Gunfire echoing through Port-au-Prince
after the president was assassinated.
Then just 36 hours after a group of more than two dozen Colombians
and two Haitian-Americans allegedly killed the president,
most would either be detained or declared dead.
On the 7th of July 2021,
the president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated.
Gunmen broke into his home
and machine-gunned Moïse in his bedroom,
killing him and critically injuring his wife.
Usually, when a sitting head of state is murdered,
it’s an act of terrorism or war.
But evidence has emerged that may show Moïse was killed
because he was launching an investigation
into high-profile Haitian drug traffickers
with political connections.
This is how drug cartels may have killed the president of Haiti.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[DID CARTELS KILL THE PRESIDENT OF HAITI?]
Immediately after the shooting,
a vicious fight broke out between police and the assassins
on the streets of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Eventually, Haitian police arrested 18 Colombian mercenaries,
along with two Haitian-Americans.
Another three Colombians were killed,
and five are still thought to be at large.
What does it say about a country
when the president in his own home is killed?
We’re doing our best, but it’s not easy for us.
This is not the army.
With that kind of battle that they’re having here,
I think it’s something that might be controlled by an army.
At the time, many people assumed this was simply a political assassination.
However, it then emerged
that Moïse was compiling a list of Haitian drug traffickers,
and he was reportedly about to turn the list over to US authorities.
The Colombian mercenaries have apparently admitted that
retrieving this list was a top priority.
And Moïse’s widow, Martine,
the only surviving witness of the assassination,
has since gone public at interviews seemingly backing this up.
Face down and bleeding,
she thinks about a dozen men ransacked the room
looking for something specific.
They came to find something, because I heard them saying,
“That’s not it. That’s not it. There it is.”
Which means they found what they were looking for.
Even more confusing in all this
is that some of the alleged drug traffickers on Moïse’s list
were the very people who put him in power in the first place—
the people who really run Haiti.
Moïse’s predecessor as president was Michel Martelly,
a popular singer who used his celebrity status
to win the presidency in 2011.
It was Martelly who handpicked Moïse to be his successor.
Under the constitution,
Haitian presidents are not allowed to run for consecutive terms.
They can run again. They just have to step down for five years.
Moïse was going to be the benchwarmer, essentially.
This all seemed to be broadly going to plan until early 2021,
when rumors of an alleged coup
made Moïse dramatically change policy.
There’s at least one, possibly three airstrips there.
In the May to June period,
several thousand kilos of cocaine actually landed in that airstrip.
They’d never seen anything like it before.
These airplanes were coming in from Columbia and Venezuela,
and they thought that Moïse was in on it.
Moïse was livid, starts calling everybody up
and starts to try to close down this airstrip.
The problem was that some of these drug trafficking operations
were allegedly run by powerful people very close to Martelly.
This is Charles ‘Kiko’ Saint-Rémy.
He’s a Haitian businessman
with interests in everything from hotels to eel fishing.
He’s openly admitted to trafficking drugs in the past
but insists his current businesses are legitimate.
However, across international law enforcement,
the assumption is that Kiko is still a major player
in Haitian drug trafficking
and is reported to have been one of the key names
on Jovenel Moïse’s list.
He also happens to be
the brother-in-law of the former president Michel Martelly.
Drug dealers, people who are involved in the drug business
are ruthless killers.
They don’t play around,
so a lot of people become very afraid of Kiko Saint-Rémy.
And they couldn’t challenge him because, after all,
his brother-in-law was the president.
What’s perhaps most suspicious about the assassination in July
is that Moïse’s own security team didn’t fire a single shot.
They stood down and let the assassins through.
Why do you think that guard tower was unmanned?
It was like a routine,
so sometimes they have people, sometimes they don’t.
Just luck of the draw that that night...
seems a little strange, no?
Well, I don’t know. I don’t know.
This is Dimitri Hérard,
who was head of President Moïse’s security detail.
Dimitri Hérard is one of the chief police officers
who runs the presidential palace security.
Moïse never trusted him.
Moïse would constantly say, “These people are traitors.
I don’t want to talk to them.”
And these are the people who are
in charge of the president’s security, right?
Forces stood aside,
the assassination unfolded,
and Dimitri basically didn’t lift a finger to save the president.
He used to work for President Martelly
and has been reported to have been spying on Moïse directly for Kiko.
But Hérard, the head of the president’s security team,
also happens to be a major suspect
in one of the biggest drug trafficking cases in Haitian history.
