Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 17 décembre 2021

Haiti’s Leader Kept a List of Drug Traffickers. His Assassins Came For It.

In the months before his murder, President Jovenel Moïse took a number of steps to fight drug and arms smugglers. Some officials now fear he was killed for it. 

Maria Abi-Habib

By Maria Abi-Habib

Dec. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE — President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was about to name names.

Before being assassinated in July, he had been working on a list of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti’s drug trade, with the intention of handing over the dossier to the American government, according to four senior Haitian advisers and officials tasked with drafting the document.

The president had ordered the officials to spare no one, not even the power brokers who had helped propel him into office, they said — one of several moves against suspected drug traffickers that could explain a motive for the assassination.

When gunmen burst into Mr. Moïse’s residence and killed him in his bedroom, his wife, Martine Moïse — who had also been shot and lay bleeding on the floor, pretending to be dead — described how they stayed to search the room, hurriedly digging through his files.

“‘That’s it,’” they finally declared to one another before fleeing, she told The New York Times in her first interview after the assassination, adding that she did not know what the gunmen had taken.

Investigators arrived at the crime scene to find Mr. Moïse’s home office ransacked, papers strewn everywhere. In interrogations, some of the captured hit men confessed that retrieving the list Mr. Moïse had been working on — with the names of suspected drug traffickers — was a top priority, according to three senior Haitian officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The document was part of a broader series of clashes Mr. Moïse had with powerful political and business figures, some suspected of narcotics and arms trafficking. Mr. Moïse had known several of them for years, and they felt betrayed by his turn against them, his aides say.

In the months before his death, Mr. Moïse took steps to clean up Haiti’s customs department, nationalize a seaport with a history of smuggling, destroy an airstrip used by drug traffickers and investigate the lucrative eel trade, which has recently been identified as a conduit for money laundering.

The Times interviewed more than 70 people and traveled to eight of Haiti’s 10 departments, or states, to interview politicians, Mr. Moïse’s childhood friends, police officers, fishermen and participants in the drug trade to understand what happened in the last seven months of the president’s life that may have contributed to his death. Many of them now fear for their lives as well.

The house where Mr. Moïse was assassinated in July. His home office was ransacked, with papers strewn everywhere.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

“I would be a fool to think that narco-trafficking and arms trafficking didn’t play a role in the assassination,” said Daniel Foote, who served as the U.S. special envoy to Haiti before stepping down last month. “Anyone who understands Haiti’s politics or economics understands this.”

A central figure on Mr. Moïse’s list was Charles “Kiko” Saint-Rémy, two of the Haitian officials tasked with helping draft the dossier said. Mr. Saint-Rémy, a Haitian businessman, has long been suspected by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of involvement in the drug trade. Notably, he is also the brother-in-law of former President Michel Martelly, who lifted Mr. Moïse out of political obscurity and tapped him to be his successor.

Mr. Martelly, who is considering another run for the presidency, and Mr. Saint-Rémy were hugely influential in Mr. Moïse’s government, with a say in everything from who got public contracts to which cabinet ministers got appointed, according to Haitian officials inside and outside his administration. But Mr. Moïse came to feel that they and other oligarchs were stifling his presidency, his aides say.

American officials say that they are looking closely at Mr. Moïse’s efforts to disrupt the drug trade and challenge powerful families as motives in the assassination, and they note that Mr. Saint-Rémy emerged as a possible suspect early in the investigation. But they caution that Mr. Moïse threatened a large swath of the economic elite, including a number of people with deep criminal connections.

Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.

The investigation into Mr. Moïse’s killing has stalled, American officials say, and if the assassination is not solved, many Haitians fear it will add to the mountain of impunity in the country, further emboldening the criminal networks that have captured the state.

Suspected drug and arms traffickers have long sat in Haiti’s Parliament. Small planes with contraband frequently land on clandestine airstrips. Haitian police officers have been caught aiding drug smugglers, while judges are regularly bribed to throw cases.

Haiti may now provide the largest route for drugs destined for the United States, but no one knows for sure because the country has become so difficult to police. American law enforcement is unable to run a wiretapping program in the country, or even fully collaborate with its Haitian counterparts, because corruption in the police and judiciary runs so deep, U.S. officials say.

“Anyone involved in drug trafficking here has at least one police officer on their team,” said Compère Daniel, the police commissioner of the Northwest Department of Haiti, a major transit smuggling corridor.

“It is impossible to get police officers to cooperate with me on the field,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t even answer my calls.”

The D.E.A.’s operations in Haiti have also drawn scrutiny. Criticism of the agency has sharpened because at least two of the Haitians suspected of involvement in Mr. Moïse’s assassination were former D.E.A. informants.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized the D.E.A. for corruption allegations that have swirled around its Haiti operations, citing a Times investigation in August linking Mr. Moïse’s head of palace security to the drug trade. The D.E.A., accused by former agents of mishandling one of Haiti’s biggest drug cases, declined to comment.

‘The True Leader Wasn’t the President’

When Mr. Moïse was chosen by Mr. Martelly in 2014 to be his successor, Mr. Martelly introduced the nation to a supposed outsider with peasant origins, a man of the countryside who had lifted himself out of poverty by running banana plantations.

Mr. Martelly’s associates said he first met Mr. Moïse during a conference and was struck by the entrepreneur’s business acumen.

But the story was misleading: Mr. Moïse had mostly grown up in the capital, several of the original board members of his banana plantation say it was a failure, and Mr. Moïse was already a close associate of Mr. Saint-Rémy and at least one other suspected drug trafficker.

Mr. Moïse, 53 at the time of his assassination, was born in Trou-du-Nord, French for “hole of the North,” an agricultural town that has suffered under decades of government neglect. His father drove a tractor at a nearby sisal plantation but lost his job when it closed, according to interviews with local residents.

When Mr. Moïse was 7, his mother moved him and his siblings to Carrefour, a slum of Port-au-Prince, in search of work and a secondary school for her children, relatives said. In university, Mr. Moïse met his wife and they moved together to her hometown, Port-de-Paix, in the northwest.

By 2000, Mr. Moïse had met and become business partners with Evinx Daniel, according to relatives and acquaintances of both men. Mr. Daniel, a close friend of Mr. Martelly’s, would later be accused of drug trafficking.

Mr. Moïse worked with Mr. Daniel on one of his ventures, Mariella Food Products, which produced biscuits with a pigtailed schoolgirl on the packaging. A former high-ranking Haitian police officer said the company was suspected of being a money laundering front.

The full extent of Mr. Moïse’s involvement in the company is unclear, but a former senator, Jean Baptiste Bien-Aimé, recalled the men coming to his office to talk about the company about a decade ago, and said the men were often with Mr. Saint-Rémy, the brother-in-law of Mr. Martelly.

“They were always together. They were fish crushed in the soup,” said Mr. Bien-Aimé, using a local saying to describe close relationships.

Mr. Saint-Rémy has publicly admitted that he sold drugs in the past but claims all his businesses are now legitimate. Haitian law enforcement officials and former D.E.A. officers who recently served in Haiti say he is still believed to be one of the country’s biggest drug traffickers.

Jacques Jean Kinan, Mr. Moïse’s cousin, said he and Mr. Moïse worked with Mr. Saint-Rémy in the eel industry.

With his brother-in-law as president, Mr. Saint-Rémy wielded enormous influence, often demanding that choice licenses and contracts be awarded to him, particularly eel export licenses, according to officials in Mr. Martelly’s government.

