Five years after the brazen murder of Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse in his bedroom, a sweeping international operation has delivered eighteen suspects to a federal courtroom in Miami, marking the largest single transfer of defendants in the case to date. The arrests, executed across multiple locations and announced on Sunday by the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, underscore a prosecution that has refused to go cold despite the Caribbean nation’s descent into near-ungovernability.
A transatlantic dragnet
The suspects were transported aboard a military aircraft from Port-au-Prince to Florida, where they will face charges ranging from conspiracy to commit murder to violations of the Neutrality Act. “Today’s multi-location and international arrests underscore the FBI’s continued commitment to bringing all participants in this plot to justice,” Special Agent Brett Skiles said in a statement released on Sunday. His counterpart, federal prosecutor Jason Reding Quinones, was blunter on social media: “Five years later, we are still bringing defendants before American courts, and we are not finished.”
Quinones confirmed that thirty individuals have now been indicted in connection with the 7 July 2021 killing. Moïse, 53, was shot dead at his private residence by a hit squad of roughly twenty Colombian mercenaries with military training. His presidential security detail, a detail that has haunted Haitian investigators for years, did not fire a single shot in his defence.
The Florida connection
The prosecution’s narrative has long centred on a Miami-based security firm, CTU, which allegedly recruited the Colombian operatives. In May, a federal jury in Miami convicted four men linked to the company on charges that included conspiracy to kill or kidnap the Haitian head of state and providing material support for an illegal military operation abroad. Prosecutors argued the defendants were lured by the promise of lucrative government contracts once Moïse was removed.
All four face potential life sentences. They join five others already sentenced to life imprisonment: a former Colombian soldier, a retired Colombian officer, a former Haitian senator, a Haitian-Chilean businessman, and a Haitian-American dual national. US jurisdiction rests on the determination that critical elements of the conspiracy were hatched on American soil.
A nation adrift
While the courtrooms of Miami tick through the legal machinery, Haiti itself has fractured. The country has been without an elected president since Moïse’s death. Gangs now control an estimated 80 per cent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, turning neighbourhoods into fiefdoms where kidnapping for ransom, carjacking and armed robbery are daily occurrences.
A transitional council is steering the country toward its first presidential and legislative elections since 2016, slated for 13 December alongside a constitutional referendum. That timetable, however, hangs by a thread. The UN-backed Multinational Security Support Mission — authorised by the Security Council last year and intended to swell to 5,500 uniformed personnel by October — comprised fewer than 1,000 troops as of July, drawn from Chad, Mongolia, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador and Sri Lanka. Updated deployment figures have not been released.
Why it Matters
The extradition of eighteen suspects is a rare procedural victory in a case that has come to symbolise the impunity governing Haiti’s political life, yet it also lays bare the uncomfortable reality that justice for a Haitian president is being dispensed in a Florida courthouse rather than in Port-au-Prince. As the international mission stalls and the December election deadline looms, the gap between legal accountability abroad and functional governance at home widens — leaving Haitians to wonder whether the rule of law can ever take root in a capital where gang leaders wield more effective authority than the state.