He was reported to have used police vehicles
to transport vast quantities of cocaine and heroin
in a case also involving Kiko.
Hérard has now been detained by authorities,
with Colombian police reporting that he visited the country
several times in the past year,
leading to suspicions that he recruited the mercenary squads.
But the case gets even murkier.
It’s since turned out that at least one of the Haitian-American suspects
detained after the assassination
was a former DEA informant,
and video has emerged showing that the gunmen
actually gained access to his home by claiming to be DEA themselves.
At least two of the main suspects in the assassination
were former DEA informants,
drug dealers flipped by the DEA to become informants,
and these are people who killed Haiti’s president.
The war on drugs has basically led US foreign policy
for several decades now,
and the DEA feels no need to answer any questions.
Drug corruption is so endemic in Haiti
that it’s even spread to the DEA mission there itself.
Whistleblowers have alleged that millions of dollars
have been misappropriated
and that DEA operatives
were even giving tip-offs to Haitian traffickers,
including Kiko.
In 2021, the US Office of Special Counsel
issued a formal reprimand to the agency
because of the situation in Haiti.
They are certainly not going to give up their lives at the battlements
for some cause.
There is no cause for them.
Their cause has always been greed and violence.
High-level drug corruption is nothing new in Haiti.
The country sits almost exactly halfway
between South America and Florida,
and its poverty, unstable politics, and lack of rule of law
make it an ideal hub for narco trafficking.
The trade exploded in the 1980s with the American cocaine boom,
and the Haitian elite got involved almost immediately.
The most recent estimates
indicate that 80 percent of cocaine that enters the US
will come through Haiti or the Dominican Republic,
which share one island.
Since the 1990s, the drug business in Haiti
has become the number one business.
Many politicians who got elected in parliament who became ministers
are involved somewhere, somehow with the drug trade.
As so often with the war on drugs,
this is a complex case,
and we can’t pretend that Jovenel Moïse himself
was some kind of super clean anti-corruption warrior
against the drug cartels.
In fact, Moïse was widely accused of maintaining control
through links with violent Haitian street gangs,
in particular, the G9 and its leader, Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier.
Chérizier is a former cop
who quit the force to become a kind of street godfather,
unifying nine of Haiti's biggest criminal gangs under his control
as the G9.
It’s also alleged that he was
strongly allied with the Moïse government,
receiving weapons and protection from the police
in return for attacking areas that voted against the government.
Do you see G9...
and yourself as a legitimate authority here in Haiti?
We know that we are a sociopolitical structure and force
that is fighting on behalf of the vulnerable.
A sociopolitical movement that carries around pretty large weapons?
But for all of Chérizier’s posturing as a defender of the poor,
he’s accused of carrying out brutal massacres,
often on behalf of the Moïse regime.
They enter homes and take people to burn them alive.
This is my son.
There were a lot of gunshots, so I ran and took him inside.
They came inside and took him away.
This past Saturday, he died.
Who do you blame for your son’s death?
Barbecue and the Fire Spitters.
Do you think President Moïse
is in any way connected to the surge in violence here?
Yes. This man is just a former police officer.
I told you he is close to the president, his guard.
He also has a badge from the president’s office.
He has a lot of sponsors. He’s in the game.
And now he is killing people in large numbers.
Jovenel is aware of all that he’s doing.
He said nothing to him. He never tried to catch and stop him.
But we will do to him what he’s done to us.
First thing he talks about is that corruption,
but he was very poor.
He was involved in money laundering.
He was using state resources to build his own private wealth.
And he tried to dispossess the ruling elite
by transferring their assets for his own good.
The murder of President Moïse has still not been solved,
and it may never well be.
In the aftermath of the assassination,
several different factions claimed power,
creating a violent political vacuum.
And Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier, leader of the G9 gang,
launched an all out-street war
to consolidate his own hold over his territory.
Many police officers, men in power, and members of the opposition
plotted with the corrupt elite to assassinate the president.
The people will go to the streets to defend our rights,
and we will practice self-defense with legitimate violence.
We repeat again: If they shoot at us, we know what to do.
Meanwhile, for all the corruption
that the war on drugs has caused in Haiti,
including the possible murder of a president,
the cocaine will continue to flow
and make the people who may have killed him
wealthy beyond the dreams of any ordinary Haitian.
There are people living in the streets, not just animals.
If the government can’t do its job,
we will watch our neighborhood. We’ll do our job.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.