When his demands were not heeded, he could turn violent: In 2015, Mr. Saint-Rémy assaulted an agriculture minister for issuing a contract without his consent, an altercation reported at the time and confirmed by a former government minister.

As Mr. Saint-Rémy’s hold on the eel trade solidified, Mr. Moïse decided to get out of the sector and focus on Agritrans, a banana plantation near his hometown.

“My father said that the Martelly family cornered the eel business and made it difficult to get in,” said Joverlein Moïse, the slain president’s son.

Mr. Moïse also kept in touch with his associate, Mr. Daniel, who had opened a hotel in Les Cayes, a coastal city in the south, an official and a relative said.

In 2013, Mr. Daniel told the authorities that he found 23 packages of marijuana floating at sea while he was on his boat and decided to bring them home. Mr. Daniel saidat the time that he and Mr. Saint-Rémy called the D.E.A. to pick up the load he discovered.

A prosecutor, Jean Marie Salomon, doubted the story, suspecting it was a ploy to cover up a drug deal gone bad after locals had stumbled on the stash. He arrested Mr. Daniel on drug-trafficking charges, but he said Mr. Martelly’s minister of justice personally intervened and ordered his release.

Shortly after, Mr. Martelly went to Mr. Daniel’s hotel with a delegation in a clear display of support, Mr. Salomon said. “The message was, justice does not matter,” he said.

Just months after his release, Mr. Daniel went missing in 2014, his abandoned car found at a gas station. Two people — a relative of Mr. Daniel’s and a police officer at the time — said Mr. Moïse was one of the last people to see him alive. Mr. Daniel is presumed dead.

Mr. Salomon suspects that drug traffickers killed him, concerned that he would expose their network as part of a plea deal, and Mr. Daniel’s disappearance remains unsolved. Two investigators said they were sidelined by a federal police unit controlled by Mr. Martelly’s government that took over the investigation and tampered with the evidence.

Barred by the Constitution from running for two consecutive terms, Mr. Martelly began looking for a successor. He wanted to find someone to keep the bench warm for him until he could launch another presidential bid and shield himself from corruption allegations involving the misappropriation of billions of dollars during his tenure, according to former officials in the Martelly and Moïse administrations.

He settled on Mr. Moïse, marketing him as a successful entrepreneur and nicknaming him the “Banana Man” on the campaign trail.

“I told Martelly, you have to look for the peasant vote, someone who looks like them, someone with black skin,” said a former senator, Jacques Sauveur Jean, a friend and sometimes political ally of Mr. Martelly. He said Haitians were tired of the privileged light-skinned elite who ran the country, like Mr. Martelly, and felt that Mr. Moïse, with his dark skin and rural origins, better represented them.

In interviews, three of the original board members of Mr. Moïse’s plantation business, Agritrans, described the venture as a failure, with their original investments lost and little but a barren field to show for it.

But as Mr. Martelly contemplated a successor, the company received a $6 million loan from the government.

Esther Antoine, one of Mr. Moïse’s campaign managers, said she worked to polish his image, to get rid of a stutter that had haunted him and improve his confidence onstage. But on the campaign trail Mr. Martelly took center stage, she said, outshining the man he was supposed to be promoting.

Ms. Antoine, who worried that Mr. Martelly’s outsized presence was “drowning” her candidate, said she convinced the president to give Mr. Moïse the space to campaign alone. That did not sit well with Mr. Martelly’s wife, Sophia, she said.

She said the first lady grew suspicious of Ms. Antoine and called her to the Martelly family home in the middle of the night, reprimanding her for not informing them of Mr. Moïse’s every move.

Ms. Antoine said she pushed back, arguing that she was there to work for Mr. Moïse, not the Martelly family.

“That’s when the wife looks at me and says, ‘Jovenel is a property. You don’t seem to understand that,’” Ms. Antoine recounted. “I was shocked. When I asked her to repeat it, she then switched to French: ‘Jovenel est une propriété.’”

The former first lady did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.

When he won and took over the presidency in 2017, Mr. Moïse felt suffocated by Mr. Martelly but remained loyal to him, his aides said.

Mr. Moïse was unable to choose his own cabinet without the approval of the Martelly family or Mr. Saint-Rémy, they said. The Martellys would often call Mr. Moïse, yelling at him for his legislative initiatives, according to several people who overheard the conversations.

“The true leader wasn’t the president,” said Gabriel Fortuné, a close adviser to Mr. Moïse who died in an earthquake a day after speaking with The Times. “It was his godfather, Martelly. When we talk about the godfather we are talking about the Italian way,” he added, “the family.”

Ms. Antoine acknowledged that Mr. Moïse often turned a blind eye to the corruption in his government, to avoid making enemies and advance his own initiatives.

“He would say, ‘Let me feed them so they leave me alone. If they’re making money, they’ll let me do my electricity and build my roads,’” Ms. Antoine recalled him saying.

But Mr. Moïse’s critics said he joined in the corruption. Before he came to power, the Haitian government was investigating Mr. Moïse, his wife and their company, Agritrans, for large amounts of money found in their bank accounts that could not be explained by the level of business they were generating, an official who worked on the case said.

Two government anti-corruption units also questioned why Mr. Martelly’s government gave a $6 million loan to Agritrans, a company with such a limited record. But when Mr. Moïse came to power, he fired the directors of the two anti-corruption units who worked on the inquiry.

‘They Will Kill Me’

As Mr. Moïse settled into office, he soon realized that the withering control Mr. Martelly and his family exerted on the campaign trail extended to his personal security, several officials said.

Mr. Moïse inherited Dimitri Hérard, a pivotal member of Mr. Martelly’s presidential security force who became the head of the police unit protecting Mr. Moïse’s presidential palace

Mr. Hérard was also a drug-trafficking suspect. In 2015, when a Panamanian-flagged cargo ship docked in Port-au-Prince with 1,100 kilograms of cocaine and heroin aboard, Mr. Hérard was seen commanding police officers in uniform to load the drugs into vehicles before speeding off with them, according to a witness and Keith McNichols, a former D.E.A. agent stationed in Haiti who led the agency’s investigation into the missing drug shipment.

But Mr. Martelly shielded Mr. Hérard from being questioned by investigators in the case, a former United Nations official said.

Mr. Moïse deeply mistrusted Mr. Hérard, according to several presidential advisers and an international diplomat the president confided in. On at least one occasion, they said, Mr. Hérard was found spying on the president for Mr. Saint-Rémy, informing him about Mr. Moïse’s meetings.

Mr. Hérard, now in detention as a suspect in the assassination, could not be reached for comment.

In January, Mr. Hérard ordered about 260 weapons from Turkey — including M4 carbines and handguns — making out the order to the presidential palace, Mr. Fortuné and a former security official said. But instead of arming his own unit, they said, Mr. Hérard sold most of the weapons to gangs and businesses.

“When Moïse found out about the weapons Hérard ordered, he wasn’t surprised — he was scared,” Mr. Fortuné said.

Mr. Moïse’s relationship with the presidential security forces, already on tenterhooks, further soured. But that changed in February, when Mr. Hérard claimed to have foiled a coup attempt against Mr. Moïse. Suddenly, the distrust waned. Some former aides, like Ms. Antoine and Mr. Fortuné, wondered whether the supposed coup was a false flag, to throw off Mr. Moïse’s suspicions about Mr. Hérard.

