Finalist: Staff of The New York Times

In the months before his murder, President Jovenel Moïse took a number of steps to fight drug and arms smugglers. Some officials now fear he was killed for it.

By Maria Abi-Habib

PORT-AU-PRINCE — President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was about to name names.

Before being assassinated in July, he had been working on a list of powerful politicians and businesspeople involved in Haiti’s drug trade, with the intention of handing over the dossier to the American government, according to four senior Haitian advisers and officials tasked with drafting the document.

The president had ordered the officials to spare no one, not even the power brokers who had helped propel him into office, they said — one of several moves against suspected drug traffickers that could explain a motive for the assassination.

When gunmen burst into Mr. Moïse’s residence and killed him in his bedroom, his wife, Martine Moïse — who had also been shot and lay bleeding on the floor, pretending to be dead — described how they stayed to search the room, hurriedly digging through his files.

“‘That’s it,’” they finally declared to one another before fleeing, she told The New York Times in her first interview after the assassination, adding that she did not know what the gunmen had taken.

Investigators arrived at the crime scene to find Mr. Moïse’s home office ransacked, papers strewn everywhere. In interrogations, some of the captured hit men confessed that retrieving the list Mr. Moïse had been working on — with the names of suspected drug traffickers — was a top priority, according to three senior Haitian officials with knowledge of the investigation.

The document was part of a broader series of clashes Mr. Moïse had with powerful political and business figures, some suspected of narcotics and arms trafficking. Mr. Moïse had known several of them for years, and they felt betrayed by his turn against them, his aides say.

In the months before his death, Mr. Moïse took steps to clean up Haiti’s customs department, nationalize a seaport with a history of smuggling, destroy an airstrip used by drug traffickers and investigate the lucrative eel trade, which has recently been identified as a conduit for money laundering.

The Times interviewed more than 70 people and traveled to eight of Haiti’s 10 departments, or states, to interview politicians, Mr. Moïse’s childhood friends, police officers, fishermen and participants in the drug trade to understand what happened in the last seven months of the president’s life that may have contributed to his death. Many of them now fear for their lives as well.

“I would be a fool to think that narco-trafficking and arms trafficking didn’t play a role in the assassination,” said Daniel Foote, who served as the U.S. special envoy to Haiti before stepping down last month. “Anyone who understands Haiti’s politics or economics understands this.”

A central figure on Mr. Moïse’s list was Charles Saint-Rémy, known as Kiko, two of the Haitian officials tasked with helping draft the dossier said. Mr. Saint-Rémy, a Haitian businessman, has long been suspected by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of involvement in the drug trade. Notably, he is also the brother-in-law of former President Michel Martelly, who lifted Mr. Moïse out of political obscurity and tapped him to be his successor.

Mr. Martelly, who is considering another run for the presidency, and Mr. Saint-Rémy were hugely influential in Mr. Moïse’s government, with a say in everything from who got public contracts to which cabinet ministers got appointed, according to Haitian officials inside and outside his administration. But Mr. Moïse came to feel that they and other oligarchs were stifling his presidency, his aides say.

American officials say that they are looking closely at Mr. Moïse’s efforts to disrupt the drug trade and challenge powerful families as motives in the assassination, and they note that Mr. Saint-Rémy emerged as a possible suspect early in the investigation. But they caution that Mr. Moïse threatened many of the economic elite, including a number of people with deep criminal connections.

Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.

The investigation into Mr. Moïse’s killing has stalled, American officials say, and if the assassination is not solved, many Haitians fear it will add to the mountain of impunity in the country, further emboldening the criminal networks that have captured the state.

Suspected drug and arms traffickers have long sat in Haiti’s Parliament. Small planes with contraband frequently land on clandestine airstrips. Haitian police officers have been caught aiding drug smugglers, while judges are regularly bribed to throw cases.

Haiti may now provide the largest route for drugs destined for the United States, but no one knows for sure because the country has become so difficult to police. American law enforcement is unable to run a wiretapping program in the country, or even fully collaborate with its Haitian counterparts, because corruption in the police and judiciary runs so deep, U.S. officials say.

“Anyone involved in drug trafficking here has at least one police officer on their team,” said Compère Daniel, the police commissioner of the Northwest Department of Haiti, a major transit smuggling corridor.

“It is impossible to get police officers to cooperate with me on the field,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t even answer my calls.”

The D.E.A.’s operations in Haiti have also drawn scrutiny. Criticism of the agency has sharpened because at least two of the Haitians suspected of involvement in Mr. Moïse’s assassination were former D.E.A. informants.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee criticized the D.E.A. for corruption allegations that have swirled around its Haiti operations, citing a Times investigation in August linking Mr. Moïse’s head of palace security to the drug trade. The D.E.A., accused by former agents of mishandling one of Haiti’s biggest drug cases, declined to comment.

‘The True Leader Wasn’t the President’

When Mr. Moïse was chosen by Mr. Martelly in 2014 to be his successor, Mr. Martelly introduced the nation to a supposed outsider with peasant origins, a man of the countryside who had lifted himself out of poverty by running banana plantations.

Mr. Martelly’s associates said he first met Mr. Moïse during a conference and was struck by the entrepreneur’s business acumen.

But the story was misleading: Mr. Moïse had mostly grown up in the capital, several of the original board members of his banana plantation say it was a failure, and Mr. Moïse was already a close associate of Mr. Saint-Rémy and at least one other suspected drug trafficker.

Mr. Moïse, 53 at the time of his assassination, was born in Trou-du-Nord, French for “hole of the North,” an agricultural town that has suffered under decades of government neglect. His father drove a tractor at a nearby sisal plantation but lost his job when it closed, according to interviews with local residents.

When Mr. Moïse was 7, his mother moved him and his siblings to Carrefour, a slum of Port-au-Prince, in search of work and a secondary school for her children, relatives said. In university, Mr. Moïse met his wife and they moved together to her hometown, Port-de-Paix, in the northwest.

By 2000, Mr. Moïse had met and become business partners with Evinx Daniel, according to relatives and acquaintances of both men. Mr. Daniel, a close friend of Mr. Martelly’s, would later be accused of drug trafficking.

Mr. Moïse worked with Mr. Daniel on one of his ventures, Mariella Food Products, which produced biscuits with a pigtailed schoolgirl on the packaging. A former high-ranking Haitian police officer said the company was suspected of being a money laundering front.

The full extent of Mr. Moïse’s involvement in the company is unclear, but a former senator, Jean Baptiste Bien-Aimé, recalled the men coming to his office to talk about the company about a decade ago, and said the men were often with Mr. Saint-Rémy, the brother-in-law of Mr. Martelly.

“They were always together. They were fish crushed in the soup,” said Mr. Bien-Aimé, using a local saying to describe close relationships.

Mr. Saint-Rémy has publicly admitted that he sold drugs in the past but claims all his businesses are now legitimate. Haitian law enforcement officials and former D.E.A. officers who recently served in Haiti say he is still believed to be one of the country’s biggest drug traffickers.

Jacques Jean Kinan, Mr. Moïse’s cousin, said he and Mr. Moïse worked with Mr. Saint-Rémy in the eel industry.

