Plots, subplots and betrayal engulfed Haiti’s president before his assassination

The brazen coup attempt that took the life of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse holds all the elements of a three-act Shakespearean tragedy: plots and subplots, ambition and betrayal, gore and death, all ensnaring the circle of people closest to him, including his wife.

Martine Moïse, who was wounded in the middle-of-the-night attack in the president’s home on July 7, 2021, was indicted Monday alongside several allies of her late husband. They include his former prime minister, the Haitian national police chief, the head of a state environmental security brigade, and an adviser so close to the fallen leader that Haitians jokingly refer to him as the vice president.

The story of their alleged power grab pervades a 122-page indictment in which a Haitian investigative judge, Walther Wesser Voltaire, says there is enough evidence to charge 51 individuals, including the late president’s widow, and have them stand trial as either author, co-authors or accomplices in his killing.

President Moïse, Voltaire wrote in the indictment report first obtained by the Miami Herald, “was supposed to be the most protected figure in the country,” with his security ensured by at least three elite units of the Haiti National Police.

Instead, the 53-year-old leader was “shot dead in his room by attackers who did not face the slightest opposition or resistance [from police], so much so that no victims of scratches were recorded within these units, although they were responsible for ensuring the security of the president.”

An attorney representing Martine Moïse insisted that she is innocent and the charges against her are politically motivated.

“She has no motivation for this attack,” said attorney Paul Turner, who is representing the former first lady in a civil lawsuit in Miami against some of the defendants charged separately in a U.S. indictment. “The Haitian government is deflecting attention away from the real culprits who bankrolled this attack, some of whom are still at large. These trumped-up charges by a kangaroo court against political opponents are a Stalinesque move by a wannabe dictator. It is saddening to see these tactics deployed against Mrs. Moïse.”

Voltaire’s sprawling indictment contrasts sharply with the narrowly honed charges stemming from the FBI’s parallel case in Miami, where only 11 defendants were charged with plotting the president’s assassination in South Florida, Haiti and Colombia. In the faster-moving Miami case, more than half of the defendants have pleaded guilty, with most facing up to life in prison.

By comparison, Voltaire’s indictment depicts a more dramatic web of politics and tragedy, featuring a long list of suspects in Haiti, including Martine Moïse, who lay seemingly dead from gunshot wounds after her husband was fatally shot a dozen times and and one of his eyes was gouged out.

As the sound of assault rifles rang out in Moïse’s hilltop Pelerin 5 neighborhood, the president frantically called for help. No one arrived in time: not the head of his palace security, Dimitri Hérard; not the coordinator of his presidential security, Jean Laguel Civil, and not his police chief, Léon Charles.

Days earlier, Moïse had been warned about his security team and impending danger, but he did nothing. It’s a reality that has stumped both Haitian investigators and those who tried to warn Moïse of the developing coup attempt. In the months before he was assassinated, Moïse was a man on edge, increasingly worried about his legacy. He was also growing distrustful of his inner circle, feared catching COVID-19 and stopped going to the National Palace, according to interviews and a journal the late president kept.

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Moïse was ruling by decree since dismissing Parliament with a tweet 18 months earlier. The United States wanted him to set a firm date for long-delayed elections. Opponents were marching against him in the streets, accusing the embattled leader of trying to become the region’s next dictator — while both his wife and his predecessor, Michel Martelly, vied to be anointed as his successor.

As an Organization of American States mission prepared to visit in early June 2021 and pressed for the prompt appointment of a new prime minister who could help resolve a debilitating political and constitutional crisis, Moïse jotted down names in his private journal. They included friends and foes.

Interviews, testimony and documents exclusively reviewed by the Miami Herald portray a president who was not only under siege, seeing enemies in every corner, but of a leader with no idea of the poisonous atmosphere enveloping him. Five months earlier, on Feb. 7, 2021, Moïse had victoriously declared he had survived an attempted assassination and coup attempt. The “vast conspiracy,” he said while announcing the arrest of 23 people, including a Supreme Court Justice, had been thwarted by his National Palace security.

Two of those security chiefs, Laguel and Hérard, are among those who have been indicted, along with Joseph Félix Badio. A former government consultant, Badio told the investigative judge he had been tasked by Moïse’s justice minister to infiltrate the circle of plotters of Feb. 7, and the president was aware. The July sequel, Badio said while claiming his innocence, expanded upon the previously aborted attempt to overthrow Moïse.

In his indictment, Voltaire focuses heavily on the coup he says was developing around Moïse, leading to charges based on people’s actions or lack of actions before the assassination. Among them: the response of one of the president’s most trusted advisers, Ardouin Zéphirin, on the night of the attack.

Referred to as Haiti’s unofficial vice president, Zéphirin was vague and nonchalant during his official interrogation as he explained that while the president had called him in distress, he missed the calls because he was sleeping. When Zéphirin did wake up at 3 a.m. to accept a call from the former first lady, he did not return the president’s calls, the judge said, because Zéphirin claimed “to have forgotten the telephone number” of the president.