After the coup scare, Mr. Moïse went on the offensive, publicly blasting Haiti’s oligarchs and political elite for trying to kill him, including in one of his final interviews with The Times before his death.

Behind the scenes, Haitian officials say, Mr. Moïse began working to take down his perceived enemies. He spoke with his closest aides and select officials to start compiling the dossier breaking down narcotics and weapons smuggling networks in Haiti, including Mr. Saint-Rémy, according to the people involved with the document.

In February, Josua Alusma, the mayor of Port-du-Paix and a close Moïse ally, ordered a crackdown on the eel trade, the industry dominated by Mr. Saint-Rémy. Many of the eels go to China, but the Haitian police are investigating the industry as a way to launder illicit profits.

“I don’t like this business. It happens at night, do you know what I’m saying?” Mr. Alusma said. “There’s no security.”

He said the industry needed to be regulated and taxed. “People like Kiko go in and out of the city,” he said, using Mr. Saint-Rémy’s nickname. “But we are the ones here cleaning his trash,” he added, referring to illegal weapons seized during a raid this year.

The same month, the president also started to discuss plans to nationalize a seaport owned by allies of Mr. Martelly, where several shipments of illegal weapons have been found and seized over the years, two senior Haitian officials said.

“Jovenel told me that he had an agenda that he wanted to implement but he couldn’t because, he said, ‘They will kill me,’” recounted a powerful politician who served as an informal aide to Mr. Moïse, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of his life. The port, he said, “was part of the plan.”

Mr. Moïse also tried to push customs, despite considerable resistance, to start inspecting Mr. Saint-Rémy’s shipments and charging taxes on his goods, according to several presidential aides, two senior security officials and an official at the customs department. Haitian economists estimate that the country loses about $500 million a year because of corruption at customs.

Then, in mid-May, Dominican security forces arrested Woodley Ethéart, also known as Sonson Lafamilia, a close friend of Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy’s. When Mr. Martelly was president in 2015, he stood by Mr. Ethéart after he was arrested on kidnapping charges.

This year, Mr. Ethéart still had a warrant out for his arrest and generally kept a low profile. But in May, he and Mr. Martelly took photos of themselves partying together in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital, that were posted on social media, a senior Dominican official said.

The next day, Dominican forces arrested Mr. Ethéart and extradited him to Haiti.

Mr. Moïse was ecstatic, his aides said.

The president’s phone buzzed with calls from Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy, but he refused to answer them, according to a close friend and a presidential adviser.

“Sonson Lafamilia is very close to the Martelly family,” said Joverlein, Mr. Moïse’s son. “It is possible that Martelly saw that arrest as some kind of disrespect, that my father was a traitor and was betraying the Martelly family.”

Drug trafficking routes in Haiti’s north also came under pressure. In the 1990s, little Cessna planes from Colombia landed on dirt airstrips on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. But as the population expanded, the landing strips became surrounded by slums. Poor residents realized the valuable illicit cargo the planes held and began raiding them, according to a security official.

So, about a decade ago, traffickers moved the airstrips north, to Savane Diane, a sprawling, isolated area. Since then, the drug trade has evolved and boomed. The planes no longer come solely from Colombia — Venezuela has become a big player, too, with family members of President Nicolas Maduro arrested by the D.E.A. in Haiti in 2015 for drug trafficking. The son of Honduras’s former president was also arrested in Haiti by the D.E.A.

This year, Mr. Moïse approved an agro-industrial zone in Savane Diane, but when the project broke ground, officials found they were about three miles south of one of Haiti’s most active airstrips for cocaine and heroin deliveries.

The small lake nearby was filled with fish, in an area where malnutrition is rampant, yet locals would not go near it. When The Times asked them why, farmers explained that human remains were often dumped there.

And when The Times went to the local airstrip, a farmer with a machete in his hand approached, asking if a drug delivery was happening so that he could get a bribe to look the other way.

Two jagged dirt strips — one path for each wheel — cut through waist-high grass. Yards from the airstrip lay the hull of a small plane that, residents say, crashed over the summer. The wreckage of another charred plane lay close by.

When the police cars that are often seen offloading the planes’ cargo get stuck along the rough roads, local tractor drivers get paid a few dollars to tow them out, residents said. Before a plane comes, they added, farmers cut the grass around the airstrip and start fires in empty cans so pilots know where to land at night.

Mr. Moïse’s aides said he became aware of the airstrip after a furious call from the D.E.A.

Between May and June, the airstrip in Savane Diane and another in Haiti’s north hosted an inordinate amount of traffic, with at least a dozen planes coming through, potentially carrying thousands of kilos of cocaine, Haitian security officials say. In mid-June, the D.E.A. called the Haitian authorities, demanding to know why there was such an uptick, according to Haitian officials with knowledge of the communication.

Several of the planes had even stopped in Port-au-Prince to refuel in the middle of the night, when the airport was closed, they said.

When Mr. Moïse found out about the deliveries in mid-June, he was fuming, his aides said. Then came an order from the presidential palace: Destroy the airstrip.

But the local authorities refused to do it, according to several officials interviewed.

About a week later, Mr. Moïse was at home with his wife and two children when hit men burst into his home. They had been let into the presidential compound by Mr. Hérard’s forces. In his initial testimony, Mr. Hérard said they stood down when the gunmen identified themselves as D.E.A. agents.

Not a single shot was fired between the assassins and Mr. Moïse’s guards. As the gunmen stormed the residence, the president called Mr. Hérard and another security official to rescue him, his widow told The Times. No help came.

One of the men leading the assassins, Joseph Felix Badio, was a former D.E.A. informant who called the country’s new prime minister, Ariel Henry, multiple times in the days just before and the hours right after the assassination, according to a copy of the police report. Mr. Henry, a close ally of Mr. Martelly, has denied any involvement in the killing.

Mr. Badio is still on the loose, but in the weeks after the assassination he was seen in bulletproof government vehicles, according to a security officer who was involved in the investigation.

Mr. Henry has stripped the government of Mr. Moïse’s former allies. Last month, he appointed a new justice minister, Berto Dorcé — who, according to a D.E.A. investigation, bribed one of the judges overseeing the case of the Panamanian-flagged vessel with 1,100 kilos of drugs aboard. A former senior Haitian law enforcement official also said Mr. Dorcé once spent months in jail in connection with drug trafficking.

Mr. Dorcé did not answer a list of questions for this article. Mr. Martelly is in Miami, where he lives, mulling another presidential run, his associates say.

National elections will be held next year, and Mr. Martelly is considered a front-runner.

Julian Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 10 décembre 2021

 Three of a Group of Missionaries Kidnapped in Haiti Have Been Released

The U.S. Christian aid group said three more people were released of the 17 who had been kidnapped by a gang in Haiti. Two were released last month.

NYT - Dec. 6, 2021

Outside the Christian Aid Ministries headquarters last month in Titanyen, north of Port-au-Prince.Odelyn Joseph/Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — Three more hostages from a group of 17 missionaries and their children kidnapped in Haiti have been released, the American Christian charity they were with said on Monday. Their release brought the total number of people freed to five.

In a statement on Monday, Christian Aid Ministries said that the three people released “are safe and seem to be in good spirits.”

The organization did not provide their names, ages or the circumstances of their release, including whether a ransom had been paid. In the past, the group had asked for discretion to protect the hostages still being held.

“We would like to focus the next three days on praying and fasting for the hostages,” the statement read. The group continued, “We long for all the hostages to be reunited with their loved ones. Thank you for your prayer support.”

