I would be surprised if Biden ordered/authorized this, but that doesn’t mean the US had no involvement. Perhaps it was more like the people behind it had some indication that the US would recognize whoever it was intended to bring to power.
I think his story is far fetched, but I don’t think his involvement points to US involvement particularly. As you say plenty of Haitian Americans are linked to local Elites, and those links make his “it was all a fluke” tale pretty unlikely (to me).
And as I posted above I don’t think it was a CIA op, I think the question about that is maybe a little naive, except it’s probably based on my post so I’m the fool there*. The US record in Haiti and the region is there for everyone to read. Clearly they take an interest, but there’s every chance this passed off with only very vague signals reaching official US security (maybe none). As you say it seems like a settling of accounts in the Haitian political elite.
The US and others have been working to embed people friendly to their interests at every level that might get involved in such matters. As I posted above, when stuff like this goes down that it involves networks linked to US interests and turns out broadly supportive of them is just ‘normal’ functioning. It’s a bit like the Carl Sagan thing about making an apple pie. If you fancy killing a Haitian President then you try getting the gang together without hiring mercenaries linked to a US trained ‘anti-communist’ or ‘anti-drug’ army unit, or having to install some local Politician who got funded by the NED or whatever. Very tricky.
note - The CIA director’s visit stuff genuinely was just me amusing myself by posting conspiracy join the dots stuff. I’d be stunned if they’d discussed this.
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They’ve arrested ex-military from Colombia, so anything other than US Trained “anti-communist” or “anti-drug” Army units is more like “I don’t believe what I’m being told conspiracy thinking” right?
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Well, some local politician who I couldn’t get a read on in a brief Google (which isn’t surprising given my lack of knowledge on Haitian politics) is claiming that that lot arrived hours after he was dead, and were actually hired to protect him from the Presidential guard, who in fact did the hit.
(Though surely the Guard fit roughly the same sort of profile, obviously.)
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Ex-military from Colombia sounds a lot more like a hit squad than body guards for the recognized head of state.
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Yeah, with the obvious caveat that I know little I don’t favour that story. Not least as the President’s wife who also got shot seems to have fingered the Colombians.
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Erik Prince has always recruited heavily from Colombian military for his merc’s.
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“My first thought was, how could they go in there and (shoot) two people without anyone else getting wounded?” said Saint-Vil. “It doesn’t make sense. (Moïse) had many Blackwater U.S. soldiers supposedly protecting him, and this still happened.”
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It might not be news but Prince also supposedly trained CIA hit squads.
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Prince is behind the guards and the hit squad. It’s just smart business.
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Can’t vouch for the veracity of this, but it would certainly neatly explain the “actually it was the Presidential Guard and the Colombians are the good guys” theories neatly. (And show our own Microbet to be a shrewd operator.)
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https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1415678471343386624?s=19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/07/15/colombia-haiti-us-military/
WaPo:
A small number of the Colombian individuals detained as part of this investigation had participated in past U.S. military training …
Correctamundo!
In the last few days I’ve come round to thinking that many of the people fingered are probably patsies (at least to the extent they didn’t know of the full plot, I still find the “we thought we were the DEA” angle far fetched). Some stuff has been coming out in the Colombian press that’s interesting.
The Caracol News investigative unit revealed this Wednesday that at least three of the Colombians who were part of the plan to assassinate President Jovenel Moïse declared that weeks before the assassination they met with politicians, including Prime Minister Claude Joseph.
However, the Haitian Police, which now reports to the prime minister, made this statement.
The Police benefit from technical support from the FBI and several other foreign technicians. Clues and information collected as part of the investigation reveal no link to the prime minister.
But Noticias Caracol learned that the authorities of several countries, including Haiti, have the confessions in which the alleged participation of the prime minister in the plot is mentioned.
Colombia probably has an interest in making their guys seem more innocent, but I’ve no idea of this news source’s bias. The FBI is in Haiti now and was going through the house where he was shot yesterday, so the claim that multiple countries have the confessions makes sense.
As ever who knows exactly what’s going on. For now my money is on Claude Joseph et al being the ‘masterminds’ who expected the US to ride to their aid uncomplicatedly, but they made a bad read on the level of assistance Biden etc. would provide (and to what ends). But that’s just a hot take.
(This is a google translate link, if you read Spanish then you can probably turn that off)
Sorry, I missed this post.
I don’t disagree about the complexities of the diaspora, and how it’s not necessarily a silver bullet, but we could tailor immigration policies to help Haitians, and blunt some of the negative impacts.
One big problem is that the complexity of the existing immigration system favors people with the money, education, linguistic skills, and family connections to navigate the system, and shuts out people without these things. This inherently favors trained doctors*, engineers, family members of current Haitian Americans, etc, and makes it more likely for them to emigrate to the USA than an unskilled worker trying to care for their family. A reliable, simple visa program designed to allow ordinary Haitians to migrate to the USA to find jobs and provide for their families would almost certainly have net positive effects for the people of Haiti.
*Regarding doctors, the book The Big Red Truck That Went By explains how the influx of free medical treatment after the 2010 earthquake caused many local doctors to go out of business, and caused its own brain drain. Every tragedy in Haiti has a devastating number of layers to it.
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