With his brother-in-law as president, Mr. Saint-Rémy wielded enormous influence, often demanding that choice licenses and contracts be awarded to him, particularly eel export licenses, according to officials in Mr. Martelly’s government.

When his demands were not heeded, he could turn violent: In 2015, Mr. Saint-Rémy assaulted an agriculture minister for issuing a contract without his consent, an altercation reported at the time and confirmed by a former government minister.

As Mr. Saint-Rémy’s hold on the eel trade solidified, Mr. Moïse decided to get out of the sector and focus on Agritrans, a banana plantation near his hometown.

“My father said that the Martelly family cornered the eel business and made it difficult to get in,” said Joverlein Moïse, the slain president’s son.

Mr. Moïse also kept in touch with his associate, Mr. Daniel, who had opened a hotel in Les Cayes, a coastal city in the south, an official and a relative said.

In 2013, Mr. Daniel told the authorities that he found 23 packages of marijuana floating at sea while he was on his boat and decided to bring them home. Mr. Daniel said at the time that he and Mr. Saint-Rémy called the D.E.A. to pick up the load he discovered.

A prosecutor, Jean Marie Salomon, doubted the story, suspecting it was a ploy to cover up a drug deal gone bad after locals had stumbled on the stash. He arrested Mr. Daniel on drug-trafficking charges, but he said Mr. Martelly’s minister of justice personally intervened and ordered his release.

Shortly after, Mr. Martelly went to Mr. Daniel’s hotel with a delegation in a clear display of support, Mr. Salomon said. “The message was, justice does not matter,” he said.

Just months after his release, Mr. Daniel went missing in 2014, his abandoned car found at a gas station. Two people — a relative of Mr. Daniel’s and a police officer at the time — said Mr. Moïse was one of the last people to see him alive. Mr. Daniel is presumed dead.

Mr. Salomon suspects that drug traffickers killed him, concerned that he would expose their network as part of a plea deal, and Mr. Daniel’s disappearance remains unsolved. Two investigators said they were sidelined by a federal police unit controlled by Mr. Martelly’s government that took over the investigation and tampered with the evidence.

Barred by the Constitution from running for two consecutive terms, Mr. Martelly began looking for a successor. He wanted to find someone to keep the bench warm for him until he could launch another presidential bid and shield himself from corruption allegations involving the misappropriation of billions of dollars during his tenure, according to former officials in the Martelly and Moïse administrations.

He settled on Mr. Moïse, marketing him as a successful entrepreneur and nicknaming him the “Banana Man” on the campaign trail.

“I told Martelly, you have to look for the peasant vote, someone who looks like them, someone with black skin,” said a former senator, Jacques Sauveur Jean, a friend and sometimes political ally of Mr. Martelly. He said Haitians were tired of the privileged light-skinned elite who ran the country, like Mr. Martelly, and felt that Mr. Moïse, with his dark skin and rural origins, better represented them.

In interviews, three of the original board members of Mr. Moïse’s plantation business, Agritrans, described the venture as a failure, with their original investments lost and little but a barren field to show for it.

But as Mr. Martelly contemplated a successor, the company received a $6 million loan from the government.

Esther Antoine, one of Mr. Moïse’s campaign managers, said she worked to polish his image, to get rid of a stutter that had haunted him and improve his confidence onstage. But on the campaign trail Mr. Martelly took center stage, she said, outshining the man he was supposed to be promoting.

Ms. Antoine, who worried that Mr. Martelly’s outsize presence was “drowning” her candidate, said she convinced the president to give Mr. Moïse the space to campaign alone. That did not sit well with Mr. Martelly’s wife, Sophia, she said.

She said the first lady grew suspicious of Ms. Antoine and called her to the Martelly family home in the middle of the night, reprimanding her for not informing them of Mr. Moïse’s every move.

Ms. Antoine said she pushed back, arguing that she was there to work for Mr. Moïse, not the Martelly family.

“That’s when the wife looks at me and says, ‘Jovenel is a property. You don’t seem to understand that,’” Ms. Antoine recounted. “I was shocked. When I asked her to repeat it, she then switched to French: ‘Jovenel est une propriété.’”

The former first lady did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.

When he won and took over the presidency in 2017, Mr. Moïse felt suffocated by Mr. Martelly but remained loyal to him, his aides said.

Mr. Moïse was unable to choose his own cabinet without the approval of the Martelly family or Mr. Saint-Rémy, they said. The Martellys would often call Mr. Moïse, yelling at him for his legislative initiatives, according to several people who overheard the conversations.

“The true leader wasn’t the president,” said Gabriel Fortuné, a close adviser to Mr. Moïse who died in an earthquake a day after speaking with The Times. “It was his godfather, Martelly. When we talk about the godfather we are talking about the Italian way,” he added, “the family.”

Ms. Antoine acknowledged that Mr. Moïse often turned a blind eye to the corruption in his government, to avoid making enemies and advance his own initiatives.

“He would say, ‘Let me feed them so they leave me alone. If they’re making money, they’ll let me do my electricity and build my roads,’” Ms. Antoine recalled him saying.

But Mr. Moïse’s critics said he joined in the corruption. Before he came to power, the Haitian government was investigating Mr. Moïse, his wife and their company, Agritrans, for large amounts of money found in their bank accounts that could not be explained by the level of business they were generating, an official who worked on the case said.

Two government anti-corruption units also questioned why Mr. Martelly’s government gave a $6 million loan to Agritrans, a company with such a limited record. But when Mr. Moïse came to power, he fired the directors of the two anti-corruption units who worked on the inquiry.

‘They Will Kill Me’

As Mr. Moïse settled into office, he soon realized that the withering control Mr. Martelly and his family exerted on the campaign trail extended to his personal security, several officials said.

Mr. Moïse inherited Dimitri Hérard, a pivotal member of Mr. Martelly’s presidential security force who became the head of the police unit protecting Mr. Moïse’s presidential palace.

Mr. Hérard was also a drug-trafficking suspect. In 2015, when a Panamanian-flagged cargo ship docked in Port-au-Prince with 1,100 kilograms of cocaine and heroin aboard, Mr. Hérard was seen commanding police officers in uniform to load the drugs into vehicles before speeding off with them, according to a witness and Keith McNichols, a former D.E.A. agent stationed in Haiti who led the agency’s investigation into the missing drug shipment.

But Mr. Martelly shielded Mr. Hérard from being questioned by investigators in the case, a former United Nations official said.

Mr. Moïse deeply mistrusted Mr. Hérard, according to several presidential advisers and an international diplomat the president confided in. On at least one occasion, they said, Mr. Hérard was found spying on the president for Mr. Saint-Rémy, informing him about Mr. Moïse’s meetings.

Mr. Hérard, now in detention as a suspect in the assassination, could not be reached for comment.

In January, Mr. Hérard ordered about 260 weapons from Turkey — including M4 carbines and handguns — making out the order to the presidential palace, Mr. Fortuné and a former security official said. But instead of arming his own unit, they said, Mr. Hérard sold most of the weapons to gangs and businesses.

“When Moïse found out about the weapons Hérard ordered, he wasn’t surprised — he was scared,” Mr. Fortuné said.