There was no immediate comment from the United States government on the latest release.

The Ohio-based charity said on Nov. 21 that two hostages had been released.

The kidnapped group, which included 16 Americans and one Canadian, was taken in October by a gang called 400 Mawozo, in a neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. Swaths of the city have come under control of criminal groups amid the escalating political and economic crisis that followed the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in July.

Among those kidnapped were five children, including an infant. Kidnapping has become an increasingly common practice for Haitian gangs, who have targeted even students going to school and pastors delivering sermons.

The 400 Mawozo gang, which is well-known for orchestrating mass kidnappings, had initially demanded a ransom of $1 million per person, although that was widely viewed as a starting sum for negotiations. It is not clear what, if any, money was paid for the five people released so far.

But the gang has been known to release captives with health problems. Haitian officials have said that the two hostages released last month were freed over medical concerns.

The abductions set off alarm among American lawmakers, who condemned the poverty and violence that has wracked Haiti and made kidnapping-for-ransom a big businesses in and around Port-au-Prince, where nearly half the nation lives.

In the days after the missionaries and their children were seized, the F.B.I. sent a team to Haiti to work with the local authorities to secure their release. Under American law, ransoms can be paid to gangs for the release of U.S. citizens held captive. American citizens are barred, however, from paying ransoms to terrorist organizations.

But U.S. officials worry that if ransoms are paid to 400 Mawozo, it will only encourage more kidnappings. There are tens of thousands of Haitian Americans in Haiti at any given moment, according to State Department officials.

Not long after the group was first kidnapped, the leader of the 400 Mawozo gang threatened to kill the hostages if the group’s ransom demands were not met. 

“I will prefer to kill them and I will unload a big weapon to each of their heads,” the leader, Wilson Joseph, said in a video recorded on the streets of the violent Croix-de-Bouquets neighborhood.

Turks and Caicos police report seven Haitian migrants found dead after boat capsized

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November 30, 2021

Turks and Caicos police say they recovered the bodies of seven people from Haiti Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021, whom authorities say were part of a large group of migrants leaving their country. Miami Herald File

Turks and Caicos police say they have recovered the bodies of seven undocumented Haitians Tuesday whom authorities say were attempting to illegally migrate from nearby Haiti. 

The dead were among a large group of migrants on a vessel that collided with a Turks and Caicos police marine patrol boat around 9:40 p.m. Monday, the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police said in a press release. 

Police said the crew of the marine patrol boat was trying to intercept the migrant vessel as it approached land in the North West Point area of Turks and Caicos. That’s when the two vessels collided and several of the Haitians fell into the water.

The Turks and Caicos crew, with the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, rescued 64 adults — 41 men and 23 women — from the water. 

Police caught another 16 men on land in North Point, according to the press release. 

Authorities say there may have been more people in the group and a search will resume at dawn on Wednesday. 

“My thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of those who have lost their lives today,” Kendall Grant, acting commissioner of the Turks and Caicos police, said in a statement. “We were hoping for the best. Unfortunately, we are now dealing with a tragedy. It is unclear how many irregular migrants were on board the vessel.” 

The tragedy is the latest in a worsening Haitian migration crisis that has affected islands in the Caribbean as well as South and Central America, along with Mexico and the U.S. The Turks and Caicos are a a British dependent chain located 736 miles south of Florida and 136 miles from the northern coast of Haiti, and is a popular location for Haitians fleeing violence and political stability at home and hoping to get to the U.S.

Since mid-September, more than 11,000 Haitians have been repatriated from seven countries back to Haiti, according to the International Organization for Migration. This includes two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flights that arrived from the U.S. on Tuesday and one on Friday, which together returned about 129 Haitians including families.

Error! Filename not specified.A sailboat floats in the shallow water off Card Sound Road in Key Largo Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021. The U.S. Border Patrol said 61 migrants from Haiti were on the vessel. U.S. Border Patrol 

Last week, a large group of 63 Haitian migrants arrived off the coast of a remote area of Key Largo on a sailboat. Those individuals are currently in custody at ICE’s Broward Transitional Center, immigration lawyers in Miami say. 

David Goodhue covers the Florida Keys and South Florida for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald. Before joining the Herald, he covered Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.

Senators and US officials are still working to ensure return of Ohio hostages in Haiti

(WTRF) — Senators are still fighting to bring the missionaries abducted overseas back home. Two missionaries are back safe but others remain hostages.

 We’ve been waiting for the return of the rest of the missionaries for six weeks now. Many of them are from Ohio. But there’s still no sign of 15 of them.

Meanwhile in the states, the FBI and State Department are trying to bring them home.  

Senator Rob Portman says he’s working closely with the State Department and promises to stay personally involved. The Assistant Secretary of State is in daily connection with people on the ground.

I just urge the kidnappers to let these people go, these good people go who are trying to help the people of Haiti. I believe the US government has this at the top of their agenda, but we’ve go to get this resolved.

Sen. Rob Portman – OH – (R)

In the meantime, people are praying for the missionaries and their safe release to authorities. 

My Group Can Save Haiti. Biden Is Standing in Our Way.

Dec. 1, 2021

NY Times PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On the streets of Port-au-Prince in February, demonstrators demanded that the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, step down because he had overstayed his elected term. His administration had dissolved Parliament after failing to hold elections, and he had illegally packed the judiciary and electoral commissions. Armed gangs, acting with his support, massacred protesters and terrorized poor and powerless citizens. Government agencies were a shambles, as they have been for years.

With the United States and other countries providing unstinting support for Mr. Moïse, Haitian civil organizations realized that the only way Haiti would be saved was if they saved it.

That month, groups representing unions, professional associations, farmers’ alliances, human rights and diaspora organizations, Voodoo groups and churches formed the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis. I am one of 13 commissioners.

To reach beyond the political class and our own circles, we consulted Haitians of every political stripe, professional background, religious affiliation and social class to reach a broad consensus through compromise that would provide us with the authority to create a Haitian-led solution.

Facing no perfect alternatives to a corrupt, illegitimate government that rules by decree, we believe the country’s best hope is a political transition in which inclusion provides legitimacy, leading to free elections. We can create a free, secure, democratic Haiti on our own, but we need the United States and other nations to abandon the status quo and back the work we’ve been engaged in for months.

We established a modest headquarters in a small room in Hôtel la Réserve in Port-au-Prince, where we met protesters, business leaders and representatives of the ruling party alike. We used Zoom and WhatsApp to talk with Haitians in other cities and with the Haitian diaspora. We consulted hundreds of people and organizations representing millions of Haitians.

Then events overtook our deliberations.

In July, Mr. Moïse was assassinated. The country was in shock. With disagreement about who would serve as interim head of state, opposition politicians quickly approached the commission to discuss a transitional government. That day, the U.S. Embassy tweeted its support for Mr. Moïse’s acting prime minister, Claude Joseph.

The commission worked with new urgency. We had already posted our draft accord online and opened it for public comment. Now we brought several hundred people together to work on it.

Yet meanwhile, the U.S. Embassy tweeted an extraordinary statement from a group of ambassadors that anointed Ariel Henry as acting prime minister and asked him to form a government.

On Aug. 30, we unveiled a blueprint for creating a transitional government backed by many political parties and sectors of Haitian society that had never before reached consensus.

