A revealing look at the effort to recruit Colombian military veterans for what was described as a “noble” nation-building effort in Haiti, but ended with 18 of them arrested and three of them dead. …
Colombian officials have said that their investigation into their citizens’ involvement in the assassination plot is focused on Germán Alejandro Rivera, a retired captain, who they say appears to have been a primary contact for the U.S.-based recruiters.
Colombian consular officials still have not had access to their detained citizens, forcing them to rely on the information provided by the Haitian authorities, Colombia’s deputy foreign minister, Francisco Echeverri, told reporters on Monday.
But according to reports in the Colombian media, citing the country’s intelligence officers, Mr. Rivera told Haitian prosecutors that he was among a group of seven retired Colombian soldiers who entered the presidential residence on the night of the assassination.
The reports do not mention what role he or other Colombians might have played in the assassination — but they add a layer of doubt to the already murky story and raise questions about how privy some members of the Colombian group might have been to the plot that unfolded in the first hours of July 7 and left Mr. Moïse dead and his wife injured, but no one else hurt.
The mystery is confounded by the frequent stopovers that the head of Mr. Moïse’s presidential palace guard, Dimitri Hérard, made in Bogotá in the months before the assassination. Mr. Hérard, who was trained in neighboring Ecuador, transited through the city six times this year on his way to other Latin American countries, spending at least two days in the Colombian capital on at least one occasion, Colombia’s defense minister said during a news conference on Monday.
The recruitment of Colombians for the mission appears to have begun when Duberney Capador, a former soldier with 20 years of experience on the force, got a call in April from a
