Haiti’s OAS ambassador resigns to focus on ‘far-fetched’ charges in Moïse assassination
Haiti’s representative to the Organization of American States, who served as police chief when the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated nearly three years ago and who has been indicted in the conspiracy, has resigned.
Léon Charles confirmed his resignation to the Miami Herald on Thursday. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, he said he was stepping down from the hemispheric agency in order “to have free rein to defend myself against the far-fetched accusations included in this order of Shame!”
Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry has accepted the resignation, the government said.
Charles is among 51 individuals who was indicted Monday in a 122-page indictment issued by a Haitian judge investigating the assassination. The order issued by Investigative Judge Walther Wesser Voltaire ended the inquiry that began more than two-and-a-half years ago. In the indictment, first obtained by the Herald, Charles is accused of being complicit in the president’s middle-of-the night slaying. He said he rejects all of the allegations against him in the indictment and plans to appeal the charges, which is his right under the country’s 1979 criminal appeal decree.
In his resignation letter to Foreign Minister Jean Victor Généus, Charles said although the charges order have not yet been served on him he wants to be able to “vigorously combat by all means of law the fanciful accusations brought against me in order to have my innocence recognized.” The accusation that he was involved in Moïse’s assassination, he said, is “absolutely unjust and slanderous.”
READ MORE: Plots, subplots and betrayal engulfed Haiti’s president before his assassination
Port-au-Prince Chief Prosecutor Edler Guilluame noted that the then-police chief had 18 minutes after Moïse called him and his security coordinator, Jean Laguel Civil, in distress to send help and he did not. The Herald previously reported that the two police officials were among several high-ranking police officers Moïse desperately called after a squad of Colombian commandos stormed his private residence in the Pélerin 5 neighborhood of Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021, and began shooting, falsely claiming that it was a Drug Enforcement Administration raid.
Charles has consistently denied being involved in Moïse’s death. He also has pushed back on the accusations of indicted plotter Joseph Félix Badio that he participated in meetings about serving an arrest warrant against Moïse in the weeks before the assassination. The bogus arrest warrant, signed by an actual Haitian judge, was at the core of the conspiracy, which evolved into an assassination plot in the days before the Haitian leader was slain, according to the indictments in Miami and Haiti.
The warrant was used by suspects in both Haiti and South Florida to carry out the ultimate scheme that led to the president’s death.
Charles, a former member of the Haitian military who has also served as chargé d’affaires in Haiti’s Washington embassy, served twice as head of the Haiti National Police. He first took charge of the force in the wake of the 2004 coup against then-President Jean-Bertand Aristide and the arrival of an interim-U.S. backed government and United Nations force. The stint, however, was short-lived and he was out by July 2005 after facing questions from the international community about his commitment to cleaning up the force.
He took the reins of the police force once again 15 years later under even more difficult circumstances. Moïse plucked him from a diplomatic role to serve as interim police chief amid a new wave of gang violence and kidnappings. Charles faced even greater policing challenges as he struggled to deal with growing gang violence and kidnappings, corruption and rogue cops.
In October 2021, while facing questions about his response during the assassination, Charles resigned and returned to his old job as Haiti’s permanent representative to the OAS. His resignation came on the same day that the arrest of a key suspect in the assassination, retired Colombian soldier Mario Antonio Palacios Palacios, who had fled to Jamaica, became public.
Early on in Haiti’s investigation of the assassination, questions emerged about the role of the Haiti National Police and the three elite units charged with protecting the president. Several police officers, including the two heads of Moïse’s presidential detail, were arrested after investigators found some agents were missing in action on the day of the slaying, and others either accompanied the Colombians and two Haitian Americans to carry out the violent coup or stood down during the attack. Though some 399 bullet casings were found in the yard of Moïse’s home, not one police officer was killed or even received a scratch, Voltaire noted in his report.
Voltaire also wondered about the links between two suspects, Haitian Americans Joseph Vincent and James Solages, with high-ranking officials in the police. The two men, who are currently in federal lock-up in Miami as part of a parallel U.S. investigation, turned themselves into Charles hours after the killing amid a police standoff. In the indictment, Voltaire said the indicted suspects wanted to call Charles from the phone of Police Commander Dimitri Hérard, the head of the presidential security unit who has also been indicted and is currently jailed in Port-au-Prince.
Charles, who attended several questionings during the inquiry, told Voltaire that he did deploy officers to help Moïse. He also said he answered the suspects’ calls after receiving a call from the U.S. embassy alerting him that Solages and Vincent, who was sentenced to life earlier this month for in the Miami federal case for his supporting role in the murder plot, wanted to turn themselves in.