It proposes an interim government whose members, in the absence of elections, will be nominated by various sectors to legitimately represent Haitians. There would be a president of the transition and head of government, as well as a representative body that can check executive power. It sets goals for strengthening institutions ahead of elections, working with many capable, well-intentioned civil servants who yearn to be able to do their jobs effectively.

It contains provisions that guard against self-interest, for instance, preventing commission members from holding leadership positions in the transitional government. The accord, which now has more than 900 signatories from groups representing millions of Haitians, includes participants who disagree with one another, ensuring diverse points of view.

Ariel Henry, Haiti’s acting prime minister, addressing the United Nations General Assembly via video in September. His proposal for new elections lacks sufficient reforms.Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mr. Henry, the unelected, de facto prime minister, quickly proposed a rival planthat would consolidate all power of the interim government in his hands. It focuses on quick elections without sufficient reform to make them credible or ensure wide participation. And most of its supporters represent groups that are already aligned with and benefiting from the existing corrupt, predatory and failing system.

We pushed forward, even as some people related to the talks were killed or forced into hiding by gangs and commissioners were threatened. Armed men interrupted our meetings twice.

Still, we were able to hold substantive and moving conversations. Regardless of their backgrounds, people had identified the problems of massive corruption and impunity for government officials. Justice was a key demand. Most people agreed that Haiti has grown more unequal and far more violent and that basic security was urgent. They agreed on the need to find a solution among Haitians without international intervention. In these ways, Haitians were already unified.

This week we are naming the members of the National Transition Council, which is expected to select an interim president and head of government. This should lead to a negotiation for the departure of Mr. Henry, who said he would step down if not wanted.

Haitians need the United States and other countries to shift their support to the commission’s democratic process — in which Mr. Henry is free to participate. The best solution for our country’s complex and overlapping problems is for Haitians to build a more inclusive, stable and nonviolent political system, a functional democracy.

Perhaps the Biden administration and other foreign leaders feel they are doing what’s best for Haiti by standing behind Mr. Henry. They are actually standing in the way of what’s right: letting Haitians save our own country.

Monique Clesca (@moniclesca) is a journalist based in Port-au-Prince, a former U.N. official and a member of the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis.

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Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 1 décembre 2021

 Mexico to offer Haitian migrants alternative to asylum

Haitian migrants arriving in Mexico may soon be eligible to stay and work in the country without applying for asylum.

Andrés Ramírez, head of Mexico’s refugee commission (COMAR), announced recently that Haitians will be eligible for a new form of migratory relief, which could take the form of temporary humanitarian visitor cards that would allow them to work and access public services.

Thousands of Haitians remain stuck in southern Mexico, often in precarious conditions.

Ramírez said Mexico is opposed to deporting migrants back to unsafe conditions in Haiti, but the new plan could prevent a "collapse" of the country's overburdened asylum system.

As of Nov. 16, Ramirez says more than 116,500 people have sought asylum in Mexico — far outpacing previous annual record of about 70,400 asylum seekers in 2019. This year, Haitians make up 44% of asylum applicants.

(Fronteras Desk)

'We need to work': Hundreds of migrants form new U.S.-bound caravan in Mexico

Jose Luiz Gonzalez . November 27, 2021

TAPACHULA, Mexico, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Hundreds of Central American and Haitian migrants formed a new caravan on Friday in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, near the Guatemala border, and began walking north toward the United States.

The migrants said they wanted to leave Chiapas as they had not been given humanitarian visas promised by Mexico or transferred to other parts of the country where they would have better living conditions.

About 1,000 migrants, many carrying children, early on Friday began walking from Tapachula, a city bordering Guatemala, to Mapastepec, about 100 km away (62.1 miles), where they plan to join another group of migrants, caravan organizers said.

A day earlier, Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM) began transferring hundreds of migrants to other parts of the country after they had spent months waiting in Tapachula for a response to requests for refuge or humanitarian visas.

The migrants were also offered documents for a temporary legal stay in Mexico that would allow them to look for jobs, defusing threats to start walking toward the U.S. border.

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Members of the Mexico's National Guard ride in a truck as migrants, mostly Haitians, walk in a caravan heading to the U.S. border, near Tapachula, Mexico November 26, 2021. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

However, many migrants in Tapachula were not transferred elsewhere or did not receive humanitarian visas, and they joined those heading toward the United States.

"We need to work to support our family and that is why we decided to do this, to leave in the caravan," said one Haitian migrant, accompanied by his wife and family members, who declined to be identified.

Luis Garcia, one of the caravan organizers, said about 1,500 people are expected to head north from Mapastepec on Tuesday. In the past, migrants have refused to accept government aid because of the fear of being deported.

Earlier on Friday, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said it discovered that last year at least three Haitian asylum seekers in Mexico were deported to their country.

The Mexican National Migration Institute did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment about the cases.

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Reporting by José Luis González Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz Writing by Drazen Jorgic Editing by Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Contending With the Pandemic, Wealthy Nations Wage Global Battle for Migrants

Covid kept many people in place. Now several developed countries, facing aging labor forces and worker shortages, are racing to recruit, train and integrate foreigners.

Nov. 23, 2021

Vjosa Isai and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

New York Times

A teacher showing immigrant trainees how to weld at Bildungskreis Handwerk, a regional training hub in Dortmund, Germany.Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

As the global economy heats up and tries to put the pandemic aside, a battle for the young and able has begun. With fast-track visas and promises of permanent residency, many of the wealthy nations driving the recovery are sending a message to skilled immigrants all over the world: Help wanted. Now.

In Germany, where officials recently warned that the country needs 400,000 new immigrants a year to fill jobs in fields ranging from academia to air-conditioning, a new Immigration Act offers accelerated work visas and six months to visit and find a job.

Canada plans to give residency to 1.2 million new immigrants by 2023. Israel recently finalized a deal to bring health care workers from Nepal. And in Australia, where mines, hospitals and pubs are all short-handed after nearly two years with a closed border, the government intends to roughly double the number of immigrants it allows into the country over the next year.

The global drive to attract foreigners with skills, especially those that fall somewhere between physical labor and a physics Ph.D., aims to smooth out a bumpy emergence from the pandemic.

Migrant farmworkers in Ontario, Canada, last year. Canada is one of many of the world’s wealthier nations seeking to increase their work force with foreign migrants.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times

Covid’s disruptions have pushed many people to retire, resign or just not return to work. But its effects run deeper. By keeping so many people in place, the pandemic has made humanity’s demographic imbalance more obvious — rapidly aging rich nations produce too few new workers, while countries with a surplus of young people often lack work for all.

New approaches to that mismatch could influence the worldwide debate over immigration. European governments remain divided on how to handle new waves of asylum seekers. In the United States, immigration policy remains mostly stuck in place, with a focus on the Mexican border, where migrant detentions have reached a record high. Still, many developed nations are building more generous, efficient and sophisticated programs to bring in foreigners and help them become a permanent part of their societies.

“Covid is an accelerator of change,” said Jean-Christophe Dumont, the head of international migration research for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D. “Countries have had to realize the importance of migration and immigrants.”

The pandemic has led to several major changes in global mobility. It slowed down labor migration. It created more competition for “digital nomads” as more than 30 nations, including Barbados, Croatia and the United Arab Emirates, created programs to attract mobile technology workers. And it led to a general easing of the rules on work for foreigners who had already moved.

