We're Alone, page 9
According to the Miami Herald, Moïse kept a diary of sorts, a notebook in which he wrote about “a tentative coup d’état and the need to track down the full name of a certain pastor named Sanon, who was rumored to have presidential aspirations.” A friend of Moïse’s, a former senator named Jacques Sauveur Jean, told a Haitian radio broadcaster that the night before he died, Moïse told him on the phone that he knew millions had been raised to finance a plot to assassinate him. Yet, he did not seem worried.
“I used to ask the president, if he had information about threats, why didn’t he go public?” Jean told Miami Herald reporter Jacqueline Charles. “He would say, I’m going to get them. He thought he had enough collaborators to arrest all of them, and they wouldn’t get a chance to kill him.”
I was reading Márquez’s novella once again when my mother-in-law introduced me, via WhatsApp and YouTube, to the fortune-telling talents of Sè Laura, who was apparently one of many who had foreseen, and foretold, Moïse’s death. After Moïse’s assassination, Sè Laura became a kind of macabre sensation in my mother-in-law’s older, and mostly female, evangelical circle. Sè Laura was stopped on the streets of Port-au-Prince and her comments were streamed live on Facebook. She was reinvited to some of the radio programs where she’d predicted Moïse’s death, and was interviewed in greater detail.
Sè Laura was from Belladère, in the Central Department of the country, she said. Her father had eighteen children, four with her mother. One brother died in childhood and two sisters were living in the United States and Canada. She has four children of her own. She has been a Christian for twenty-two years, though she doesn’t attend any particular church. One of her frequent interviewers, Pierre Richard Guillaume, the host of Blocus, a YouTube program focused on spirituality and the occult, told her when she appeared on Blocus in mid-August 2021 that he’d heard she was arrested as part of the investigation into the president’s death. Sè Laura was rumored to be the cousin of one of the accused, a judge who’d allegedly signed an arrest warrant for the president that some of the Colombian mercenaries said they thought they were carrying out the night of the assassination. Sè Laura denied knowing the judge, or that they were related. She has not been arrested.
Sè Laura was not the only prophet or prophetess to emerge before and after Moïse’s death. “Prophets have been sprouting like mushrooms in Haiti,” Guilluame told her during their August 2021 interview. Some of the other prophets claimed that Moïse’s death would make way for them to be crowned kings or queens of a new Haiti, and that many of the country’s trials and tribulations would be a stepping stone for Haiti’s future glory, when the country would be turned into a theocratic Christian paradise. Whether they were living in Haiti or the Haitian diaspora, many of the prophets and prophetesses echoed foreign evangelicals, including the former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson, who after the January 12, 2010, earthquake said that Haiti was cursed because the country’s revolution was launched at an August 14, 1791, Vodou ceremony in the north of Haiti at Bois Caïman. Sé Laura, however, prophesied that she would become Haiti’s next president, and that God himself would hand her the job as there would never be another election held in Haiti again.
Three months to the day after Jovenel Moïse’s assassination, on October 7, 2021, his brother, Gabriel Moïse, was a guest on a much-listened-to midmorning news-and-commentary-as-entertainment radio program called Matin débat, which was one of the first places that Sè Laura had announced the president’s imminent death. On Matin débat, the hosts, including the show’s famous anchor, Louko Désir, ring a bell each time they make or someone they are interviewing makes what they consider an interesting point. The morning Gabriel Moïse was on the show, the bell was rung a lot. Gabriel Moïse told Louko Désir that he knew his brother would be assassinated, though perhaps not while in office. Everyone knew, Gabriel Moïse said, that the president had some extremely powerful enemies, including some wealthy oligarchs, who for decades had been benefiting from extremely lucrative and questionable government contracts, which Moïse had publicly challenged, and in some cases tried to take away.
“I know that a lot of people he spoke about would not have tolerated what he said,” Gabriel Moïse told Louko Désir on the air. “There are things that if you say to someone just between the two of you, it stays between you two, but as soon as you say it publicly, you will die. Jovenel Moïse had no allies,” his brother added.
