The widow of the Haitian president recounts his assassination

MIAMI – With her elbow shattered from gunfire and her mouth full of blood, Haiti’s first lady lay on the floor next to her bed, unable to breathe as the killers stormed the room.

“The only thing I saw before he was killed were his boots,” said Martine Moïse of when her husband, the President of Haiti Jovenel Moses, was shot dead next to her.

“Then I closed my eyes and saw nothing else.”

She listened to the room being searched, methodically searching for something in her husband’s files, she said.

” It’s not that. It’s not that, ”he recalls being told in Spanish, again and again.

And finally: “‘So’“.

The killers are out.

One stepped on his feet.

Another passed a flashlight over her eyes, apparently to check if she was still alive.

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

In her first interview since the president’s assassination on July 7, Moses, 47, described the heartbreaking pain of seeing her husband, a man she had shared 25 years with, killed in front of her.

She didn’t want to relive the deafening gunshots, the shaking of walls and windows, the terrifying certainty that her children would be killed, the horror of seeing her husband’s body, or how she struggled to get up afterward. the departure of the killers.

“All that blood,” he said softly.

But she needed to speak up, she said, because she didn’t think the investigation into her death answered the central question that plagued her and countless Haitians:

¿Who ordered and paid for the murder of her husband?

Haitian police have detained a wide range of people linked to the murder, including 18 Colombians and several Haitians and Haitian-Americans, and continue to search for others.

The suspects include retired Colombian commandos, a former judge, a security equipment salesman, a Florida mortgage and insurance broker and two commanders of the President’s security team.

According to Haitian police, the elaborate plot revolves around a doctor and a pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, 63, who, according to the authorities, plotted to hire Colombian mercenaries to kill the president and seize political power.

But critics of the government’s explanation say none of those named in the investigation could afford to fund the plot on their own.

And Martine Moïse, like many Haitians, believes that there must be a brain behind them, giving the orders and providing the money.

She wants to know what happened to the 30 or 50 men who were stationed at her house when her husband was there.

None of his guards were killed or even injured, He said.

“I don’t understand how they didn’t shoot anyone,” he said.

At the time of his death, Jovenel Moïse, 53, was plunged into a political crisis.

Protesters accused him of overstepping his mandate, controlling local gangs and ruling by decree as the nation’s institutions were emptied.

Moses also faced some of the oligarchs richest people in the country, including the family who controlled the electricity grid.

Although many people described the president as an autocratic leader, Martine Moïse said his fellow citizens should remember him as a man who stood up to the rich and powerful.

And now he wants to know if either of them had him killed.

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

Dressed in black, with her arm – now inert and possibly forever useless, she said – wrapped in a scarf and bandages, Moses gave an interview in South Florida with the agreement that the The New York Times would not reveal where she was.

Flanked by her children, security guards, Haitian diplomats and other advisers, she barely spoke above a whisper.

She and her husband were asleep when the sound of gunfire brought them to their feet, she recalls.

Moses said that he ran to wake up his two sons, both in their twenties, and urged them to hide in a bathroom, the only room without a window.

They huddled there with their dog.

Her husband picked up the phone and asked for help.

“I asked him, ‘Honey, who did you call?

“He told me: ‘I found Dimitri Hérard, I found Jean Laguel Civil’,” he said, citing the names of two senior officials in charge of presidential security.

“And they told me they were coming.”

But the killers rushed into the house, apparently no problem, He said.

Jovenel Moïse told his wife to lie down on the ground so as not to hurt her.

“’This is where I think you’ll be safe,” he recalls telling her.

It was the last thing he said.

A flurry of gunfire crossed the room, she said, and hit her first.

Wounded in the hand and in the elbow, she lay motionless on the ground, convinced that she and all the members of her family had been killed.

None of the killers spoke Creole or French, he said.

The men spoke only Spanish and communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room.

It seems they found what they wanted on a shelf where her husband kept his files.

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

He said he didn’t know what it was.

“At that time, I felt like I was suffocating because I had blood in the mouth and I couldn’t breathe, ”he said.

“In my mind everyone was dead because if the president could die everyone could have died too.”

The men her husband asked for help – the officials responsible for her security – are now in detention in Haiti.

And although she has expressed her satisfaction with the arrest of several of the accused conspirators, she is not at all satisfied.

Moses wants international law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, which this week searched Florida homes as part of the investigation, to trace the money that funded the murder.

The detained Colombian mercenaries, he said, did not come to Haiti to “play hide and seek,” and he wants to know who paid for everything.

Moïse hopes the money will flow back to wealthy oligarchs in Haiti, whose livelihoods have been disrupted by her husband’s attacks on their lucrative contracts, she said.

He quoted a powerful Haitian businessman who wanted to run for president, Reginald Boulos, as someone who had something to gain from her husband’s death, although she refrained from accusing him of ordering the murder.

Boulos and his companies have been at the center of an avalanche of lawsuits initiated by the Haitian government, which is investigating allegations of a senior loan obtained from the state pension fund.

Boulos’ bank accounts were frozen before Moses’ death, and were handed over to him immediately after his death, said Martine Moïse.

Boulos said only his personal accounts, with less than $ 30,000, had been blocked, and noted that a judge ordered the money released this week after suing the Haitian government.

He insisted that, far from being involved in the assassination, his political career was better with Moses alive, as denouncing the president was a fundamental part of Boulos’ platform.

“I have absolutely nothing to do with his murder, not even in a dream,” Boulos said.

“I support a strong and independent international inquiry into who came up with the idea, who funded it and who executed it.”

Martine Moïse says she wants the killers to know that she is not afraid of them.

“I would like them to catch the people who did this, otherwise they will kill all the presidents who take power,” he said.

“They did it once. They will do it again.”

He said he is seriously considering running for president once he undergoes further operations on his injured arm.

He has already had two surgeries, and now doctors are planning implanting the nerves from your feet into your arm, He said.

He might never regain the use of his right arm, he said, and he can only move two fingers.

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

Anatoly Kurmanaev and Harold Isaac provided information from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

c. 2021 The New York Times Company