Mr. Moïse’s relationship with the presidential security forces, already on tenterhooks, further soured. But that changed in February, when Mr. Hérard claimed to have foiled a coup attempt against Mr. Moïse. Suddenly, the distrust waned. Some former aides, like Ms. Antoine and Mr. Fortuné, wondered whether the supposed coup was a false flag, to throw off Mr. Moïse’s suspicions about Mr. Hérard.

After the coup scare, Mr. Moïse went on the offensive, publicly blasting Haiti’s oligarchs and political elite for trying to kill him, including in one of his final interviews with The Times before his death.

Behind the scenes, Haitian officials say, Mr. Moïse began working to take down his perceived enemies. He spoke with his closest aides and select officials to start compiling the dossier breaking down narcotics and weapons smuggling networks in Haiti, including Mr. Saint-Rémy, according to the people involved with the document.

In February, Josua Alusma, the mayor of Port-du-Paix and a close Moïse ally, ordered a crackdown on the eel trade, the industry dominated by Mr. Saint-Rémy. Many of the eels go to China, but the Haitian police are investigating the industry as a way to launder illicit profits.

“I don’t like this business. It happens at night, do you know what I’m saying?” Mr. Alusma said. “There’s no security.”

He said the industry needed to be regulated and taxed. “People like Kiko go in and out of the city,” he said, using Mr. Saint-Rémy’s nickname. “But we are the ones here cleaning his trash,” he added, referring to illegal weapons seized during a raid this year.

The same month, the president also started to discuss plans to nationalize a seaport owned by allies of Mr. Martelly, where several shipments of illegal weapons have been found and seized over the years, two senior Haitian officials said.

“Jovenel told me that he had an agenda that he wanted to implement but he couldn’t because, he said, ‘They will kill me,’” recounted a powerful politician who served as an informal aide to Mr. Moïse, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of his life. The port, he said, “was part of the plan.”

Mr. Moïse also tried to push customs, despite considerable resistance, to start inspecting Mr. Saint-Rémy’s shipments and charging taxes on his goods, according to several presidential aides, two senior security officials and an official at the customs department. Haitian economists estimate that the country loses about $500 million a year because of corruption at customs.

Then, in mid-May, Dominican security forces arrested Woodley Ethéart, also known as Sonson Lafamilia, a close friend of Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy’s. When Mr. Martelly was president in 2015, he stood by Mr. Ethéart after he was arrested on kidnapping charges.

This year, Mr. Ethéart still had a warrant out for his arrest and generally kept a low profile. But in May, he and Mr. Martelly took photos of themselves partying together in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital, that were posted on social media, a senior Dominican official said.

The next day, Dominican forces arrested Mr. Ethéart and extradited him to Haiti.

Mr. Moïse was ecstatic, his aides said.

The president’s phone buzzed with calls from Mr. Martelly and Mr. Saint-Rémy, but he refused to answer them, according to a close friend and a presidential adviser.

“Sonson Lafamilia is very close to the Martelly family,” said Joverlein, Mr. Moïse’s son. “It is possible that Martelly saw that arrest as some kind of disrespect, that my father was a traitor and was betraying the Martelly family.”

Drug trafficking routes in Haiti’s north also came under pressure. In the 1990s, little Cessna planes from Colombia landed on dirt airstrips on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. But as the population expanded, the landing strips became surrounded by slums. Poor residents realized the valuable illicit cargo the planes held and began raiding them, according to a security official.

So, about a decade ago, traffickers moved the airstrips north, to Savane Diane, a sprawling, isolated area. Since then, the drug trade has evolved and boomed. The planes no longer come solely from Colombia — Venezuela has become a big player, too, with family members of President Nicolás Maduro arrested by the D.E.A. in Haiti in 2015 for drug trafficking. The son of Honduras’s former president was also arrested in Haiti by the D.E.A.

This year, Mr. Moïse approved an agro-industrial zone in Savane Diane, but when the project broke ground, officials found they were about three miles south of one of Haiti’s most active airstrips for cocaine and heroin deliveries.

The small lake nearby was filled with fish, in an area where malnutrition is rampant, yet locals would not go near it. When The Times asked them why, farmers explained that human remains were often dumped there.

And when The Times went to the local airstrip, a farmer with a machete in his hand approached, asking if a drug delivery was happening so that he could get a bribe to look the other way.

Two jagged dirt strips — one path for each wheel — cut through waist-high grass. Yards from the airstrip lay the hull of a small plane that, residents say, crashed over the summer. The wreckage of another charred plane lay close by.

When the police cars that are often seen offloading the planes’ cargo get stuck along the rough roads, local tractor drivers get paid a few dollars to tow them out, residents said. Before a plane comes, they added, farmers cut the grass around the airstrip and start fires in empty cans so pilots know where to land at night.

Mr. Moïse’s aides said he became aware of the airstrip after a furious call from the D.E.A.

Between May and June, the airstrip in Savane Diane and another in Haiti’s north hosted an inordinate amount of traffic, with at least a dozen planes coming through, potentially carrying thousands of kilos of cocaine, Haitian security officials say. In mid-June, the D.E.A. called the Haitian authorities, demanding to know why there was such an uptick, according to Haitian officials with knowledge of the communication.

Several of the planes had even stopped in Port-au-Prince to refuel in the middle of the night, when the airport was closed, they said.

When Mr. Moïse found out about the deliveries in mid-June, he was fuming, his aides said. Then came an order from the presidential palace: Destroy the airstrip.

But the local authorities refused to do it, according to several officials interviewed.

About a week later, Mr. Moïse was at home with his wife and two children when hit men burst into his home. They had been let into the presidential compound by Mr. Hérard’s forces. In his initial testimony, Mr. Hérard said they stood down when the gunmen identified themselves as D.E.A. agents.

Not a single shot was fired between the assassins and Mr. Moïse’s guards. As the gunmen stormed the residence, the president called Mr. Hérard and another security official to rescue him, his widow told The Times. No help came.

One of the men leading the assassins, Joseph Felix Badio, was a former D.E.A. informant who called the country’s new prime minister, Ariel Henry, multiple times in the days just before and the hours right after the assassination, according to a copy of the police report. Mr. Henry, a close ally of Mr. Martelly, has denied any involvement in the killing.

Mr. Badio is still on the loose, but in the weeks after the assassination he was seen in bulletproof government vehicles, according to a security officer who was involved in the investigation.

Mr. Henry has stripped the government of Mr. Moïse’s former allies. Last month, he appointed a new justice minister, Berto Dorcé — who, according to a D.E.A. investigation, bribed one of the judges overseeing the case of the Panamanian-flagged vessel with 1,100 kilos of drugs aboard. A former senior Haitian law enforcement official also said Mr. Dorcé once spent months in jail in connection with drug trafficking.

Mr. Dorcé did not answer a list of questions for this article. Mr. Martelly is in Miami, where he lives, mulling another presidential run, his associates say.

National elections will be held next year, and Mr. Martelly is considered a front-runner.

Julian Barnes contributed reporting from Washington.

Struck by gunfire, Martine Moïse lay bleeding as the assassins who killed her husband ransacked her room. Now, she says, the F.B.I. must find the mastermind behind the attack.