Asylum-seekers preparing to cross from Mexico into Texas this year. In the United States, immigration policy remains mostly stuck in place, with a focus on the southern border, where migrant detentions have reached a record high.Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Many countries, including Belgium, Finland and Greece, granted work rights to foreigners who had arrived on student or other visas. Some countries, such as New Zealand, also extended temporary work visas indefinitely, while Germany, with its new Immigration Act, accelerated the recognition process for foreign professional qualifications. In Japan, a swiftly graying country that has traditionally resisted immigration, the government allowed temporary workers to change employers and maintain their status.

These moves — listed in a new O.E.C.D report on the global migration outlook — amounted to early warnings of labor market desperation. Humanitarian concerns seemed to combine with administrative uncertainty: How would immigration rules be enforced during a once-in-a-century epidemic? How would companies and employees survive?

“Across the O.E.C.D., you saw countries treat the immigrant population in the same way as the rest of the population,” Mr. Dumont said. 

When it came time to reopen, fewer people appeared to care about whether immigration levels were reduced, as a poll in Britain showed earlier this year. Then came the labor shortages. Butchers, drivers, mechanics, nurses and restaurant staff — all over the developed world, there did not seem to be enough workers.

In Britain, the shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers has affected pig farmers, who may start culling their stocks.Andrew Testa for The New York Times

In Britain, where Brexit has crimped access to immigrants from Europe, a survey of 5,700 companies in June found that 70 percent had struggled to hire new employees. In Australia, mining companies have scaled back earnings projections because of a lack of workers, and there are about 100,000 job openings in hospitality alone. On busy nights, dishwashers at one upscale restaurant in Sydney are earning $65 an hour.

In the United States, where baby boomers left the job market at a record rate last year, calls for reorienting immigration policy toward the economy are getting louder. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has urged policymakers to overhaul the immigration system to allow more work visas and green cards.

President Biden is trying first to unclog what’s already there. The administration’s $2.2 trillion social policy bill, if it passes a divided Senate, would free up hundreds of thousands of green cards dating back to 1992, making them available for immigrants currently caught up in a bureaucratic backlog.

In Australia, cafes have asked the government for a special visa for baristas.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake for The New York Times

Many other countries are galloping further ahead. Israel, for example, has expanded its bilateral agreements for health workers. Inbal Mashash, director of the Israeli government’s program for managing foreign labor, noted that there were currently 56,000 immigrants, mostly from Asia, working in the country’s nursing care sector. And that may not be enough.

“The state keeps asking itself where it wants to take this,” she said. “Do we want 100,000 foreign workers, in the nursing care sector alone, by 2035?”

In advanced economies, the immigration measures being deployed include lowering barriers to entry for qualified immigrants, digitizing visas to reduce paperwork, increasing salary requirements to reduce exploitation and wage suppression, and promising a route to permanent status for workers most in demand.

Portugal’s digital nomads can stay as long as they want. Canada, which experienced its fifth consecutive year of declining births in 2020, has eased language requirements for residency and opened up 20,000 slots for health workers who want to become full residents. New Zealand recently announced that it would grant permanent visas, in a one-time offer, to as many as 165,000 temporary visa holders.

Medical staff members treating coronavirus patients in Zefat, Israel, in February. Israel has expanded its bilateral agreements for immigrants in the health care sector.Atef Safadi/EPA, via Shutterstock

One of the sharpest shifts may be in Japan, where a demographic time bomb has left diapers for adults outselling diapers for babies. After offering pathways to residency for aged-care, agriculture and construction workers two years ago, a Japanese official said last week that the government was also looking to let other workers on five-year visas stay indefinitely and bring their families.

“It’s a war for young talent,” said Parag Khanna, the author of a new book called “Move,” who has advised governments on immigration policy. “There is a much clearer ladder and a codification of the tiers of residency as countries get serious about the need to have balanced demographics and meet labor shortages.”

For the countries where immigrants often come from, the broader openness to skilled migration poses the risk of a brain drain, but also offers a release valve for the young and frustrated.

Countries like Germany are eager to welcome them: Its vaunted vocational system, with strict certifications and at-work training, is increasingly short-handed.

One of the sharpest immigration shifts may be in Japan, as the aging population is forcing the government to change its policy to allow foreign workers to stay.Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“During the coronavirus crisis, the system has really collapsed,” said Holger Bonin, research director for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn. “We’ve seen the lowest number of apprenticeship contracts since German unification.”

Young Germans increasingly prefer to attend universities, and the country’s labor force is shrinking. According to a newly released study by the German Economic Institute, Germany will lose five million workers in the next 15 years — a full 3.2 million by 2030.

Immigrants have become a stopgap. Around 1.8 million people with a refugee background lived in Germany as of three years ago. And over time, the country has tried to improve how it integrates both asylum seekers and foreigners with work visas.

On a recent morning at Bildungskreis Handwerk, a regional training hub in Dortmund, near the Dutch border, around 100 trainees shuffled down the linoleum-floored corridors of a five-story building in a quiet residential area. In classrooms and work spaces, they learned to be professional hairdressers, electricians, carpenters, welders, painters, plant mechanics, cutting machine operators and custodial engineers.

The costs for 24- to 28-month programs are covered by the local government employment office, which also pays for apartment and living expenses. To get in, candidates must first take an integration course and a language course — also paid for by the German government.

Serghei Liseniuc, right, who came to Germany from Moldova in 2015, has started training as a plant mechanic at Bildungskreis Handwerk in Dortmund, which will soon bring him stable work and higher wages.Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

“At this point, it doesn’t matter which of our departments graduates our trainees — trained workers are desperately sought in almost any domain,” said Martin Rostowski, the deputy director of the center.

Serghei Liseniuc, 40, who came to Germany from Moldova in 2015, has started training as a plant mechanic, which will soon bring him stable work and higher wages. “We are a bit like doctors,” he said. “Doctors help people, and we help buildings.”

But despite the gains for some workers and some locations, economists and demographers argue that labor market gaps will linger and widen, as the pandemic reveals how much more needs to be done to manage a global imbalance not just in population but also in development.

One question perhaps runs like a cold-water current just beneath the new warm welcome: What if there are not enough qualified workers who want to move?

“We’re hearing the same thing from everywhere,” said Mr. Dumont, the O.E.C.D researcher. “If you want to attract new workers, you need to offer them attractive conditions.”

Trainees learning how to build walls at Bildungskreis Handwerk. To deal with a labor shortage, Germany is trying to improve how it integrates both asylum seekers and foreigners with work visas.Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Vjosa Isai and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Détails

Catégorie : What's up Little Haiti

Création : 17 novembre 2021

 Moise murder suspect to be sent to Colombia

Jamaica is again moving to enforce the court-ordered deportation of ex-Colombian army officer Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, a key suspect in the July assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, to his homeland.

This development comes despite a request by Haiti, through diplomatic channels, to have Palacios turned over to authorities there, according to a document seen by The Sunday Gleaner.

Palacios remained in local police custody up to yesterday, almost one month after he was fined $8,000 or five days in prison by a Parish Court judge who also ordered his deportation for illegally entering the island.

Plans for what was expected to be a routine deportation were, however, scuttled after the high-profile target in one of the hemisphere’s most notorious modern murders became the subject of a Red Notice issued by the International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol), sources told The Gleaner at the time.

But Jamaica’s Deputy Police Commissioner Fitz Bailey confirmed on Thursday that the “administrative process” surrounding Palacios’ deportation is now in train.

That process includes obtaining travel and other official documents for the ex-Colombian army officer, Bailey explained.

“That process is going on,” he said.

