More information is still coming out about the death of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated in his residence overnight by a group of unidentified individuals.
For now, NPR’s Carrie Khan looks back at his political legacy and the turbulence Haiti experienced under his tenure.
‘The banana man’
Kahn first met Moïse in 2015, when he was campaigning for the presidency. She tells Morning Edition that his background was not in politics, but in agriculture; in fact, people called him “the banana man.”
He positioned himself as a champion of the poor, but didn’t have a clear path for Haiti, she says.
“He was not the typical strong-man or the wily politician that Haiti is used to, and ever since he took office, from the get-go it was difficult. The elections were flawed, it was marred by controversy, it took more than a year for him to take office, so that complicated how long his rule was actually going to be,” Kahn explains.
Instability in Haiti
His presidency marks only the most recent chapter in Haiti’s long history of instability.
Kahn ticks through a list of challenges: It’s the poorest country in the hemisphere, was left with a weak national police force after the U.N. pulled out as its major security force and is still dealing with the devastation of the 2010 earthquake and a cholera outbreak.
Plus, political struggles: The country’s parliament had been dissolved because it couldn’t hold elections, meaning Moïse had been ruling by decree for the last two years. But, as Kahn puts it, he wasn’t able to pull the country together, and gangs are now ruling many important regions.
What’s next?
She expects fallout from the assassination, predicting “a very difficult situation for Haiti to remain stable.”