By Frances Robles

MIAMI — With her elbow shattered by gunfire and her mouth full of blood, the first lady of Haiti lay on the floor beside her bed, unable to breathe, as the assassins stormed the room.

“The only thing that I saw before they killed him were their boots,” Martine Moïse said of the moment her husband, President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti, was shot dead beside her. “Then I closed my eyes, and I didn’t see anything else.”

She listened as they ransacked the room, searching methodically for something in her husband’s files, she said. “‘That’s not it. That’s not it,’” she recalled them saying in Spanish, over and over. Then finally: “‘That’s it.’”

The killers filed out. One stepped on her feet. Another waved a flashlight in her eyes, apparently to check to see if she was still alive.

“When they left, they thought I was dead,” she said.

In her first interview since the president’s assassination on July 7, Mrs. Moïse, 47, described the searing pain of witnessing her husband, a man with whom she had shared 25 years, being killed in front of her. She did not want to relive the deafening gunfire, the walls and windows trembling, the terrifying certainty that her children would be killed, the horror of seeing her husband’s body, or how she fought to stand up after the killers left. “All that blood,” she said softly.

But she needed to speak, she said, because she did not believe that the investigation into his death had answered the central question tormenting her and countless Haitians: Who ordered and paid for the assassination of her husband?

The Haitian police have detained a wide array of people in connection with the killing, including 18 Colombians and several Haitians and Haitian Americans, and they are still seeking others. The suspects include retired Colombian commandos, a former judge, a security equipment salesman, a mortgage and insurance broker in Florida, and two commanders of the president’s security team. According to the Haitian police, the elaborate plot revolves around a 63-year-old doctor and pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who officials say conspired to hire the Colombian mercenaries to kill the president and seize political power.

But critics of the government’s explanation say that none of the people named in the investigation had the means to finance the plot on their own. And Mrs. Moïse, like many Haitians, believes there must have been a mastermind behind them, giving the orders and supplying the money.

She wants to know what happened to the 30 to 50 men who were usually posted at her house whenever her husband was at home. None of his guards were killed or even wounded, she said. “I don’t understand how nobody was shot,” she said.

At the time of his death, Mr. Moïse, 53, had been in the throes of a political crisis. Protesters accused him of overstaying his term, of controlling local gangs and of ruling by decree as the nation’s institutions were being hollowed out.

Mr. Moïse was also locked in battle with some of the nation’s wealthy oligarchs, including the family that controlled the nation’s electrical grid. While many people described the president as an autocratic leader, Mrs. Moïse said her fellow citizens should remember him as a man who stood up to the rich and powerful.

And now she wants to know if one of them had him killed.

“Only the oligarchs and the system could kill him,” she said.

Dressed in black, with her arm — now limp and perhaps useless forever, she said — wrapped in a sling and bandages, Mrs. Moïse offered an interview in South Florida on the agreement that The New York Times not reveal her whereabouts. Flanked by her children, security guards, Haitian diplomats and other advisers, she barely spoke above a whisper.

She and her husband had been asleep when the sounds of gunfire jolted them to their feet, she recalled. Mrs. Moïse said she ran to wake her two children, both in their early 20s, and urged them to hide in a bathroom, the only room without windows. They huddled there with their dog.

Her husband grabbed his telephone and called for help. “I asked, ‘Honey, who did you phone?’” she said.

“He said, ‘I found Dimitri Hérard; I found Jean Laguel Civil,’” she said, reciting the names of two top officials in charge of presidential security. “And they told me that they are coming.”

But the assassins entered the house swiftly, seemingly unencumbered, she said. Mr. Moïse told his wife to lie down on the floor so she would not get hurt.

“‘That’s where I think you will be safe,’” she recalled him saying.

It was the last thing he told her.

A burst of gunfire came through the room, she said, hitting her first. Struck in the hand and the elbow, she lay still on the floor, convinced that she, and everyone else in her family, had been killed.

None of the assassins spoke Creole or French, she said. The men spoke only Spanish, and communicated with someone on the phone as they searched the room. They seemed to find what they wanted on a shelf where her husband kept his files.

“They were looking for something in the room, and they found it,” Mrs. Moïse said.

She said she did not know what it was.

“At this moment, I felt that I was suffocating because there was blood in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “In my mind, everybody was dead, because if the president could die, everybody else could have died too.”

The men her husband had called for help, she said — the officials entrusted with his security — are now in Haitian custody.

And while she expressed satisfaction that a number of the accused conspirators have been detained, she is by no means satisfied. Mrs. Moïse wants international law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I., which searched homes in Florida this week as part of the investigation, to track the money that financed the killing. The Colombian mercenaries who were arrested, she said, did not come to Haiti to “play hide and seek,” and she wants to know who paid for it all.

In a statement on Friday, the F.B.I. said it “remains committed to working alongside our international partners to administer justice.”

Mrs. Moïse expected the money to trace back to wealthy oligarchs in Haiti, whose livelihoods were disrupted by her husband’s attacks on their lucrative contracts, she said.

Mrs. Moïse cited a powerful Haitian businessman who has wanted to run for president, Reginald Boulos, as someone who had something to gain from her husband’s death, though she stopped short of accusing him of ordering the assassination.

Mr. Boulos and his businesses have been at the center of a barrage of legal cases brought by the Haitian government, which is investigating allegations of a preferential loan obtained from the state pension fund. Mr. Boulos’ bank accounts were frozen before Mr. Moïse’s death, and they were released to him immediately after he died, Mrs. Moïse said.

In an interview, Mr. Boulos said that only his personal accounts, with less than $30,000, had been blocked, and he stressed that a judge had ordered the release of the money this week, after he took the Haitian government to court. He insisted that, far from being involved in the killing, his political career was actually better off with Mr. Moïse alive — because denouncing the president was such a pivotal part of Mr. Boulos’s platform.

“I had absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nothing to do with his murder, even in dreams,” Mr. Boulos said. “I support a strong, independent international investigation to find who came up with the idea, who financed it and who executed it.”

Mrs. Moïse said she wants the killers to know she is not scared of them.

“I would like people who did this to be caught, otherwise they will kill every single president who takes power,” she said. “They did it once. They will do it again.”

She said she is seriously considering a run for the presidency, once she undergoes more surgeries on her wounded arm. She has already had two surgeries, and doctors now plan to implant nerves from her feet in her arm, she said. She may never regain use of her right arm, she said, and can move only two fingers.

“President Jovenel had a vision,” she said, “and we Haitians are not going to let that die.”

Anatoly Kurmanaev and Harold Isaac contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince.

Officials are examining whether President Jovenel Moïse’s killing was tied to the drug trade. The man in charge of his safety was a suspect in a major trafficking case, they say.

By Maria Abi-Habib

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The commander in charge of guarding the Haitian president’s home quickly became a suspect in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last month when his security team inexplicably melted away, enabling hit men to enter the residence with little resistance and kill the president in his own bedroom.

But current and former officials say that the commander, Dimitri Hérard, was already a suspect in a separate case that the United States Drug Enforcement Administration has pursued for years: the disappearance of hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of cocaine and heroin that were whisked away by corrupt officials only hours before law enforcement agents showed up to seize them.

