Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in the early morning hours of Wednesday in a brazen attack on his private home outside Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Moïse’s assassination ended a four-and-a-half-year presidency that plunged the troubled nation deeper into crisis.
Moïse, 53, was born in 1968, meaning that he grew up under the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Like most Haitians today, he lived through turbulent times — not only dictators but also coups and widespread violence, including political assassinations.
Moïse, a businessman turned president, made his way into politics using political connections that stemmed from the business world. Initially he invested in automobile-related businesses, primarily in the north of Haiti, where he was born. Eventually, he landed in the agricultural sector — a big piece of the economy in Haiti, where many people farm.
But the business brought Moïse prominence. It was as a famed banana exporter that Moïse met then-Haitian President Michel Martelly in 2014. Though he had no political experience, Moïse became Martelly’s hand-picked successor in Haiti’s next election.
Martelly was deeply unpopular by the end of his term, but party leaders assumed that Moïse would be more welcomed given his relatable background in farming.
Instead, Moïse barely eked out a win in a November 2016 election that fewer than 12% of Haitians voted in. His meager electoral victory came after two years of delayed votes and confirmed electoral fraud by Martelly’s government.
In 2017, Moïse’s first year in office, the Haitian Senate issued a report accusing him of embezzling at least $700,000 of public money from an infrastructure development fund called PetroCaribe to his banana business.
Protesters flooded into the streets crying “Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a?” — “Where is the PetroCaribe money?”
Lacking the trust of the Haitian people, Moïse relied on hard power to remain in office.
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