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The Colombian president admitted that his country “has a joint responsibility” in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse at the hands of Colombian mercenaries and announced that he will travel to that country to support him in the search for a way out of the prevailing crisis. At the moment he has not announced any date.
“I want to go to Haiti, it is an issue where Colombia has a joint responsibility, first because Haiti was the one that helped us to be a country in the past, and second because it was Colombian mercenaries who went to kill the president of Haiti, unleashing a crisis even worse than the one they were already experiencing,” the leftist president told the media on Saturday from the Dominican Republic, where he was participating in the Ibero-American Summit.
Without giving dates of his possible visit, Petro assured that the Haitian people must solve their own crisis, “but they need democratic help, not aid based on weapons.”
Moise was shot to death at the beginning of July 2021 at his private residence in Port-au-Prince, by a commando group made up mostly of about twenty former Colombian soldiers.
The United States has arrested 11 people for participating in the assassination from the south of the state of Florida (southeast), and among the suspects there are Americans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Colombians.
At least 17 former Colombian soldiers are in a prison in Port-au-Prince for this case.
Despite the arrests, when more than a year has passed since the assassination, there are still several unknowns about the true motives of the crime.
Haiti – the poorest country in the Americas – has been mired in a humanitarian, economic and political crisis for years, exacerbated since the Moise assassination and accentuated by the rise in gang violence.
Some 530 people were killed between January and March, many of them by snipers, and about 280 kidnapped by criminal gangs, according to the UN.
Haiti was a key player in the independence of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia due to its military support for Simón Bolívar in the 19th century.
