The brutal assassination of President Jovenel Moïse adds new elements to the crisis in Haiti, after years of foreign intervention and a state that is increasingly a machine for the enrichment of the cliques in power. Today the country faces the prospect of a permanent degradation of human rights and the living conditions of its population, if it is not able to take advantage of this situation to start a reconstruction process. The assassination of Jovenel Moïse. A blow within a blow? The death of someone, cruelly murdered in the presence of his wife and children, as Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was last July, calls for a firm and unanimous gesture of condemnation on the part of all democrats in the world.
It is a drama that recalls the crisis of 1867 in Haiti, which ended with the execution of President Sylvain Salnave in January 1870, and the crisis of 1915, when President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was massacred on the eve of the US Whatsapp Mobile Number List that began in July and lasted 19 years. I would not like to refer to the assassination of the father of the country, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in October 1806. It would require a more extensive context, since it is currently used rhetorically by defenders of President Moïse's policy, who seek recklessly make this parallel.
The main risk that the recent assassination brings with it is that, with an inoperative Justice, the prevailing impunity will be reinforced, a permanent evil that Haitian society suffers and that works as an obstacle to the rule of law and the rule of law. There is thus the risk of a double impunity: on the one hand, it may never be known who was responsible for the president's death; on the other hand, neither Moïse nor his accomplices will answer for the crimes they have committed, as human rights organizations have claimed, as well as the political opposition, for at least three years.