RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Haiti’s first lady, Martine Moise, called Friday for justice for the country’s assassinated president, Jovenel Moise, who, she assured, “was abandoned and betrayed.”
“You were abandoned and betrayed. Your assassination exposed (the) ugliness and cowardice,” Martine said at the civil ceremony in honor of Moise held in Cap-Haitien, in the north of the impoverished Caribbean country, where he will be buried this Friday.
The woman said that Moise’s “greatest sin” was “to love his country. Defending the weakest against the greed of others.”
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“You were brutally murdered. There was a conspiracy against you. They hated you; they threw poison at you,” said Martine, visibly affected.
She affirmed that “the birds of prey” that killed her husband last July 7 “are still running in the streets. They are not even hiding. They are there watching and listening to us.
The woman called to prevent “the blood of our president from being spilled in vain.”
“We do not want revenge, nor violence. We will not give in to fear. We will look them (the killers) straight in the eye. We will tell them that enough is enough,” she added.
The family “is going through dark days,” said Martine Moise, who was shot and wounded in the armed attack on her husband at their private residence in Port-au-Prince.
The first lady spoke for 15 minutes about her 25-year relationship with the late ruler, whom she found to be a “passionate and determined person, kind, cheerful and with great charisma.”
“He became my anthem, and I became his orchestra,” she said, recounting their life together and stating that she was never prepared for her husband’s death in this way.
Martine said she did not understand “how power envy and vulnerability could lead to such malice against” her husband.
“He always tried to do more and better,” said Martine Moise, who described the Haitian political system as “rotten and unfair,” while assuring that the ruler wanted to “leave with clean and pure hands” from the Presidency.
Jovenel Moise “found himself overnight with the whole system in front of him. He was treated with all sorts of evils,” she said.
According to Martine, “all means – including media networks and microphones – have been used to destroy her husband” as president.
“Jovenel, my love, what will become of me without you. Go in peace, go with a sense of duty done. Let your soul rest in peace; we will take care of the rest,” she said.
“It is a goodbye but not a farewell. I didn’t think this change you wanted to make could lead to your assassination. The oligarchs have won a battle. We have lost a battle, but the war is not over yet,” she insisted.
The president was shot dead at his residence in Port-au-Prince in the early hours of July 7, in an attack by an armed commando made up of Colombian ex-military personnel who gained access to the presidential residence without encountering resistance from the guards who should have been protecting the president’s life.