The president of Haiti, Jovenel Moise, has been assassinated in an attack perpetrated this Wednesday at dawn against his private residence and in which the first lady has also been shot, as reported by the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, in a release.
The attack took place around 1:00 am (local time), when “a group of unidentified individuals”, including “several who spoke Spanish”, attacked the house, according to the statement collected by local media such as Juno7 and ‘ Gazette Haiti ‘.
Joseph has condemned this act “heinous, inhuman and barbarous” and has called to the population “to the calm”. “The country’s security situation is under the control of the National Police and the Armed Forces,” said the interim prime minister, who is confident that “democracy and the Republic will overcome” this escalation of tensions.
The murder of Moise pushes the serious security crisis in Haiti to the limit, which threatens to cause a power vacuum, given that the president had already been ruling by decree for more than a year due to the absence of an elected Parliament.
Moise had drawn up an electoral calendar that has changed as he goes, as the situation in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has worsened. Initially, a referendum had been called in April to reform the Constitution, but the uncertainty led to a first postponement to June and, later, until September 26, coinciding with the first round of the legislative and presidential elections.
The uncertainty has also extended to the Government, whose reins Joseph assumed internally last April. This same week, the president had appointed Ariel Henry, a former head of the Interior, as the new prime minister, whom he tasked, among other tasks, with “solving the flagrant problem of insecurity and supporting the Electoral Council in holding the general elections and the referendum “.
The political and security crisis has also led to a worsening of the humanitarian situation, especially in the Port-au-Prince area, where some 18,100 people have been forced to leave their homes due to the upsurge in violence, 14,700 of them in the last month, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The UN has also warned that the violence complicates the distribution of aid and has left thousands of people with little or no assistance, although it estimates that a total of 1.1 million need some type of aid to cover needs or services. basic.