Zéphirin was among those who had switched allegiance from the head of state to the first lady, according to Badio, a main suspect in the murder conspiracy. Martine Moïse had her eye on the presidency as her husband neared the end of his term.

READ MORE: From rebellious beginnings, Haiti has been beset by violence

Badio described an atmosphere inside the national palace in which the people who were supposed to be protecting Moïse were scheming to take him down.

“There were several teams plotting... the president’s ouster,” Badio said during one of his interrogations by Haitian investigators. He also was interviewed by the FBI agents who were conducting the parallel investigation in Miami.

One of the alleged plotters was Jeantel Joseph, the recently dismissed head of an armed environmental security brigade that has recently been campaigning for the ouster of Ariel Henry, who accepted Moïse’s offer to be prime minister just days before the assassination. Joseph is accused of providing logistics to the Colombians involved in the attack, and according to Badio sought to be the next interior minister in a new post-Moïse administration while pushing his own pick to replace the president.

Badio said the president’s wife, Martine, had been in favor of keeping then-Prime Minister Claude Joseph in his role to organize a presidential election after her husband’s removal that would lead to her ascendance as Haiti’s leader.

Just two days before the deadly assault, the president’s wife spent hours clearing her things out of the National Palace, and two days afterward she told the palace’s secretary general that her husband “had not done anything for us” as president and that she wanted to succeed him, Voltaire’s indictment says. “Now we will have power,” she reportedly said, according to the indictment.

Several insiders told the Herald that the former first lady, who hinted at a presidential run following her husband’s assassination, wanted to be president. Her political ambition was a contentious issue between the couple, and the president had suggested she run for the Senate instead. He even had a private poll done to prove she lacked popularity to become president, one of his advisers told the Herald.

In his order, Voltaire mentioned the first lady’s presidential ambitions several times while also noting that she had given contradictory statements. Among them, he cited, was that the mother of two had claimed to have taken refuge from the attackers under the bed she shared with her husband. But a visit to the premises, Voltaire said, revealed there was such little space under the bed at “not even a giant rat” could fit underneath.

‘Julius Caesar’

Unlike Julius Caesar, the Roman leader who was assassinated by dozens of senators, Moïse wasn’t stabbed to death by fellow politicians envious of his power. Instead, those seeking his demise hired foreign hit men to do their bidding.

A group of former Colombian soldiers were hired by a politically ambitious Haitian American pastor by the name of Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who sought to replace Haiti’s president, according to indictments filed in both Haiti and Miami.

In Haiti, the Colombian commandos who were arrested after the coup testified that they were initially told they would be providing security for Sanon, who was working with a Miami-area firm, Counter Terrorist Unit Security, to bring a development project to Haiti to help launch his presidential aspirations.

But after arriving in Haiti, the Colombians said they were eventually informed that their mission would be to serve an arrest warrant alongside Haitian police officers to oust Haiti’s president from office.

The arrest warrant was at the core of the conspiracy, which evolved into an assassination plot in the days before the Haitian leader was slain, according to the indictments in Miami and Haiti. Despite doubts about the validity of the fabricated warrant, which was signed by an actual Haitian judge, it was nonetheless used by suspects in both Haiti and South Florida to carry out the ultimate scheme that led to the president’s death.

In the weeks before the assassination, whispers circulated inside the president’s entourage about an impending coup, according to testimony gathered by Voltaire. At the same time, Moïse was meeting with political operatives as he tried to decide who would be his next prime minister to replace Claude Joseph.

Badio, a key Haitian government witness, said there was disagreement in the president’s inner circle about Moïse’s choice of Henry, a 71-year-old neurologist, whose nomination as prime minister didn’t become public until two weeks before the assassination. This was also around the same time Germán Alejandro Rivera Garcia, co-leader of the Colombian squad, said he learned the plan had shifted from arresting the president to killing him.

Henry eventually accepted the job on July 3 and was to be sworn in days later. In between, the lead plotters decided to kill Moïse on July 4, but pushed the plan back for three days, according to the indictment. Henry was eventually installed as prime minister after the president’s death and a power struggle with Claude Joseph. The struggle happened because an adviser to Moïse hid the legal document naming Henry to the position, a source close to Henry said.

“The authors, co-authors and collaborators from near or far ... agreed for months … to plan the seizure of power by coup d’état against the then president ... by proceeding with his arrest or his physical elimination,” wrote Port-au-Prince Chief Prosecutor Edler Guillaume in his report to the investigative judge.

Guillaume stressed that Badio “was at the scene where he even had conversations with some important people who planned, financed and executed such a plan.”

Badio moved undetected between those who despised the president and those who embraced him. After his arrest in October, Badio told Haitian investigators that in addition to the late president’s widow, others close to him played supporting roles in the assassination conspiracy: the former prime minister, Joseph, and ex-police chief, Charles. Both men have denied the allegations.

Joseph, who is close to Martine Moïse, accused Henry, the current prime minister, of using Haiti’s justice system to target political opponents like himself.

Shifting blame from himself, Joseph told the Herald that “every single report with respect to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse shows links between Felix Badio and Ariel Henry.”