Yesterday former First Lady Martine Moise, widow of the assassinated Jovenel Moise, and two of her children, filed a complaint against Haiti’s current Prime Minister Ariel Henry alleging his involvement in the assassination of her husband. On Sept. 15, Haiti’s Justice Minister and Public Prosecutor had also called for Henry to be arrested in connection with Moise’s murder, based on three phone calls he placed after the murder to Joseph Felix Badio, a suspect in Moise’s murder now in jail. All of the people named by Martine Moise are already in jail, suspects in the assassination. Of particular interest, though, is the case of Dimitri Herard, who was the head of Moise’s security detail at the presidential residence on the night of the murder and did nothing to stop the hit squad that entered the house to kill Moise. Latest developments suggest that, more tha a political or economic motive as such behind the assassination, drugs was a key factor. Keep in mind that Haiti is a major transshipment point for drugs into the U.S. EIR is pursuing this lead.
According to an Aug. 22, 2021 expose in The New York Times, Herard appears to have been a link in a network of Haitian drug traffickers (including Haitian politicians) and corrupt elements in the DEA who botched an April, 2015 drug bust that was to occur at a private port in Port-au-Prince to which a load of cocaine and heroin had been delivered. DEA agents were on the scene, but because of corrupt elements among them, traffickers got away with hundreds if not thousands of pounds of cocaine and heroin. Herard, who was working at the time in the security detail of then-President Michel Martelly, was on the scene at the time of the drug bust, and was seen directing men in jeeps to load cocaine and heroin onto jeeps and speed away. He has long been a focal point of the investigation into the 2015 drug bust, and now he is a leading suspect in the murder of Jovenel Moise. He was close to Martelly’s brother-in-law Charles Saint-Remy, with whom senior DEA officials were also seen meeting. The suspicion was that the DEA officials were alerting Saint Remy, now also in jail, about planned DEA operations.
None of the suspects in this 2015 case were ever arrested. Former DEA agent Keith McNichols, who led the investigation into the botched drug bust, witnessed the DEA corruption in Haiti, but when he tried to report it to higher-ups, he was reprimanded for pressing the issue. He repeatedly pointed to serious flaws in anti- drug efforts in Haiti. McNichols and his coworker George Greco, with whom he worked in pursuing this case, ultimately left the DEA in frustration over the stonewalling and hostility they endured from within the DEA.
