Jovenel Moïse
Jovenel Moïse was president of Haiti from February 2017 until he was shot dead in his bedroom at Pèlerin, above Port-au-Prince, in the early hours of 7 July 2021 by a squad of Colombian mercenaries who walked past his guards. He was the banana exporter whom Martelly had picked as his successor and who won the re-run election of November 2016, at the second attempt and with a turnout of eighteen per cent. His four and a half years were the ones in which the state ceased to function. He was the banana man, the owner of the Agritrans plantation in the north-east that the Martelly government had financed to export to Germany. He was a businessman from Trou-du-Nord with no politics whom the party chose because he was nobody. The presidency was the PetroCaribe affair, the Venezuelan oil money whose disappearance the Senate's audit of 2017 and the court of auditors' reports of 2019 traced, in part, through companies of his. That was the accusation the crowds carried through the summer of 2018 and the country lock-down of the autumn of 2019, the peyi lòk, when nothing moved for two months and he did not appear. The parliament's term expired in January 2020 with no election held. He ruled by decree for the eighteen months that were left. The opposition and the bar said his own term had ended in February 2021 and he said it ended in 2022. The supreme court judges who might have ruled were retired by decree. The referendum on a new constitution was scheduled and postponed. The gangs, whom his party's men had armed against the slums that had voted Aristide, took the capital's roads, the La Saline massacre of November 2018 among the things they did. The murder was arranged, the investigations in Port-au-Prince and Miami have found, by a Haitian-American pastor, a Miami security company, a former justice official and a drug trafficker turned informant. The country's own police chief and the wife's account are in dispute. The men convicted in Florida have said the plan was to arrest him and it became a killing. The wife, Martine, was shot and survived. The prime minister he had appointed two days before, Ariel Henry, who had spoken to one of the suspects that night, governed for the next three years without an election. He was born in Trou-du-Nord. No president has been elected since.
- Lived: 1968 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Haitian
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
