Tribune. It has been more than a month since the government of Jovenel Moïse, deemed unconstitutional by the Haitian opposition and by the highest judicial body in the country, the Superior Council of the Judicial Power (CSPJ), arrested 23 citizens under the pretext of “attempted coup”. The arrest itself, on February 7, was made under conditions reflecting the arbitrary and repressive character of this regime massively rejected by the population: around 2 a.m. and with great disregard for the procedure. Photos of detainees in pajamas, including a judge of the Court of Cassation, manhandled by the regime’s henchmen, circulated on social networks.
Long before February 7, 2021, the date on which his mandate constitutionally ended, Jovenel Moïse had begun to display dictatorial tendencies. The massacres in working-class neighborhoods to suppress any inclinations for protests and demands, unconstitutional orders and decrees, untimely dismissals and appointments, attacks on journalists, among others, already showed the slope followed by the regime resulting from the PHTK Party. [Parti haïtien Tèt Kale, de l’ancien président Michel Martelly].
Violence and repression
Since Jovenel Moïse came to power in 2017, the country’s economic situation has worsened, corruption has become widespread, violence and repression have invaded working-class neighborhoods, in particular kidnappings and repression of all kinds have cast a veil of terror over the country as a whole. This accusation of conspiracy against the person of the president or against the internal security of the State to justify arbitrary arrests and intimidate the population is not new. Those who were born or raised during the years of the Duvalier regime [1957-1986] recognized this maneuver for what it is: a grotesque attempt to justify arbitrariness by a regime that can only manage through violence and repression.
Honest citizens, upright civil servants, some of them at retirement age, find themselves locked up for more than thirty days in painful conditions. On the night of February 13 to 14, surgeon Marie Antoinette Gautier – detained with her husband, the agronomist Louis Buteau, and her sister, the Inspector General of the National Police Marie Louise Gautier – helped a fellow inmate deliver her baby . The ambulance was late in coming, it was around 3 a.m. Seven days earlier, at around the same time, the government had yet been able to send a troop of heavily armed officers from the brigade unit responsible for the president’s security to arrest 23 people.
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