Haitian-Chilean businessman Rodolphe Jaar has been sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the assassination of the country’s president Jovenel Moise, one of the main triggers in 2021 for the current and enormous political and security crisis that one of the most dangerous countries is experiencing. poor of the world
Jaar, 51, also known as ‘Dodof’, pleaded guilty in March this year to the charges against him, mainly that of providing weapons to the mercenaries who killed Moise at his residence in Port-au-Prince. on July 7 of that year, in the midst of a constitutional crisis over the validity of the president’s mandate and his confrontation with the country’s elites, whom he accused of being involved in an international drug trafficking plot.
Jaar had also pleaded guilty to housing the conspirators and bribing Haitian officials to weaken the president’s security detail before his assassination.
Jaar has thus become the first person to be convicted and sentenced as part of the scheme to end Moise’s life — orchestrated at a horse-smashing between Haiti and Florida (USA) — and impose a successor favorable to those responsible for the assassination . The businessman, who has precisely been sentenced in Miami, had previously served as a confidant for the US government and was sentenced for drug trafficking a decade ago.
Jaar’s defense attorney, Frank Schwartz, argued in court for a sentence reduction to 30 years of maximum sentence, finally rejected by the court on the recommendation of federal prosecutors Mónica Castro and Andrea Goldbarg, reports the ‘Miami Herald’.
The other ten individuals charged in the United States are due for trial in mid-July, although that date may be postponed. It should also be recalled that after Moise’s murder, Haitian police authorities carried out arrest operations that resulted in the arrest of more than 40 people suspected of being involved in the murder, including 18 former Colombian soldiers.
All of the defendants were charged after being transferred to the United States from Jamaica, where two suspects fled after the murder, or from the Dominican Republic, where Jaar fled after spending months in hiding in Haiti. Three Haitian-Americans with ties to South Florida were airlifted from the Port-au-Prince prison earlier this year.