Days after the October 15 court order for Palacios’ deportation, Haiti’s Foreign Ministry dispatched a letter to Jamaica’s Foreign Minister Kamina Johnson Smith requesting that the Colombian be handed over to Haitian authorities, according to documents seen by The Sunday Gleaner.

In the aftermath of Moise’s July 7 assassination, Haitian police arrested 20 persons, including 18 Colombians and two Haitian Americans. They were suspected of being among the 28 commandos who stormed the late president’s private residence in the hills overlooking the Port-au-Prince capital, killing him and wounding his wife, Martine. 

Three suspects were reportedly killed, while five, including Palacios, were on the run.

Palacios was arrested at a guest house in central Jamaica in October, the police have confirmed.

It is believed that he entered the country through one of the island’s more than 140 informal ports of entry.

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Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti Welcomes Brian Concannon as Returning Executive Director

Boston, MA (November 10, 2021)—On Monday, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) welcomed Brian Concannon Esq., IJDH’s founder, as its returning Executive Director. Concannon succeeds Franciscka Lucien, who previously informed the Board of her decision to step down from leadership of IJDH as of November 5. 

Concannon originally served IJDH as Executive Director for fifteen years before stepping down in November 2019. He is a lawyer and activist who has dedicated his career to advancing human rights in Haiti. He lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, where he co-managed the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a public interest law firm and IJDH’s sister organization, and served as a UN Human Rights Officer. He left Haiti in 2004 after the US-sponsored coup d’etat overthrew Haiti’s democracy and demonstrated that no progress in Haiti was sustainable unless the US and other powerful countries were compelled to respect the country’s sovereignty and democracy. From 2019 to 2021, Brian served as the Executive Director of Project Blueprint, where he led the effort to promote a progressive, human rights-based US foreign policy by bringing the perspectives of people impacted by US actions abroad into policy discussions. 

“I appreciate all of Franciscka’s hard and skilful work as Executive Director. I look forward to rejoining the entire IJDH community—colleagues at the Institute and at BAI, collaborators throughout the world, and IJDH’s wonderful financial supporters—to continue this work fighting the root causes of instability and injustice in Haiti.”

About IJDH: The Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) is a US-based human rights non-profit organization. Established in 2004, it is a partnership of human rights advocates in Haiti and the US, dedicated to tackling the root causes of injustice that impact basic human rights in Haiti. In partnership with its Haiti-based sister organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), IJDH advocates, litigates, builds constituencies, and nurtures networks to create systemic pathways to justice for marginalized communities in Haiti. For more information about IJDH, please visit www.ijdh.org.

Contact:
Catherine Chang, Operations Coordinator
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti 
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Miami Herald: U.S. Warns Americans to Leave Haiti as Security Crisis Deepens, Hostages Remain Captive

The Miami Herald.com

Jacqueline Charles

Haitians say the current crisis is the worst to hit the country since the 1990s, when the international community and Clinton administration maintained economic sanctions after a Sept. 29, 1991, military coup toppled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The Biden administration is urging U.S. citizens in Haiti “to strongly consider returning to the United States” amid a gang-aggravated fuel shortage and a deteriorating security climate in which 17 Christian missionaries, including 16 Americans, have been held hostage for more than three weeks.

The message in a Friday security alert from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince came as Haiti’s commercial banks and other businesses announced reduced hours starting this week, grocery store owners warned of coming food shortages and the United Nations encouraged employees to stock up on emergency supplies of water, food and other essential items.

Americans in the country are being encouraged to depart while commercial flights are still available, noting that while the security situation has been unpredictable for months, the environment has deteriorated rapidly in recent days.

“It sounds like an abdication of any kind of responsibility,” Robert Maguire, a longtime Haiti expert who once prepared U.S. diplomats being sent to Port-au-Prince, said of the responses of the U.S. and the U.N. to the unfolding crisis, which is expected to get worse this week if authorities don’t manage to supply fuel. “I think this administration would prefer for Haiti to go away. But it’s not going to go away. It seems that there is no real unanimity of what to do in this administration.”

Rice University names school Provost Reginald DesRoches as next president

HOUSTON — Rice University’s board of trustees has selected Reginald DesRoches, who is now serving as school provost, to be the university’s next president.

DesRoches, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is the first immigrant, first Black man and first engineer to lead the private research university. An internationally recognized structural engineer and earthquake resilience expert, DesRoches will succeed President David Leebron, who previously announced his plan to step down next summer after the academic year ends.

“I am deeply honored to be named the next president of Rice University,” DesRoches said in a written statement. “The past 4½ years at Rice have been among the most rewarding in my professional career and I look forward to building on the tradition of excellence established by President Leebron and those who served before him.”

At Rice, 7% of students are Black or African American.

DesRoches arrived at Rice in 2017 as dean of engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering. During DesRoches’ time as dean, the department underwent significant growth in research programs, including new efforts in the areas of neuroengineering and synthetic biology. He also led the establishment of the school’s first-of-its-kind collaborative research center in India with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Before joining Rice, DesRoches was chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. His work there stemmed from his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate student, DesRoches witnessed the damage wrought by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. That experience led him to focus on earthquake resiliency as he pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees at Berkeley.

Fuel crisis

American Airlines cuts flights to Haiti

Port-au-Prince, November 12, 2021. The current situation in Haiti is not without consequences for the functioning of national and international institutions.

American Airlines announced the reduction of its flights to Haiti. This decision will be effective from Monday, November 15, 2021, according to the company’s spokesperson, Laura Masvidal, during an interview with the Miami Herald.

Starting on that date, there will be only one flight per day to Haiti, from Miami to Port-au-Prince, Masvidal told the newspaper.

Who are the U.S. drug informants caught up in the Haiti assassination?

At least two DEA informants are under arrest or are implicated in the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moise. What is known about their alleged participation in the plot and does the DEA bear any responsibility?

Univision

On May 1, 2000, a wealthy Haitian businessman Rodolphe Jaar was stopped by United States Customs agents while he was driving in South Florida.

Agents searched his rental car and seized a large amount of U.S. currency. But the agents did not arrest or charge Jaar with any crime, despite the fact that he was under investigation for alleged money laundering, according to court documents.

Jaar, the owner of an import and export business in Haiti, would go on to be one of Haiti’s most prolific drug traffickers, helping smuggle at least seven tons of Colombian cocaine into the country, destined mostly for the United States between 1998 and 2012, according to court records. He went by the alias ‘Whiskey’ according to his 2013 indictment.

To save his skin, he became a U.S. government informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration or DEA, though he eventually landed in jail in 2013, pleading guilty to stealing 50 kilos of the cocaine he was supposed to be helping agents seize, worth around $1 million.

After his release from jail in 2016, Jaar returned to Haiti where his name has surfaced as one of the suspects in the plot to assassinate Haitian president, Jovenel Moise, gunned down in his bedroom on July 7.

A month earlier, Jaar allegedly attended a bizarre meeting in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where a plan was discussed, with supposed U.S. government backing, to detain 34 Haitian businessmen and government officials involved in drug trafficking and money laundering, using Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

U.S. officials deny any such plan existed and Haitian police say the nine participants were actually involved in the plot to kill the president. Most are in detention, except for Jaar who is a fugitive and two other Haitians, a justice ministry official who was fired this year for corruption and a former senator.

“There is absolutely no truth to the allegations that the Department of State, FBI, DEA or any other U.S. Government entity was involved in this plot,” a State Department spokesperson told Univision late Friday.

