The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has apologized on behalf of the Government during his visit to Haiti for the assassination of former Haitian President Jovenel Moise in 2021 at his residence and which left a power vacuum that aggravated the turbulent political and economic situation in the Central American country.
“I ask for forgiveness because some white Colombians came here to kill the president of Haiti. On behalf of all the Colombian people I tell you, we do not believe in that death that those Colombians spread, we believe in life, Colombia is the heart of life in the world and, therefore, we want to join hands in life, with our hearts, with a sincere hand and not with the hand of the murderers,” he said in a speech in the town of Jacmel.
Petro, who held an official meeting with the president of the Haitian Presidential Transition Council, Leslie Voltaire, said that “the Latin American peoples today have to unite to help each other, to grow, to help each other again between Colombians and Haitians, because this help, this mutual solidarity, this cooperation is the basis of humanity, of our strength, of our power.”
On July 7, 2021, about twenty people broke into the home of the then Haitian president, where they encountered little resistance from the security team, killed Moise and injured his wife, Martine Moise. In 2024, a former Colombian soldier was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to commit the assassination, while the Haitian authorities arrested almost twenty suspects, most of them Colombian nationals.
