Four men convicted in Florida of conspiring to assassinate Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021

Four men were found guilty Friday by a federal jury in Miamifor their role in the July 2021 plot that led to the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, a crime that precipitated the Caribbean country toward a spiral of violence, institutional vacuum and territorial domination by armed gangs that persists to this day.

The verdicts fell on Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla and James Solages, who could spend the rest of their lives in prison. The charges include conspiracy to assassinate or kidnap a foreign leader, providing material support to the plot and violating a long-standing U.S. rule that prohibits citizens or residents from promoting violent operations from their territory against governments with which Washington is not at war.

The case revealed that the plot was not only planned in Port-au-Prince but also in the Miami metropolitan area.There, two firms operated that the prosecution identified as financial and logistical cogs in the plan, the first a private security company known by its initials CTU, linked to Pretel Ortiz and Intriago, and the second a financial company called Worldwide Capital Lending Group, where Veintemilla had a managerial role. Solages served as CTU's representative on the ground in Haiti.

For prosecutors, the motivation of the defendants was not purely political. The State argued during the trial is that the conspirators aspired to place in the presidential chair a figure manageable for them -in an initial stage, the doctor Christian Sanon, with dual Haitian and American nationality- to then capitalize on contracts, influence and positions in the State apparatus. Sanon will be tried later, in a separate trial.

The main witness

The toughest account of the trial, which began in March, was provided by Martine Moïse, the president's widow and a survivor of the attack. Wounded that night and later evacuated to United States, she testified in court with the assistance of a Creole interpreter. During her testimony, she described the moment the gunshots woke her up and the response she received from her husband when she asked him what was going on: "We're dead". The operation was carried out by a group of approximately two dozen foreign mercenaries, mostly Colombian ex-military, who broke into the official residence.

In the courtroom, lawyers for the defendants tried to demolish the prosecutors' narrative. Mainly, they argued that the investigation was riddled with flaws and that their clients were used as fuses in an internal Haitian operation. They insisted that the four believed they were acting under legal cover, under cover of an alleged court order signed in Haiti, and that they understood their mission as an act of liberation against a president who, in their view, had already exhausted his time in office.

However, the defense failed to convince the jury.

The Miami conviction comes on top of five previous guilty pleas in U.S. courts, all with life sentences. In Haiti, on the other hand, judicial progress is almost nonexistent: a score of defendants, among them 17 former Colombian soldiers, await resolution while the local justice system struggles to survive the siege of gangs and the institutional collapse that the assassination itself helped to unleash.