Now, some international officials assisting with the investigation into the president’s assassination say they are examining whether those criminal networks help explain the killing. Haitian officials, including the country’s prime minister, have acknowledged that the official explanation presented in the days after the assassination — that Mr. Moïse was gunned down in an elaborate plot to seize political office — does not entirely add up, and that the true motive behind the murder has not been uncovered.

Haiti is a major transit point for drugs heading to the United States, and American and United Nations officials say the trade flourishes through an array of politicians, businesspeople and members of law enforcement who abuse their power. Now, current and former officials say that Mr. Hérard has long been a focal point of the investigation into one of the biggest drug trafficking cases the D.E.A. has ever pursued in Haiti.

“The corruption goes up to the top levels,” said Keith McNichols, a former D.E.A. agent who was stationed in Haiti and led the agency’s investigation into the missing drug shipment. “Justice is elusive.”

The sprawling drug case not only involves Mr. Hérard, but also judges and the brother-in-law of a former Haitian president. Officials say the staggering quantity of drugs spirited away by officials illustrates the extent to which Haiti has become a narco-state — with Haitian politicians, members of the judiciary and even American officials in the D.E.A. enabling corruption for years.

When a Panamanian-flagged cargo ship called the MV Manzanares docked at a privately owned seaport in Haiti’s capital in April 2015, officials say that longshoremen began offloading what they thought were bags full of sugar — until one ripped open, revealing the valuable, illicit goods inside.

Fights broke out among the longshoremen as they stole what they could of the enormous stash of cocaine and heroin, officials say. Security guards fired into the air to stop the looting, with the ruckus alerting Mr. McNichols and the Haitian anti-narcotics police to the chaos unfolding at the port.

But before they could get there, two Jeeps sped up to the dock. Men in presidential guard and other police uniforms emerged, and instead of making arrests, they furiously grabbed bags of cocaine and heroin, throwing loads into their vehicles before speeding away, witnesses and officials say.

Shouting commands to some of the guards was Mr. Hérard, a member of the presidential security force at the time, according to a witness interviewed by The New York Times and to Mr. McNichols, who arrived about two hours later and started his investigation at the scene.

Witnesses not only told him about Mr. Hérard’s actions at the port, but also that most of the illicit cargo — as much as 800 kilograms of cocaine and 300 kilograms of heroin — had already been hauled away. A former United Nations official confirmed that Mr. Hérard had been spotted at the port and accused of deploying members of the presidential guard to ferry the drugs off the ship.

In all, about 120 kilograms of cocaine and heroin were eventually recovered during a 28-day search by Haiti’s anti-narcotics unit, the D.E.A. and the U.S. Coast Guard. Even the recovered amount makes it one of the biggest drug busts on record in Haiti.

The D.E.A. would not comment on its investigation into the fiasco at the port. None of the main suspects have been arrested, and the case ultimately led to a whistle-blower complaint that the agency was not doing enough to fight drug trafficking in Haiti.

Multiple witnesses have accused Mr. Hérard of working with Charles Saint-Rémy, the brother-in-law of former President Michel Martelly; Bernard Mevs, whose family owns the terminal where the ship docked; and members of the Acra family, who imported the sugar the ship was carrying, to bring drugs into Haiti, according to a current senior American official who worked on the case as well.

While the drug raid was first revealed by The Miami Herald, the fact that Mr. Hérard and the former president’s brother-in-law were suspects in the investigation has not previously been reported.

Mr. Hérard is currently in Haitian custody, detained in connection with the assassination. The president’s widow has angrily demanded to know what happened to the dozens of guards Mr. Hérard commanded, and why none of them were killed when assailants stormed her home on July 7, wounding her and shooting her husband dead on the floor beside her.

Mr. Hérard could not be reached for comment in detention, and his lawyer declined to pass on questions to his client. A spokeswoman for the Haitian National Police denied that the force was involved in narcotics trafficking.

Mr. Saint-Rémy texted “no, no, no” when asked whether he had ever taken part in drug trafficking. A member of the Acra family declined to comment. And Mr. Mevs denied any wrongdoing or ever meeting Mr. Hérard, adding that he knew Mr. Saint-Rémy only as an acquaintance.

Mr. Mevs’s lawyer, Joel Hirschhorn, said that the D.E.A. was relying on impoverished Haitians willing to lie to support a biased investigation.

“It doesn’t take much for someone who is desperate to take the offer of a better life,” he added, “to take the D.E.A. ball and run with it, even if it may be false.”

But the web of corruption in Haiti ran even deeper, Mr. McNichols asserted — all the way to the D.E.A. itself.

When Mr. McNichols and a second former D.E.A. agent, George Greco, first arrived in Haiti in 2014, they said they noticed as much as $1.2 million in irregular expenses that appeared to enable a senior D.E.A. official to receive fraudulent reimbursements.

Witnesses had also reported seeing the senior D.E.A. official meeting several times with Mr. Saint-Rémy in private, raising concerns that the official was tipping off Mr. Saint-Rémy about D.E.A. operations, according to Mr. McNichols and an affidavit by an F.B.I. agent. The D.E.A. prohibits agents from meeting alone with suspected drug traffickers, to prevent bribery and collusion.

A D.E.A. spokeswoman declined to comment on the allegations.

Mr. McNichols said he reported the suspicious payments and meetings, only to be reprimanded by his superiors within the D.E.A. for pressing the matter.

He and Mr. Greco recounted serious flaws in antidrug efforts in Haiti. Whenever he and Mr. McNichols tried to enter the seaport, they said guards stalled them at the entrance for about half an hour, despite their diplomatic license plates. But when they pushed the D.E.A. to do more to fix the problems, they said they were rebuffed.

“The port is an open sewer,” Mr. Greco said.

Van Williams, another United Nations anti-narcotics supervisor based in Haiti at the time, agreed.

“There was very little importance placed on the docks, which I found very strange,” Mr. Williams said. “Corruption in Haiti from the top on down is so rampant.”

The problems at Haiti’s seaports persist. With only two operational sea vessels for 1,100 miles of coast, “maritime law enforcement is a daunting task,” concluded an American government report earlier this year. Only five people have been convicted of drug trafficking in Haiti, and the government did not classify corruption as a crime until 2014, the report added.

Mr. McNichols said his alarm grew as his investigation deepened. Traffickers told him that Haiti had become a preferred transit route for smugglers because the police helped move thousands of pounds of drugs for them.

What Mr. Hérard may have done with the illicit cargo taken from the port that day remains unclear. But his job protecting Mr. Martelly, the president at the time, and allegations that he worked with Mr. Saint-Rémy — Mr. Martelly’s brother-in-law — were central points in the investigation.

Mr. Martelly was nearly a year away from finishing his presidential term and preparing his handpicked successor, a little-known banana exporter named Jovenel Moïse, to take his place.

But Mr. Martelly denied a request from the Haitian judicial police to question Mr. Hérard over his role in the Manzanares case, according to a United Nations official stationed in Haiti at the time. Mr. Martelly declined to comment.

