The US federal prosecution of individuals connected to the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse continued to produce results in 2023, with a dual Haitian-Chilean citizen entering a guilty plea to murder-related charges in March, adding to the roster of individuals who had accepted legal responsibility for roles in the July 2021 killing. The progression of the US proceedings stood in stark contrast to the slow pace of the Haitian judicial investigation.
The Miami prosecution had built an increasingly detailed picture of the assassination conspiracy through the cooperation of witnesses and the guilty pleas of participants at various levels of the operation. The emerging narrative described an operation planned over months, financed by Haitian-American businessmen with political ambitions, executed by Colombian military veterans recruited through private security networks, and coordinated from South Florida.
Each guilty plea added detail to the publicly available understanding of the conspiracy while creating legal pressure on remaining defendants to cooperate or face trial. American prosecutors were systematically working through the network of participants, using the leverage created by convictions and sentences to build the evidentiary foundation for prosecutions higher up the chain of command.
The Haitian judicial proceedings remained far behind, hampered by the intimidation of judges and prosecutors, the flight of suspects, and the general dysfunction of a justice system operating in an environment of total insecurity. The contrast between the accountability being delivered by American courts and the impunity prevailing in Haiti itself was a constant source of frustration for Haitian families and civil society organizations that believed full accountability required both international and Haitian legal processes to succeed.