“I want to go to Haiti, it is an issue where Colombia has a co-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 president told the media on Saturday, March 25, in the Dominican Republic, where he was participating in the Ibero-American Summit.
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Petro did not advance possible dates for his visit to Haiti. Although he stressed that the Haitian people must solve their own crisis, he stressed that they “need democratic help, not weapons-based help.”
Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021 at his residence in Port-au-Prince, by a commando group made up mostly of about twenty Colombian ex-military officers. 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 over the 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 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, reported R.F.I.
