US authorities on Tuesday announced the arrest of four men allegedly linked to the July 2021 assassination of Haiti President Jovenel Moïse in Port-au-Prince. With his arrest, there are already 11 detainees in the US for the case, but more than 50 in total, plus the suspected detainees in Haiti. Despite the arrests, the case is still a mystery a year and a half after the assassination, especially in the area of intellectual authorship.
The assassination of President Moïse, a nation plagued by corruption and violence, marked a before and after in Haiti. In the early morning of July 7, 2021, former Colombian soldiers, coordinated with Haitian mercenaries, broke into the presidential residence in the upper part of Port-au-Prince. They easily broke the guards’ resistance, destroyed the home – apparently with millions of dollars in cash – and shot the President dead and wounded his wife. Then they fled. The arrests were not long in coming. Nor the question of how a group of armed men could have gotten into the President’s room so easily.
Among the new arrestees are Antonio Intriago and Arcángel Pretel, head of a security firm in the Miami area, CTU Security. According to the investigation, CTU was responsible, among other things, for hiring about twenty former Colombian soldiers for the operation. As reported by US media at the time, especially The Miami Herald, it was initially planned to kidnap Moïse and take him out of the country, thereby forcing a change of government. At some point the plan changed. The assassination of Moïse, who took office in 2016, became the main target.
In addition to Intriago and Pretel, the US justice system jailed financiers Walter Veintimilla and Frederick Bergmann, who allegedly provided money for the operation and helped send commando equipment to Haiti for former Colombian soldiers. As with some of the previously indicted men, at least one of the new men was a US security forces informant, Archangel Pretel, an FBI informant at the time of Moïse’s murder.
Otherwise there is something for every taste. The North American country’s prison system has incarcerated Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian doctor, pastor and old political leader who lived halfway between the Caribbean country and Florida. According to investigators, Sanon would have been the instigator of the conspiracy, with the ultimate intention of taking Moïse’s place. Captured days after the murder in Haiti, authorities later extradited him to Miami for trial.
Alongside Sanon, a former senator from Haiti, John Joel Joseph, accused of assisting with the logistics of the operation, Colombians Germán Rivera and Miguel Ángel Palacios, part of the military team alleged to have assassinated the president, are also jailed, two of the Main characters in the storyline, James Solages, a Haitian American recruited by CTU for the occasion, and Joseph Vincent, also a Haitian American and former DEA informant.
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According to the investigation, both were part of the field operation and, in the case of Intriago and Pretel, also acted as intermediaries with the owners of CTU. Vincent had been in Port-au-Prince days before the attack and had shared time with Rodolphe Jaar, another inmate in the United States, a drug trafficker who provided guns and ammunition to the operation. Solages credited for his role in one of the most convoluted parts of the plot, which also indicates intellectual authorship.
As reported by the Herald and other media at the time, the operation to kidnap Moïse and take him out of the country failed sometime in late June 2021. The plane that was supposed to reach Port-au-Prince to take the President out of the country did not arrive. Solages then traveled to Miami with a letter asking for support for Intriago, allegedly signed by Wendelle Coq Thelot, a judge at the Court of Cassation, the country’s highest court, and promising immunity. Confronted with Moïse since he removed her from the court, Coq Thelot always said that the signature on that letter was not hers.
While the case is progressing in the US, it is completely paralyzed in Haiti. More than 40 people are in prison for Moïse’s murder, including 18 former Colombian soldiers and as many police officers. The statement has changed hands five times in that time with no progress. For Mary Rosy Auguste, part of the team at the National Network for Human Rights in Haiti, “The case will not be in Haiti when it is solved. And what is happening in the United States will not tell us the whole truth.”
Auguste mentions two key figures who are still available at the moment. Above all, it is Joseph Félix Badio, a former high-ranking official in the Moïse administration, who may have known about the operation on the ground. The other is Dimitri Herard, head of security at the National Palace, who came to Moïse’s house when the murder was already complete. “They knew it,” says Auguste. “It is possible that some of the police officers who were arrested did not know or thought that they were only going to arrest him. But they knew, as did Solanges.”
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