Mr. Hérard emerged again as a suspect in the assassination of Mr. Moïse. The president’s widow said her husband called Mr. Hérard as the killers stormed the house, pleading for help. Phone records and Mr. Hérard’s initial testimony also showed that Mr. Moïse had called him at 1:39 a.m. on the night of the killing. But Mr. Hérard and his unit never engaged the hit squad at the residence, instead mounting a roadblock some distance away, according to his initial police testimony.

Haitian security officers eventually cornered some of the suspected assailants in a house near the presidential residence. Officers said they saw Mr. Hérard speaking by telephone to the mercenaries and attempting to negotiate their surrender, but it was unclear how Mr. Hérard had obtained their numbers.

Mr. Hérard wasn’t the only person in the president’s orbit suspected or convicted of drug trafficking. In March, Lissner Mathieu, a convicted trafficker who provided what the Moïse administration called “professional services” for the national palace, was arrested in Haiti by the D.E.A. and flown to the United States.

Mr. Mathieu fled to Haiti in 2006 after admitting in court that he had smuggled 500 kilograms of cocaine into the United States. When Mr. Mathieu was detained, he was found with an access card to the national palace. A photo of him on the campaign trail with Mr. Moïse later emerged. The president’s office later said Mr. Mathieu was not an employee and had an access badge like many other service providers.

As for the drugs coming through the seaport, Mr. McNichols and Mr. Greco said that the obstacles, stonewalling and hostility they endured within the D.E.A. eventually led them to leave the agency.

They pressed their complaints with the help of a group called the Government Accountability Project, which represents whistleblowers. Last month, the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel, the American government arm responsible for protecting federal workers from political interference, reprimanded the D.E.A. for its handling of the Manzanares case and for not doing more to clean up Haiti’s ports.

“I went through hell, speaking the truth and trying to do the right thing,” said Mr. McNichols.

Anatoly Kurmanaev in Port-au-Prince and Julian Barnes in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

Valued at $3.4 million, a Haitian senator’s Montreal villa has become a potent emblem of the growing gap between Haiti’s impoverished citizens and its wealthy political elite.

By Dan Bilefsky and Catherine Porter

MONTREAL — He is one of the few lawmakers left in Haiti, a close ally of the assassinated president who has kept his seat while the country’s democratic institutions have been whittled away.

As one of only 10 remaining members in all of Haiti’s Parliament, Rony Célestin, a swaggering figure who styles himself as a self-made multimillionaire, belongs to a tiny circle of leaders with the legal authority to steer the nation out of crisis now that the president is dead.

But to many Haitians, Mr. Célestin is also a symbol of one of their biggest grievances: a ruling class that enriches itself while so many go hungry.

In recent months, as the country erupted in protest over abuse of power by the political elite, Mr. Célestin has been parrying accusations of corruption from Haitian activists over his purchase of a mansion almost 2,000 miles away in Canada.

The sprawling $3.4 million villa, with its sweeping driveway, home cinema, wine cellar and swimming pool overlooking a lake, was among the most expensive homes ever sold in one of Quebec’s most affluent neighborhoods, and the purchase set off a corruption investigation into Mr. Célestin by officials in Haiti.

The villa has become emblematic of the chasm between the gilded lifestyles of Haiti’s elite and the majority of the population, who on average earn less than $2.41 a day. Mr. Célestin’s ownership has incited outrage over capital flight — legal and illicit — that drains money from Haiti and weakens the country’s institutions.

Mr. Célestin vehemently denies any wrongdoing, describing himself as a savvy entrepreneur whose success and donations to the election campaign of the assassinated president, Jovenel Moïse, have afforded him a variety of privileges, including the ability to pay for the villa and get his wife a job at the Haitian consulate in Montreal.

“I have enough influence, if I wanted to make her an ambassador, that would happen,” he told The New York Times.

But The Times found little or no indication in Haiti of the thriving businesses that Mr. Célestin cites as the source of his great wealth. Some appear to operate on a much smaller scale than he claimed, if at all in some cases.

His lawyer declined to provide details about his businesses with the anticorruption inquiry in Haiti underway. Anger over the mansion became so pitched that some members of Montreal’s Haitian community hid in the bushes around the home in Laval, an affluent suburb, and sneaked onto the grounds, hoping to confront Mr. Célestin and his family.

“Haiti is a poor country where people are dying of hunger, and here you have rich people trying to take their money out of the country and buying mansions in cash,” said Frantz André, a leading Haitian human rights advocate in Montreal, who has led protests outside the Haitian consulate in recent months.

Because Haiti, a country of 11 million people, has so few functioning institutions, Mr. Célestin could help play a pivotal role in the nation’s future. Only 10 senators out of 30 remain in Parliament, and Mr. Célestin is one. The terms of the other 20 expired, and new elections were never called. The lower house of Parliament is entirely vacant, and the head of the nation’s highest court died of Covid-19 in June.

That leaves senators like Mr. Célestin among the few remaining elected officials in Haiti, with a powerful say in determining how the country should be led after the brazen assassination of Mr. Moïse on Wednesday.

But critics call the Senate dysfunctional. And as the country has spiraled into turmoil in recent months, members of the political elite have prospered abroad in places like the Dominican Republic, the United States and Canada, investing their money — and in some cases laundering it, the authorities say — through real estate.

Despite billions of dollars in reconstruction aid after a devastating earthquake in 2010, the country has not rebuilt, and many contend it is worse off. Armed gangs control many areas, poverty and hunger are rising and officials like Mr. Célestin have been accused of enriching themselves while failing to provide the country with even the most basic services. Transparency International, the anticorruption monitor, ranked Haiti 170th out of 180 countries for perceived levels of corruption in 2020 — tied with North Korea.

In a rare interview in late March, Mr. Célestin, 46, said he amassed his wealth in farming, importing and other legitimate businesses that earned him millions of dollars a month. He gave his wife, Marie Louisa Célestin, the money to buy the mansion in late 2020, he said, so that she and their children could enjoy the “social advantages” of living in Canada.

“I don’t have to justify myself, I’m sick of having to do it,” Mr. Célestin said.

A son of farmers who grew up in a rural area, Mr. Célestin said he began his business career by importing products in a rented truck, sometimes sleeping on the sacks of sugar and flour he was shuttling. He is now a member of the assassinated president’s Bald Head Haitian party.

“I came from nowhere, and I became who I am with no support,” he said. Referring to his critics, he added: “I don’t have to be scared of a bunch of vagabonds, bastards and criminals.”

But the traces of Mr. Célestin’s business empire on the ground in Haiti differed greatly from the image he painted.

He said he owned a giant henhouse in the Haitian city of Léogâne with 800,000 hens valued at about $60 million, but did not provide any supporting documentation. A reporter hired by The Times who visited the city could not find such a vast henhouse or anyone who had heard of it. Patrice Dumont, a senator from Léogâne, told The Times that Mr. Célestin’s project had been planned but never begun.

Mr. Célestin said he also had a radio station called Model FM, which he started in a rural region but which grew to the point that he installed it in a suburb of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The station does have a small, discreet office in the suburb of Petionville, with no signs. On the two occasions when The Times visited, the office was closed, or a single person was there who could provide no information about the station — not even an advertising rate sheet.