The police investigation concurred.
“A paranoid president who trusted no one, Moïse ran his own camera surveillance system and was a man without friends,” Jacqueline Charles and Jay Weaver wrote in the Miami Herald, on September 20, 2021, after reviewing a detailed report on the assassination investigation. As his killers were encroaching in the early morning hours of July 7, Moïse made several telephone calls seeking help from the police chief and the inspector general, as well a high-level security official, Jean Laguel Civil, who, according to the police report, had paid security agents to stand down that night. Usually there are between thirty and fifty security personnel posted at the president’s residence. The night Moïse was assassinated, there were fewer than ten. The head of the General Security Unit of the National Palace, Dimitri Hérard, who had been credited by Moïse with saving him from an alleged assassination attempt in February 2021, was accused of having helped plan the assassination, and providing guns and ammunition to the Colombian mercenaries. Hérard also happened to be under investigation by US law enforcement officials for arms trafficking. The Haitian Americans—James Solages, Joseph Vincent, and Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who saw himself as a potential replacement for Moïse—were later transferred to the United States, where they were charged with conspiring to commit murder or kidnapping outside the United States. Mario Palacios Palacios, a former Colombian military officer, was arrested in Kingston, Jamaica, and was taken into FBI custody during a layover in Panama as he was being returned to Colombia. In mid-November 2021, another suspect, Samir Handal, a sixty-three-year-old Haitian businessman who’d spent time with Christian Emmanuel Sanon before the assassination, was arrested, through an Interpol request, in Turkey then released. Another suspect, a former Haitian senator named John Joël Joseph, was arrested in Jamaica, where he had been hiding for months. In February 2023, four US-based suspects were taken into custody, including Antonio Intriago and Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, the owners of CTU, the Miami security firm, and the Florida-based financiers Walter Veintemilla and Frederick J. Bergmann. In 2023, Rodolphe Jaar, a Haitian Chilean businessman and convicted drug trafficker turned Drug Enforcement Administration informant, and Germán Alejandro Rivera García, a retired Colombian colonel, along with Bergmann, García, Vincent, Palacios Palacios, and John Joël Joseph, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kidnap, murder, and provide material support for the assassination.
In February 2024, a Haitian judge, Walther Wesser Voltaire, indicted fifty individuals in the president’s assassination, including his former police chief, Léon Charles, his former prime minister, Claude Joseph, and his wife, Martine Moïse, whom the judge accused of being complicit in his assassination in part because she wanted to replace him.
“This is Julius Caesar with a twist even Shakespeare didn’t think of,” commented a friend.
Moïse, too, had occasionally made statements that indicated he might have foreseen his own death. On several occasions, including at a town hall at the National Palace in September 2020, he said that whenever Haitian presidents try to change the status quo, “Either they kill you, and they kill you in many different ways. They demonize you. They assassinate your character. They eliminate you, shoot you, or send you into exile.”
During a precarnival speech in Jacmel, in February 2021, Moïse railed against a “system” that he said was sucking the country dry. This system, he emphasized, goes back centuries, to when Africans were abducted from the continent and enslaved on the island. Jean Jacques Dessalines, one of Haiti’s founding fathers, and the first Black head of state in the Americas, had fought against this system, Moïse said, beating the French on November 18, 1803, at the Battle of Vertières, the final campaign in a twelve-year war for independence. Dessalines was assassinated three years later. By invoking both Africa and Dessalines’s assassination, Moïse was alluding to the fact that Dessalines’s lighter-skinned political rivals had conspired to kill him. The system, he implied, was now being run by the country’s lighter-hued oligarchs, whom he referred to as “a category of people who say that they are people and that we are not.
“After you killed Dessalines, you’ve killed presidents. You’ve assassinated presidents. You’ve exiled presidents. You’ve imprisoned presidents. Don’t forget there’s one last president who is stuck in your throats,” he said, referring to himself.