It remains unclear what Jaar’s role was in the meeting, what was actually discussed and whether it had anything to do with assassination of Moise. It is also unknown if Jaar was still working as a DEA informant after he returned to Haiti. The DEA declined to comment about his status in response to several requests from Univision.

“If he was informing the U.S. government of the plot to kill the Haitian president we have a solemn obligation even with criminals to inform the target of that plot. The President of Haiti would have been notified. We could not have let something like that pass,” said Mike Vigil, former chief of DEA for the Caribbean.

The DEA has previously acknowledged that one of the other participants now in detention was working as a “confidential source.” The DEA did not name the person but said that following the assassination the informant reached out to his contacts at the DEA and later surrendered to local authorities, along with one other.

The DEA has also strongly denied any involvement in the assassination during which some assassins yelled "DEA" during the attack on the president's residence. “These individuals were not acting on behalf of DEA,” it said.

Experts from the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) are now working with Haitian authorities to try and solve the murder which has baffled Haitians and outside observers for almost a month, threatening to further destabilize the impoverished Caribbean nation of 11 million.

The meeting attended by Jaar could hold vital clues and has important links with other elements in the plot. It’s timing coincided with the arrival in Haiti of a group of former Colombian soldiers who are also in detention suspected of participating in the killing.

Two of the participants in the meeting, both Haitian-Americans, James Solages and Joseph Vincent, have alleged confessed to working with the Colombians, supposedly as translators. It is widely believed that one of them, Vincent, is the unidentified DEA informant. Few details have emerged about Vincent's life in the United States. The Miami Herald reported that Vincent, 55, became a DEA informant after being arrested more than 20 years ago for filing false information on a U.S. passport application.

A lot more is known about Jaar, the 49-year-old black sheep of an otherwise reputable family at the top of the country’s business elite. Palestinian emigres from Bethlehem, the Jaar family own the Coca-Cola bottling license in Haiti as well as a brewery in Canada and investments in electricity. But they are largely estranged from Rodolphe who has a reputation as a big spender who mysteriously disappeared from Haiti for long periods.

His participation in the June 8 meeting was described in a letter delivered to prosecutors by a lawyer for one of the detained men, Reynaldo Corvington, the owner of a security company who hosted the gathering.

According to the letter by Corvington’s attorney, Samuel Madistin, the 6pm meeting was requested by Joseph Felix Badio, a former Justice Ministry official who was fired in May from an anti-corruption unit for “serious breaches” of ethical rules.

Madistin told Univision in a phone interview that Badio worked as a consultant for Corvington’s firm, Corvington Courier & Security Service, which has held several U.S. government contracts in the 1990s, including providing guards for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.

Badio and Corvington have known eachother for 20 years when Badio worked for an anti-drug unit in the Justice Ministry and Corvington’s firm had a security contract for a government warehouse were seized drugs were held.

Badio had called Corvington earlier in the day to say that “an FBI officer and a DEA official wished to meet with him and asked him if he could receive them at his home,” according to Madistin’s letter.

Badio showed up with a former senator John Joel Joseph as well as a Colombian man who spoke only Spanish. Jaar arrived a few minutes later, but the 49-year-old businessman never spoke during the meeting. “I don’t know why he was there,” said Madistin.

The meeting wound up after about one hour. Corvington was unimpressed by Badio’s presentation of the supposed anti-money laundering and drug trafficking operation, according to Madistin.

“It was all fake. It wasn’t FBI or DEA at all at the meeting. It was the ones implicated in the plot, and the Colombian, who were there,” said Madistin.

Madistin said he expected his client would soon be released as “he had nothing to do with the assassination. Nothing at all.”

What happened over the next four weeks is a mystery. On the night of July 7 armed men entered the president’s residence, with almost no resistance from Moise’s 40-men security team.

According his wife, First Lady Martine Moise, none of the assassins spoke Creole or French, she has said. The men spoke only Spanish and communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room. They appeared to find what they wanted on a shelf where her husband kept his files, she told The New York Times.

“They were looking for something in the room, and they found it,” she said. She said she did not know what it was.

There remain more questions than answers, both for Haitian authorities and the United States.

“Who has the US, and the DEA specifically, been working with in Haiti? To what end?” asked Jake Johnson, a Haiti expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.

“Have those relationships compromised the agency’s ability to do its job and actually undermined security and stability in Haiti?” he asked. “More directly, given previous investigations and arrests, what evidence of high-level government and private sector corruption or criminality does the US possess? And could that be, in any way, related to the assassination of the president?" he added.

Jaar “was a very high-profile (U.S. government) informant,” said Vigil.

It’s likely that Jaar’s role as a DEA informant ended in 2016 after he left jail, as by then he had been exposed in court, and the media, as having, as one judge put it “a checkered history”, of double dealing with traffickers and the DEA.

“He has too much garbage, too much baggage by then,” said Albert Levin, a Miami attorney who represented a Haitian police commander, Claude Thelemaque, who helped provide security for Jaar’s drug shipments.

A fluent English speaker with a degree in business administration, Jaar, was considered by DEA to be a valuable “snitch” as he helped authorities disrupt the longstanding cocaine connection between Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti. Jaar would pay off local cops to protect the cocaine loads flown in on planes that landed at night on dirt strips protected by local police who guided the pilots by radio, according to court records.

Thelemaque was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in jail in 2016 for his role in a 425-kilo shipment of cocaine coordinated by Jaar, who stole 50 kilos from the shipment behind the DEA’s back.

“In this case you have a situation where a man was presumably cooperating and at the same time double dealing; in essence working both sides of the fence,” said Levin.

Jaar was facing life in prison but because he was a DEA informant he received a prison sentence of less than four years. Jaar’s lawyer, Richard Dansoh, did not answer several requests for comment.

At his sentencing in 2014, Jaar asked the judge for forgiveness. “Your Honor, I have accepted full responsibility from the beginning, and I have cooperated with the government,” he said.

“I admit I made a big mistake, in my cooperation. I can assure you that I will never make this mistake again,” he added.

Thelemaque is still is jail and is not due to be released until May 22, 2023, according to federal prison records.

Jaar’s lawyer at the time, Richard Dansoh, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Two years later, at Thelemaque’s trial, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Judge Williams expressed her own disquiet. “Jaar got a huge break here, and it has to be acknowledged,” she told the court.

“Mr. Jaar was the leader of the band and Mr. Jaar was the one who had all the pieces on the chess board,” the judge told the court at Thelemaque's sentening.

His double dealing “so fatally impaired” his credibility that prosecutors decided not to have him testify against Thelemaque at trial, Williams noted, according to the 2016 trial transcript.

Jaar also helped convict a Haitian policeman and his codefendant Olgaire Francois, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for his role in the same kilo shipment.

“I was shocked to learn that Mr Jaar was given rewards notwithstanding the fact that it had been discovered that he had been a double agent and had actually stolen part of the cocaine that he was working with the DEA to have seized,” Francois’ lawyer, Curt Obront, told Univision.

“You can only make so many deals with the devil,” said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who handled several Haitian drug cases.

“After a while you have stop making those deals and use another way to go after the big fish,” he added.

Correction: A previous version of this story erroneosly quoted Claude Thelemaque's lawyer, Albert Levin, as saying that his client was recruited by Rodolphe Jaar. It was the prosecutors who said Thelemaque was recuited by Jaar. Levin says his client was innocent and never participated in the drug shipment.