More than a dozen suspects locked in a cell block do not equal justice. Every headline celebrating another batch of handcuffs on the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse falls for the oldest trick in political theater. Authorities love a neat narrative. They want you to believe that a gaggle of Colombian mercenaries and shady fixers dreamed up a midnight hit on a sitting head of state purely out of rogue ambition.
It is a comforting fantasy. It neatly boxes up a catastrophic systemic failure into a criminal conspiracy solved by police work.
Strip away the courtroom drama and the extradition updates. The lazy consensus says that rounding up the hit squad finishes the job. That premise is fundamentally broken. Focusing entirely on the trigger-pullers misses the architecture of impunity that allowed the keys to the palace to be handed over in the first place. You can arrest every mercenary on two continents, and the crisis in Port-au-Prince remains completely untouched.
Look at the mechanics of power in a hollowed-out state.
Assassinating a president inside his private residence without resistance is not a commando masterclass. It is an inside job requiring institutional paralysis. The national police detail vanished. The security perimeter dissolved. When a political assassination succeeds with the eerie precision of a scheduled delivery, the investigation cannot stop at the men who held the rifles. Those men are replaceable cogs.
The real story hides in the financial networks and the domestic elite who stood to gain from a vacuum.
For decades, international experts have peddled a single prescription for institutional rot: heavier policing, foreign intervention, and technical capacity building. They treat a compromised government like a software bug that needs a patch. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how power operates when institutions no longer serve the public. When the state itself functions as a criminal enterprise, strengthening the enforcement arm without altering the incentive structure only gives more leverage to whoever controls the machinery next.
Consider the aftermath. The arrests roll in, extradition papers shuffle across desks in Miami and Port-au-Prince, and commentators declare that accountability is working. Meanwhile, the actual conditions that commercialized murder in the Caribbean remain entirely intact. Gangs control the arteries of daily life. The judiciary is starved, intimidated, or bought. Importing foreign judges or relying on slow-moving federal courts abroad does not rebuild a domestic rule of law. It merely outsources sovereignty.
There is a profound discomfort in admitting that foreign mercenaries are symptoms, not the disease.
Blaming external actors or a handful of rogue security contractors lets the domestic political class off the hook. It ignores how deeply intertwined business elites, political aspirants, and transnational smuggling networks have become. When legal channels are entirely blocked by corruption, violence becomes a rational instrument of upward mobility. Until analysts and policymakers confront that brutal economic reality, every high-profile arrest is just rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.
Stop treating political violence as an aberration. In certain environments, it is the primary mechanism of political succession.
The obsession with finding the mastermind follows a cinematic script that real life rarely honors. Real power is decentralized, messy, and deeply embedded in the banking system and import-export cartels. Follow the contracts, trace the land titles, and audit the debt relief promises. That is where the motives live. Handcuffs on a mercenary's wrists look great on camera, but they do not write a constitution, they do not fund a school, and they certainly do not resurrect a murdered president.
Justice requires structural overhaul, not a dramatic season finale for the evening news. Until the structural incentives for political murder are dismantled piece by piece, the next assassination is just waiting for an open window.