He ended up being right about his killers’ inability to obliterate him. He was even stuck in international journalists’ throats. After his assassination, few articles were ever written or reported about Haiti without mentioning him and how the country continued to spiral in the months and years since his death.
Between July and September 2021, Martine Moïse gave a series of interviews to foreign journalists. In late July, she described to Frances Robles of the New York Times being awakened by gunfire in the early morning hours of July 7, then running to her adult children’s bedrooms to tell them to hide, with their dog, in a bathroom. When she returned to her husband’s side, she found him calling for help. He reached Civil and Hérard by phone. They said they were coming to his rescue but never showed up. As the assassins moved in, her husband told her to lie down on the floor, his final words to her. The mercenaries then burst through the door. Their bullets struck her first, in her right arm. As she lay on the ground, she saw only her husband’s killers’ boots.
“Then I closed my eyes, and I didn’t see anything else,” she told Robles.
The Spanish-speaking assassins were talking to someone on the phone as they searched for a document, which they eventually found. Martine Moïse said she did not know what kind of document it was, but in December 2021, the New York Times reported that it was a list of “powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti’s drug trade,” a list that the president intended to hand over to US government officials. On the list apparently were former president Martelly’s brother-in-law and other wealthy businesspeople. On the way out the door, after killing her husband, one of the assassins waved a flashlight in her eyes, possibly to see if she was dead. She managed to convincingly appear dead, Martine Moïse said.
In her interview with CNN reporter Matt Rivers, which aired on August 3, 2021, Martine Moïse said that her husband was still alive, and unhurt, after the dozen or so assassins burst into their bedroom looking for the document in question. They shot her husband only after verifying with the person on the phone that it was him.
On August 14, 2021, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti’s southern peninsula and killed more than twenty-two hundred people. The earthquake destroyed schools, churches, health facilities, and thousands of homes, including, we learned while my mother-in-law was in Miami, her home in Gros Marin, which had been repaired after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. A tropical storm, Grace, battered the same area soon after. In early October 2021, Martine Moïse traveled to several towns in the earthquake- and hurricane-ravaged southern peninsula, where she was greeted by crowds chanting, “Yo tiye Papa. N a p vote Manman.” They killed our father. We’ll vote for our mother.
Whether they will vote for this particular mother remains to be seen. The prophetess Sè Laura told Blocus’s Pierre Richard Guillaume that if she, Laura, does not become president of Haiti, she will die. (As of this writing, she is still alive and not the president of Haiti. Nearly three years after Moïse’s assassination, there are no elected officials in the country.)
On July 23, 2021, Jovenel Moïse’s funeral was held at his family’s compound, where his flag-draped coffin rested on the side of a crowded stage with four young men in military dress uniforms standing guard. As far as we know, Sè Laura was not present at that funeral. A large billboard of Moïse’s face loomed over both his family members and the dignitaries on the stage, as well as his supporters in the crowd below. Sounds of gunfire rang out outside, and the smell of tear gas and smoke drifted into the compound, forcing the US delegation to depart early, and hurriedly.
Her right arm in a cast, Martine Moïse was dressed in a caped black dress with a red rose corsage pinned to her lapel. She covered her recently cropped hair with a wide-brimmed black hat, and removed a black face mask with her husband’s photo affixed to it in order to deliver her bilingual (French, then Creole) eulogy. She recalled meeting her husband as a young man and finding him “brilliant, inventive, creative, passionate, and determined.”
“This young man charmed me and won my heart,” she said. She too railed against the system. “They assassinated President Jovenel, but they cannot assassinate his vision. They cannot assassinate his ideas. They cannot assassinate his dreams for his country. We lost a battle but not the war. The fight is not over. The vultures are still running the streets with their claws and hooks, still bloody, they are still in search of prey. They are not even hiding. They are here, watching us, listening to us, hoping to frighten us. Their thirst for blood has not yet been quenched.”
