(English)
Just because some still doubt…
Let’s look at a fact that no one can ignore. On Jul. 7, 2021, Jovenel Moïse, the sitting head of state, was tortured and assassinated in his own residence, in his own bedroom. Not on a battlefield or in a war zone. At the very heart of power. And yet…
None of the agents who were supposed to ensure his security were killed. This detail alone is key to understanding what happened. Because it reveals something much deeper: that the violence was not external to the system. It was compatible with it.
It is not a simple failure when a head of state can be eliminated in the country’s most secure space, without apparent resistance, without the state apparatus’ immediate collapse. One attacker announcing through a megaphone that “We are the DEA” cannot explain it. The event denotes a structural problem.
This is not the first time.
On Oct. 17, 1806, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emperor, founder, the very embodiment of the 1804 rupture, was assassinated. Regicide. Magnicide.
On that day, a tenet of the revolution was broken. And since then, it has never been fully restored.
After the 1806 counter-revolution, what we see throughout history is an almost mechanical repetition. Every time a power attempts to reconnect with the spirit of 1804 — a real rupture, a return to sovereignty, a refounding, or even a step toward that — it becomes an anomaly in and a threat to the post-1806 system – what I call the “Affranchi state” – and must be eliminated.
It happened to Charlemagne Péralte, to Dumarsais Estimé, to Daniel Fignolé, and to Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Threats are either coopted, scared into submission, exiled, or simply killed. This elimination became much more effective when Washington joined with the “Affranchi state” and effectively took over Haitian affairs after the 1915 U.S. military intervention, the first of many.
In this interpretation, Jovenel Moïse is not merely a victim. He becomes a symptom. An indicator. A moment when the system was confronted with an attempt at redefinition: rupture, reorganization, or redefinition of the Republic. And the system’s response has been the same as in the past: neutralization.
This observation is difficult to accept. Because it implies that the threat doesn’t come solely from the outside, nor solely from visible disorder, but from the structure’s very heart, very essence.
So yes, this confirms something fundamental: We are not simply facing a weak state. We are facing a state that has historically demonstrated its capacity, usually in coordination with U.S. imperialism, to eliminate even its own central figures when they contradict its deep-seated logic.
And from this point on, no illusions are possible. If a system can let its own leader die, then no ordinary life is truly protected.
This is where the truth becomes stark: What we call a crisis may simply be the normal functioning of a structure built since Oct. 17, 1806, to prevent the full realization of 1804 and May 20, 1805 Constitution which enshrined Dessalines’ principles. And as long as we Haitians do not understand this logic nor even see the class structure undergirding our nation, every attempt at rupture will be responded to by the system’s immune defenses as a threat to be eliminated.
That is why the question is no longer historical. It is current. Urgent. Alive: How do you carry out a revolution in a system which you have not fully analyzed, which you don’t fully understand how it works.
Once that is done, that’s where the real battle begins. Invisibly at first, but gradually, or suddenly, it will manifest. And be decisive, if the majority of the masses are also made to understand.
Their first reflex will be to defend the system, the status quo, the 1806 order, because that is what they know, what they’ve been taught.
But if the “mental revolution” can be won, then the actual, genuine, flesh-and-blood return to the principles of 1804, history’s first working-class revolution, is possible.
