Haiti ships its tragedy to Miami as justice goes begging

By Aoife Gallagher · Reporting from Dublin · September 21, 2026

Eighteen suspects in the killing of Jovenel Moïse are flown to Florida, exposing a hollowed-out republic where sovereignty is surrendered and foreign courts take the wheel.

A republic under siege and the flight to Florida

On a Sunday morning, eighteen men accused of an unimaginable crime were bundled onto a military flight in Port-au-Prince and sent across the Caribbean to Florida. Among them were seventeen former Colombian soldiers and Joseph Badio, a former official from Haiti's Ministry of Justice anti-corruption unit. According to BBC reporting, President Jovenel Moïse was shot dead at his home in July 2021 by a group of mainly Colombian mercenaries. Five years later, the men who allegedly carried out or facilitated that night of blood are trading the cells of a broken island for the antiseptic federal courtrooms of the Southern District of Florida.

Let us be entirely clear about what this extradition represents. It is not an assertion of international law, nor is it a triumph of global cooperation. It is a humiliation. It is the formal, documented bankruptcy of a state that can no longer even try the men who murdered its head of state. As Al Jazeera notes, armed gangs control an estimated 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, and the United Nations documented at least 8,100 gang killings in 2025. In the face of that collapse, Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network, rightly called the transfer a "disgrace for the Haitian justice system." He is right, and anyone who pretends otherwise is mistaking foreign tutelage for justice.

The machinery that brought these men to Miami was set in motion because the Haitian judiciary was systematically eviscerated. Judges resigned because they feared for their lives. Gangs seized control of the downtown Port-au-Prince courthouse, turning temples of law into hollow shells. NPR reports that defense attorneys in the U.S. have asserted Joseph Badio was the mastermind behind a plan to use the president's arrest to assassinate Moïse. Yet while Badio sat on the run for over two years before his October 2023 arrest, he was also reportedly making early-morning phone calls to then-acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

That single, damning detail explains why the local judicial process stalled so completely. The highest levels of the post-assassination government were entangled with the alleged conspirators. When power is so compromised, local accountability becomes impossible. And so the big capitals stepped in, deciding that a trial in Miami is easier to manage than a reckoning in Port-au-Prince.

The Miami prosecutor and the imperial reach

We must examine the leverage at play here, because small nations do not surrender their criminal dockets out of civic-minded generosity. They do it because they are starving, bleeding, and governed by provisional authorities who survive at the pleasure of foreign donors. U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, directing the prosecution for the Southern District of Florida, took to X to declare that "today marks the next major phase in our pursuit of accountability." Quiñones, an appointee of the second Trump administration and an Air Force Reserve colonel, leads an office that routinely handles major transnational security prosecutions across the Caribbean basin.

This is where the mechanism of Extraordinary Rendition reveals its true face. Extraordinary rendition is a type of state-sponsored extraterritorial abduction. While these eighteen suspects were formally surrendered by Haiti's Ministry of Justice and Public Security "to allow for their trial," the reality of the transfer mirrors the coercive dynamics of rendition. The suspects were moved from a failing state to a foreign power's jurisdiction specifically to bypass a paralyzed local justice system. Diana Marcela Arbeláez Llano, the wife of one of the detained Colombians, captured the sheer powerlessness of the periphery in a phone interview with NPR: "We never imagined that the United States would have taken them so suddenly... It's a state of total uncertainty."

The families are left in the dark, the Colombian government stated it did not intervene in the decision, and the U.S. justice apparatus dictates the terms. In May, a Florida jury already convicted four men—Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla, and James Solages—of conspiring to kill or kidnap Moïse and providing material support. Those men were linked to CTU, a South Florida security firm, and Worldwide Capital Lending Group. The plot was engineered, financed, and staged out of South Florida.

The defense will argue, as some Colombian soldiers testified in Haiti, that they were beaten, threatened with death, and forced to sign documents in a language they did not understand, believing they were participating in a coup rather than an assassination. Some may even cooperate, cutting plea deals to turn on the Miami-based financiers who dangled lucrative security contracts before them. But let us not lose sight of who pays the ultimate price when Washington and Miami decide to run the trial. The price is paid by the Haitian people, whose constitutional right to try their own president's murderers has been quietly expropriated by a foreign superpower.

Sovereignty, solidarity, and the long shadow

The strongest opposing case for this extradition is built entirely on pragmatism. The argument runs that because Haiti's justice system is paralyzed by gang violence, and because judges have fled or been corrupted, leaving these men in Port-au-Prince would guarantee either their violent escape or a farcical trial that delivers no truth at all. Therefore, proponents argue, transferring them to a secure federal court in Miami is the only practical way to ensure that someone—anyone—faces a judge and answers for the crime. It is an argument born of profound despair, and it has a surface logic that appeals to those who care only about outcomes and nothing about the health of republics.

That argument collapses the moment you ask what happens to the nation left behind. Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites; a small nation cannot stand in solidarity with its neighbors if it has surrendered the most basic attribute of self-government, which is the power to judge crimes committed on its soil. When a foreign court takes over the trial of a head of state's assassination, it sends an unmistakable message to every citizen in the periphery: your laws are provisional, your courts are decorative, and your sovereignty is merely a lease held at the pleasure of the larger capitals.

When domestic legal structures shatter under the weight of crisis, dominant powers step in to fill the vacuum, ensuring that accountability is delivered on their terms, within their borders, and under their rules. But outsourcing justice does not cure the disease; it merely masks the symptoms while hollowing out the host.

The eighteen men now sitting in Florida cells will face American justice, and many will likely spend the rest of their lives in American prisons. Yet as Haiti prepares for its first presidential and legislative elections since 2016, contingent on a security situation where gangs still control the capital, the courthouse in Port-au-Prince remains a monument to an unfinished state. Miami will get its verdicts, the headlines will praise the reach of federal law, and Haiti will remain a country where justice is something that happens somewhere else, administered by someone else, for an audience that lives far across the sea.

Haiti ships its tragedy to Miami as justice goes begging

A republic under siege and the flight to Florida

The Miami prosecutor and the imperial reach

Sovereignty, solidarity, and the long shadow

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