Wozo, Not Mawozo
By mid-October 2021, Haiti was in the news regularly again, this time as a result of the kidnapping of seventeen missionaries by a heavily armed gang called 400 Mawozo, notorious for mass kidnappings of locals and foreigners. The missionaries included five men, seven women, and five children. Sixteen were from the United States, and one from Canada. The missionaries were among the 782 people who’d been reported kidnapped that year, earning Haiti a new moniker in the international press: the country with the world’s highest kidnapping rate per capita. 400 Mawozo demanded $17 million for the missionaries’ release, and their leader, Wilson Joseph, also known as Lanmò san jou (Death Without Warning/Death Without Days), threatened to kill them if he didn’t receive the full ransom.
Before abducting these seventeen Mennonites and Anabaptists from the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, 400 Mawozo had previously held transport buses full of people, and five French Catholic priests and two nuns, for ransom. The group operated out of Croix-des-Bouquets, a commune about eight miles northeast of Port-au-Prince. Home to around half a million people, Croix-des-Bouquets is known for its signature steel metal art, or metal dekoupe: silhouetted images carved out of recycled oil drums. Metal dekoupe grew from the work of a local blacksmith named Georges Liautaud, who, in the 1940s, carved wrought iron wreaths and cut metal crosses for funerals. Liautaud’s pieces were seen in local cemeteries by the American DeWitt Peters, cofounder with Haitian artists and intellectuals such as Maurice Borno and Albert Mangonès of Haiti’s famous Centre d’Art, where Liautaud and others were encouraged to expand their daily labor into art.
At a square near Croix-des-Bouquets’ Metal Arts District, whose center is the Village Artistique de Noailles, the artist friend who’d taken me there had said that Georges Liautaud’s crosses and metal dekoupe art was wozo.
“Most Haitians are wozo,” he’d added.
Wozo—roseau in French—is an irrepressible reed that grows in marshlands and riverbeds despite impossible conditions. No matter what happens to wozo, it springs back. If the wind blows it over, it rises again. If a flood drowns it, it sinks into the earth for a while, then shoots up again. If you burn and raze it in the dirt, it will reemerge even stronger.
There’s a saying that’s often sung, either as the chorus of other songs—as in “Wozo” by the singer Belo—or as a short rhyme.
Nou se wozo.
Menm si nou pliye,
nou pap kase.
We are wozo.
Even if we bend,
we will not break.
I know there’s some hyperbolic mythology in all of this. All-powerful plants are like the almighty saints, saviors, and warriors we aspire to emulate but would rather not be forced to. It’s like being constantly called resilient because people think you’re able to suffer much more than others. Still, better that we are wozo than prey, my artist friend had said. Better that we are wozo than Mawozo, he added recently as we recalled our visits to Croix-des-Bouquets, me from Miami and him from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, in Carrefour.
Four days before they kidnapped the missionaries, the 400 Mawozo gang attacked the Village Artistique de Noailles. Over fifty years old, the village is home to close to four hundred artists and eighty ateliers, as well as four well-frequented peristil, landmark Vodou temples. During a shoot-out with police, 400 Mawozo invaded the area and opened fire on the artists’ shops and residences, killing a well-known sculptor, Anderson Belony. I had been to the village many times, strolling through the compound lined with art shops filled with flat metal sculptures of different shapes and sizes, depicting trees, flowers, butterflies, birds, lizards, snakes, suns, moons, stars, fish, crosses, mermaids, and vèvès, drawings of Vodou deities, including that of Lasirèn, the goddess of the sea. Some of the shops’ walls were also covered with Bible verses carved in metal, as well as tourist bait phrases such as “Dream Big,” “Coffee Is Always a Good Idea,” “Always Kiss Me Good Night.” Some shops had three-dimensional mixed-media sculptures with pots and pans, car parts, mirrors, dolls, and musical instruments attached to the metal dekoupe. You could buy furniture in some workshops: a few chairs or an entire dining room set. In the yards and alleys, if you were lucky, you could spot an artist stenciling or drawing an image or pattern right before it was chiseled, polished, varnished, and sometimes coated in bright colors.