Mr. Célestin said he also owned a gas company called PetroGaz-Haiti, but by his own description, it appeared to violate legal prohibitions against profiting from state funds. While politicians are permitted to own businesses, the Constitution forbids them from having contracts with the state, which Mr. Célestin said he had had for four years through the company.

With outrage brewing, the Haitian government’s Anti-Corruption Unit launched an investigation into the purchase of the Célestin home in Canada in February. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police force, said it could not disclose whether it was also investigating the transaction. But under Canadian regulations, the purchase should have raised a red flag, said Garry Clement, the former head of an R.C.M.P. unit that investigates money laundering.

As a senator, Mr. Célestin is considered a “politically exposed person” under Canadian money-laundering regulations, which means financial institutions are required to perform due diligence to determine the source of any transferred funds greater than $100,000. These rules would also apply to Mrs. Célestin as the wife of a “P.E.P.,” Mr. Clement explained.

Mr. Célestin said everything about the purchase was above board. “If I wasn’t clean, I would have had a lot of trouble with the banks in Miami,” he added, saying that he routinely transferred between $20 million and $30 million to Turkey to buy iron for what he described as one of his import businesses. “I would be scared if my money wasn’t clean.”

But Mr. Célestin and his lawyer in Montreal, Alexandre Bergevin, declined to answer follow-up questions or provide the names of his import company or his farm. His wife, a counselor at the Haitian consulate in Montreal since 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.

“I am no longer at this level, the one where my wife or I am looking for work to live,” Mr. Célestin said, emphasizing his wealth by adding that his chef in Haiti earned $4,000 a month.

Despite the investigation into Mr. Célestin in Haiti, many activists there and in Canada were skeptical that it was being conducted in earnest. One said he had asked about the case just last week and was told by officials that they were not following through.

A 2020 report by the State Department on human rights in Haiti said that despite many reports of government corruption, wrongdoers operate with impunity. The country’s Senate has never prosecuted a high-level official accused of corruption as required by the Constitution, the report said.

In 2019, Willot Joseph, a senator with the assassinated president’s party, admitted on the radio that he had accepted a $100,000 bribe from a candidate for prime minister in exchange for a “yes” vote on his nomination.

Three damning reports by the country’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes revealed in lengthy detail that much of the $2 billion lent to Haiti as part of a Venezuela-sponsored oil program, PetroCaribe, had been embezzled or wasted over eight years by a succession of Haitian governments.

Since 2008, all elected officials in Haiti have been legally required to disclose their financial assets upon taking and leaving office. But a 2019 report by the Clear Eyes Foundation, a Haitian human rights group, revealed that few had done so over the previous 10 years, and that there had been no penalties or repercussions.

Over the years, Mr. Célestin has faced multiple accusations of fraud and corruption, both in his election campaigns and in his role as a public servant.

In 2010, when he was elected to Parliament’s lower chamber, the elections were marred by allegations of corruption and fraud. Seven years later, when he won a Senate seat, his opponent said the vote had been rigged.

In 2016, Mr. Célestin was living in a mansion when it was seized by the police during a drug trafficking investigation. Mr. Célestin denied the house had links to a drug dealer and said the accusations had been concocted by political enemies.

Even before the president’s assassination this week, senior Canadian officials had expressed alarm over the deteriorating situation in Haiti and the country’s poor governance.

“We are concerned about corruption, and rising insecurity involving kidnappings,” said John Babcock, a spokesman for Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in an April email. “We are very aware the population is suffering.”

Senior Canadian officials also said Canada had been strengthening legislation to combat money laundering and adding resources to fight it. A 2019 report by the State Department designated Canada a “major money laundering country,” citing weak law enforcement and gaps in its laws, putting it on a list of countries that included Afghanistan, China and Colombia.

Money laundering experts said too few banks, notaries and real estate agents were reporting suspicious activities in Canada, and that money laundering cases seldom resulted in convictions.

“People think Canada is the Boy Scout of countries, but when it comes to real estate, that is not always the case,” said Andy Yan, an adjunct professor of urban planning at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Haiti’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked Mrs. Célestin to make herself available for questioning by the government’s Anti-Corruption Unit, said the consul general in Montreal, Fritz Dorvilier. But Haitian activists say they have little faith in the inquiry.

Pierre Espérance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, has called for Mr. Célestin to reveal records documenting his assets and expenses, such as custom slips from his imports of merchandise and his tax returns.

“He must pay a lot of taxes to the state if he is earning millions of dollars a month,” Mr. Espérance said from his office in Port-au-Prince. “He must show us the proof.”

Mr. André, the Montreal-based Haitian human rights advocate, posted photographs of the home’s lavish interior on his Facebook page, urging fellow Haitians to pay the family a visit. “If you are of Haitian origin, this is your home too,” he wrote.

“I suggest you ask for the lake view,” he wrote. “Have a good stay.”

Harold Isaac contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Markendy Simon and Nasuna Stuart-Ulin from Montreal.

Haitian officials accuse the suspects of meeting to plot President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination, but participants say the sessions were intended to plan a government once the president stepped down.

By Anatoly Kurmanaev, Frances Robles and Julie Turkewitz

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Several of the central figures under investigation by the Haitian authorities in connection with the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse gathered in the months before the killing to discuss rebuilding the troubled nation once the president was out of power, according to the Haitian police, Colombian intelligence officers and participants in the discussions.

The meetings, conducted in Florida and the Dominican Republic over the last year, appear to connect a seemingly disparate collection of suspects in the investigation, linking a 63-year-old doctor and pastor, a security equipment salesman, and a mortgage and insurance broker in Florida.

All have been identified by the Haitian authorities as prominent players in a sprawling plot to kill the president with the help of more than 20 former Colombian commandos and seize political power in the aftermath. It is unclear how the people under investigation could have accomplished that, or what powerful backers they may have had to make it possible.

But interviews with more than a dozen people involved with the men show that the suspects had been working together for months, portraying themselves in grandiose and often exaggerated terms as well-financed, well-connected power brokers ready to lead a new Haiti with influential American support behind them.

Haitian officials contend that Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a doctor and pastor who divided his time between Florida and Haiti, conspired with the others to take the reins of the country once Mr. Moïse was killed. During a raid of Mr. Sanon’s residence, they say, the police found six holsters, about 20 boxes of bullets and a D.E.A. cap — suggesting that it linked him to the killing because the team of hit men who struck Mr. Moïse’s home posed as agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Sanon is now in custody.

Haitian officials are investigating whether the president’s own protection force took part in the plot as well, and on Thursday they detained the head of palace security for Mr. Moïse. Colombian officials say the palace security chief made frequent stopovers in Colombia on his way to other countries in the months before the assassination.

The Haitian authorities offered little explanation as to how Mr. Sanon — who did not hold elected office — planned to take over once the president was killed. It was also difficult to understand how he might have financed a team of Colombian mercenaries, some of whom received American military training when they were members of their nation’s armed forces, to carry out such an ambitious assault, given that he filed in Florida for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in 2013.

But the interviews show that several of the key suspects met to discuss Haiti’s future government once Mr. Moïse was no longer in power — with Mr. Sanon becoming the country’s new prime minister.

