, the horror of seeing her husband’s body, or how she fought to stand up after the killers left. “All that blood,” she said softly.

The president’s funeral in Cap-Haitien, days after gunmen entered the couple’s official residence and attacked them in their bedroom.Federico Rios for The New York Times

But she needed to speak, she said, because she did not believe that the investigation into his death had answered the central question tormenting her and countless Haitians: Who ordered and paid for the assassination of her husband?

The Haitian police have detained a wide array of people in connection with the killing, including 18 Colombians and several Haitians and Haitian Americans, and they are still seeking others. The suspects include retired Colombian commandos, a former judge, a security equipment salesman, a mortgage and insurance broker in Florida, and two commanders of the president’s security team. According to the Haitian police, the elaborate plot revolves around a 63-year-old doctor and pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who officials say conspired to hire the Colombian mercenaries to kill the president and seize political power.

But critics of the government’s explanation say that none of the people named in the investigation had the means to finance the plot on their own. And Mrs. Moïse, like many Haitians, believes there must have been a mastermind behind them, giving the orders and supplying the money.

She wants to know what happened to the 30 to 50 men who were usually posted at her house whenever her husband was at home. None of his guards were killed or even wounded, she said. “I don’t understand how nobody was shot,” she said.

Martine Moïse, the first lady of Haiti, this month at a memorial for her assassinated husband, Jovenel Moïse. Federico Rios for The New York Times

At the time of his death, Mr. Moïse, 53, had been in the throes of a political crisis. Protesters accused him of overstaying his term, of controlling local gangs and of ruling by decree as the nation’s institutions were being hollowed out.

Mr. Moïse was also locked in battle with some of the nation’s wealthy oligarchs, including the family that controlled the nation’s electrical grid. While many people described the president as an autocratic leader, Mrs. Moïse said her fellow citizens should remember him as a man who stood up to the rich and powerful.

And now she wants to know if one of them had him killed.

“Only the oligarchs and the system could kill him,” she said.

Dressed in black, with her arm — now limp and perhaps useless forever, she said — wrapped in a sling and bandages, Mrs. Moïse offered an interview in South Florida on the agreement that The New York Times not reveal her whereabouts. Flanked by her children, security guards, Haitian diplomats and other advisers, she barely spoke above a whisper.

She and her husband had been asleep when the sounds of gunfire jolted them to their feet, she recalled. Mrs. Moïse said she ran to wake her two children, both in their early 20s, and urged them to hide in a bathroom, the only room without windows. They huddled there with their dog.

Her husband grabbed his telephone and called for help. “I asked, ‘Honey, who did you phone?’” she said.

Mrs. Moïse said investigators have yet to answer the central question of the case: Who ordered and paid for the assassination of her husband?Matias Delacroix/Associated Press

“He said, ‘I found Dimitri Hérard; I found Jean Laguel Civil,’” she said, reciting the names of two top officials in charge of presidential security. “And they told me that they are coming.”

But the assassins entered the house swiftly, seemingly unencumbered, she said. Mr. Moïse told his wife to lie down on the floor so she would not get hurt.

“‘That’s where I think you will be safe,’” she recalled him saying.

It was the last thing he told her.

A burst of gunfire came through the room, she said, hitting her first. Struck in the hand and the elbow, she lay still on the floor, convinced that she, and everyone else in her family, had been killed.

None of the assassins spoke Creole or French, she said. The men spoke only Spanish, and communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room. They seemed to find what they wanted on a shelf where her husband kept his files.

“They were looking for something in the room, and they found it,” Mrs. Moïse said.

She said she did not know what it was.

“At this moment, I felt that I was suffocating because there was blood in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “In my mind, everybody was dead, because if the president could die, everybody else could have died too.”

President and Mrs. Moïse in 2019.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press

The men her husband had called for help, she said — the officials entrusted with his security — are now in Haitian custody.

And while she expressed satisfaction that a number of the accused conspirators have been detained, she is by no means satisfied. Mrs. Moïse wants international law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I., which searched homes in Florida this week as part of the investigation, to track the money that financed the killing. The Colombian mercenaries who were arrested, she said, did not come to Haiti to “play hide and seek,” and she wants to know who paid for it all. 

In a statement on Friday, the F.B.I. said it “remains committed to working alongside our international partners to administer justice.”

Mrs. Moïse expected the money to trace back to wealthy oligarchs in Haiti, whose livelihoods were disrupted by her husband’s attacks on their lucrative contracts, she said.

Mrs. Moïse cited a powerful Haitian businessman who has wanted to run for president, Reginald Boulos, as someone who had something to gain from her husband’s death, though she stopped short of accusing him of ordering the assassination.

Mr. Boulos and his businesses have been at the center of a barrage of legal cases brought by the Haitian government, which is investigating allegations of a preferential loan obtained from the state pension fund. Mr. Boulos’ bank accounts were frozen before Mr. Moïse’s death, and they were released to him immediately after he died, Mrs. Moïse said.

Police officials gather evidence around the presidential residence in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Joseph Odelyn/Associated Press

In an interview, Mr. Boulos said that only his personal accounts, with less than $30,000, had been blocked, and he stressed that a judge had ordered the release of the money this week, after he took the Haitian government to court. He insisted that, far from being involved in the killing, his political career was actually better off with Mr. Moïse alive — because denouncing the president was such a pivotal part of Mr. Boulos’s platform.

“I had absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with his murder, even in dreams,” Mr. Boulos said. “I support a strong, independent international investigation to find who came up with the idea, who financed it and who executed it.”

Mrs. Moïse said she wants the killers to know she is not scared of them.

“I would like people who did this to be caught, otherwise they will kill every single president who takes power,” she said. “They did it once. They will do it again.”

She said she is seriously considering a run for the presidency, once she undergoes more surgeries on her wounded arm. She has already had two surgeries, and doctors now plan to implant nerves from her feet in her arm, she said. She may never regain use of her right arm, she said, and can move only two fingers.

“President Jovenel had a vision,” she said, “and we Haitians are not going to let that die.”

Protests and riots erupted the day before the president’s funeral.  Federico Rios for The New York Times

Anatoly Kurmanaev and Harold Isaac contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince.