A federal grand jury in South Florida has indicted 30 people for their alleged roles in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, a plot prosecutors say was driven by greed, funded with stolen U.S. pandemic relief money, and carried out by mercenaries posing as American drug agents.
U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quinones announced the indictment and confirmed that 18 of the 30 suspects had already been transported from Haiti to the United States aboard a military plane, escorted by an elite team of FBI and Homeland Security Investigations agents. The case is being prosecuted in the Southern District of Florida, ABC News reported.
The 85-page indictment lays out an alleged conspiracy in which U.S.-based companies, referred to in court documents as "CTU companies", recruited roughly 18 Colombian nationals with military training, funded their travel to Haiti, and equipped them with gear procured inside the United States. The alleged payoff: future infrastructure and security contracts in Haiti once the president was removed from power.
Prosecutors allege the CTU companies used proceeds from Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan funds, federal pandemic relief programs meant to keep American small businesses afloat, to finance the operation. The indictment describes the defendants as people "motivated to take part in a coup d'état and armed hostilities in Haiti by the desire for private gain and who were not sent by any nation or state on official duty as members of its law enforcement or armed forces."
That detail is worth pausing on. American taxpayer dollars, routed through emergency pandemic programs, allegedly ended up funding the assassination of a sitting head of state. The indictment charges that the defendants defrauded the U.S. government to get those funds in the first place.
The Colombian mercenaries allegedly posed as agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration during the attack. The DEA itself had no operational involvement in the plot, and the impersonation appears to have been a deliberate tactic to sow confusion and gain access to the presidential residence.
President Moïse was killed early on July 7, 2021, at his private residence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. His wife, Martine Moïse, survived the attack. AP News reported that the president was shot 12 times. The brazenness of the assault, armed men storming the home of a sitting leader in the middle of the night, shocked the hemisphere and left Haiti's already fragile government in chaos.
For more than four years, accountability has been agonizingly slow. Haiti's own judicial system has struggled to move forward. Twenty suspects remain held in Haitian custody, including 17 former Colombian soldiers and three Haitian officials, but none has faced trial there. Gang violence, death threats against judges and prosecutors, and a crumbling court system have ground domestic proceedings to a halt.
Bruner Ulysse, a Haitian lawyer and history professor, described the situation bluntly: "While international efforts have yielded some results, the quest for justice in Haiti remains elusive. Judges, prosecutors and lawyers operate under constant threat."
One of the Colombian suspects held in Haiti, Jheyner Alberto Carmona Flores, has alleged mistreatment in detention, stating, "I have been subjected to degrading treatment. I have been subjected to physical and psychological torture."
The American prosecution has moved far faster than Haiti's. Before this latest round of indictments, the U.S. had already charged 11 extradited suspects, and five had pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Moïse. Breitbart reported that nine individuals have now been convicted on charges related to the assassination.
Among the 18 suspects newly transported to the U.S. is Joseph Felix Badio, described as an alleged mastermind of the plot. Badio allegedly posed as a DEA agent and coordinated the armed assault on Moïse's home, directing dozens of mercenaries. His extradition marks a significant escalation, Haitian proceedings had stalled for over five years without bringing him to trial.
Questions of accountability for political leaders extend well beyond this case. In the United States, debates over the arrest and detention of foreign heads of state have surfaced in other contexts, underscoring how fraught these matters remain in both domestic and international law.
Quinones framed the indictment as a turning point. "Today marks the next major phase in our pursuit of accountability for the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse," Just The News reported him saying. He added: "We will follow the evidence wherever it leads, to those who financed it, facilitated it, supported it, or committed crimes to make it possible."
FBI Special Agent in Charge Brett Skiles, who oversees the Miami field office, issued a statement reinforcing the scope of the investigation:
"In July 2021, President Jovenel Moise was assassinated by individuals seeking to profit from illicit financial opportunities and business contracts. Today's multi-location and international arrests underscore the FBI's continued commitment to bringing all participants in this plot to justice. FBI Miami, along with our domestic and international partners, remain steadfast in ensuring that all individuals who allegedly sought to profit from the assassination of a head of state are held fully accountable."
The pandemic relief angle adds a distinctly American dimension to what might otherwise seem like a distant Caribbean crisis. The Paycheck Protection Program and EIDL loans were created under enormous time pressure in 2020 to keep businesses alive during COVID lockdowns. Fraud was rampant from the start, and federal prosecutors have spent years chasing billions in stolen funds. But the allegation that PPP money helped finance the murder of a foreign president stands apart, a grim illustration of how poorly guarded those programs were.
The indictment alleges the CTU companies did not simply misuse the funds. They allegedly obtained the money through fraud, then channeled it into recruiting, hiring, and materially supporting Colombian mercenaries for a planned coup that included "the planned killing or kidnapping of President Moïse." The full names and identities of the CTU companies have not been publicly disclosed.
Significant questions remain. The names of the 30 indicted individuals have not been released in full. It is unclear how many of the 30 are in custody versus still at large. The specific criminal charges in the indictment have not been detailed publicly. And the Washington Examiner noted that the extradition process itself represented a complex international operation, with the 18 suspects flown out of a country where the government barely controls its own capital.
Haiti's dysfunction is not incidental to this story. It is the reason the U.S. prosecution exists. When a nation's courts cannot function, when judges fear for their lives and suspects sit in jail for years without trial, the pursuit of justice falls to whoever has the institutional capacity to carry it forward. In this case, that meant American federal prosecutors and FBI agents flying into Port-au-Prince and putting suspects on a military plane.
The broader principle matters, too. When questions of executive authority and accountability arise in American governance, the expectation is that institutions will function. Haiti's tragedy is a reminder of what happens when they do not.
Whether the Southern District of Florida can secure convictions against all 30 defendants remains to be seen. The case spans multiple countries, involves alleged mercenaries, and rests on a conspiracy that allegedly reached from small-business loan applications in the United States to a predawn raid on a presidential residence in the Caribbean.
But after more than four years of delay, deflection, and institutional collapse in Haiti, American prosecutors have at least put the alleged plotters in front of a court that can actually hold a trial. Accountability delayed is not the same as accountability delivered, but it beats the alternative, which is no accountability at all.
When stolen American tax dollars allegedly help fund the assassination of a foreign president, the case stops being someone else's problem. It becomes ours.