“The idea was to prepare for that eventuality,” said Parnell Duverger, a retired adjunct economics professor at Broward College in Florida, who attended about 10 meetings on Zoom and in person with Mr. Sanon and other experts to discuss Haiti’s future government.

“At the time of the meetings he was, we all believed, going to become a prime minister,” said Mr. Duverger, adding that Mr. Sanon had presented himself as having the support of Democratic and Republican politicians in the United States, Haiti’s most powerful international backer.

At no time did anyone discuss, much less plan, a coup or an assassination, Mr. Duverger stressed. “I would have stopped attending if anyone mentioned a coup, let alone murder.”

To the contrary, he added, the expectation at the meetings was that President Moïse — who had faced months of blistering street protests demanding his removal — would eventually have no choice but to step down. Mr. Duverger, 70, described the meetings as cabinet-style sessions intended to help Mr. Sanon form a potential transition government once that happened.

Mr. Duverger said he believed Mr. Sanon was innocent. But as for his claims to be a prime minister in waiting, he added: “I keep asking myself, there must be something wrong with me for being so naïve. I believed him. I believed that, because I believed a new transitional government was needed in Haiti.”

Among the participants in the meetings, Mr. Duverger said, were at least two other key suspects who have since been identified by Haitian officials as central figures in the plot. One was Antonio Intriago, who owns the private security and equipment company that hired the former Colombian commandos and brought them to Haiti.

The other was Walter Veintemilla, who leads a small financial services company in Miramar, Fla., called Worldwide Capital Lending Group. On Wednesday, the Haitian authorities accused him of helping to finance the assassination plot.

Neither Mr. Intriago nor Mr. Veintemilla, both based in Florida, responded to repeated requests for comment through their businesses and relatives. Their whereabouts, and whether the Haitians have sought to charge them with any crimes, is unknown. But Haitian and Colombian officials say that in late May, after some of the former Colombian soldiers hired by Mr. Intriago arrived in Haiti, he and Mr. Veintemilla met in the neighboring Dominican Republic with Mr. Sanon.

On Wednesday, Haitian and Colombian officials said that a photograph showed the three men at the meeting with another central suspect in the investigation: James Solages, a Haitian American resident of South Florida who was detained by the Haitian authorities shortly after the assassination.

It is unclear whether any of the discussions crossed into a nefarious plot that led to the death of Mr. Moïse. The Haitian police have provided little concrete evidence, and American and Colombian officials familiar with the investigation said their officers in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, had been unable to interview most of the detained suspects as of Wednesday morning, forcing them to rely on the accounts of the Haitian authorities.

Another participant in one of the meetings with Mr. Sanon also said there was never any hint of a plot to kill the president.

“Never!!! never!!! Never!!!” the attendee, Frantz Gilot, a consultant for the United Nations, said in a text message, adding that about 20 people had been present. “Sanon introduced himself as a potential candidate,” he said, “and talked about his dream and vision for Haiti.”

More than a dozen interviews with relatives of the Colombian commandos — as well as an audio recording of how the soldiers’ mission in Haiti was presented to them — show that several of the main suspects vastly exaggerated their experience and financial capabilities, and deeply misled at least some of the Colombian soldiers they hired.

In April, Mr. Intriago’s firm, CTU Security, contacted a retired Colombian army sergeant, Duberney Capador, and asked him to put together a group of ex-commandos to “protect important people in Haiti,” according to Mr. Capador’s sister, Yenny Carolina Capador.

“We are going to help in the recovery of the country, in terms of its security and democracy,” Mr. Capador wrote in one recruitment pitch he later sent to other former soldiers on WhatsApp. “We are going to be pioneers.”

Mr. Capador reached out to his wide network of military buddies, most of them in their early 40s, recently retired from the armed forces and struggling to find good paying jobs in Colombia.

The New York Times interviewed 15 family members of the Colombian soldiers implicated in the attack, as well as 14 men who had been recruited for the operation but who ended up not going in June — in some cases because they were part of a second wave of men slated to arrive at a later date, they said.

In interviews, several wives of the recruits said Mr. Capador had assured the men that the operation was backed by an American company — and in some cases even told them it was supported by the U.S. government — and promised to pay the men $2,700 a month, a life-changing sum.

Many of the former soldiers jumped at the opportunity, agreeing to take the job even though some did not know where they were headed or whom specifically they would be protecting, according to their family members.

A group of about two dozen Colombians arrived in Port-au-Prince between early May and June 6, according to interviews with their relatives. Mr. Capador told the recruits they would be fighting criminal gangs, securing crucial infrastructure, and guarding dignitaries and investors, with the backing of a major American company.

Instead, they found themselves confined to a cottage and spending the next month exercising indoors, taking English classes and cooking, said the relatives, who remained in daily touch with the recruits. Colombian officials said on Thursday that Mr. Sanon had also met with leaders of the former Colombian soldiers shortly after they arrived in Haiti in May.

In mid-June, the ex-soldiers were introduced to a Spanish-speaking man claiming to represent Worldwide Capital, the name of Mr. Veintemilla’s company, according to a recording made by one of the former Colombian soldiers. In that same session, the speaker introduced Mr. Solages, the now detained Haitian American, describing him as a seasoned international investor leading the reconstruction of Haiti.

The speaker went on to present Worldwide Capital as a multinational conglomerate with 200 subsidiaries that has worked with governments on security and reconstruction in dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, Spain, Somalia and Iraq.

There is little indication that Worldwide Capital, which operates from a small suite in a suburban business center in Florida, has played a significant role in major global projects. The company’s websites, which claim to offer generic financial services such as mortgages and insurance, do not mention any notable deals.

And the owner of the company that hired the Colombian commandos, Mr. Intriago, has a history of debts, evictions and bankruptcies. Several relatives of the Colombian soldiers said they had never received their promised wages.

After the assassination, 18 of the Colombian soldiers were detained by the Haitian authorities and accused of participating in the killing. Another three Colombians, including the recruiter, Mr. Capador, were killed in the hours after the president’s death.

On Thursday, the Colombian police said Mr. Capador and a retired Colombian captain, German Alejandro Rivera, had conspired with the Haitian suspects as early as May to arrest Haiti’s president, providing the first indication of at least some of the veterans’ complicity in the plot.

It remained unclear how the plot turned into murder, but the Colombian authorities said seven Colombian commandos had entered the presidential residence on the night of the attack, while the rest guarded the area.

“What happened there?” said the wife of one of the detained former soldiers, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern for her safety. “How does this end?”

Reporting was contributed by Mirelis Morales from Miramar, Fla.; Sofía Villamil from Bogotá, Colombia; Edinson Bolaños from Villavicencio, Colombia; Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington; and Catherine Porter.

Washington dismissed warnings that democracy was unraveling under President Jovenel Moïse, leaving a gaping leadership void after his assassination.

By Natalie Kitroeff and Michael Crowley

As protesters hurled rocks outside Haiti’s national palace and set fires on the streets to demand President Jovenel Moïse’s resignation, President Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago in 2019, posing cheerfully with him in one of the club’s ornate entryways.

After members of Congress warned that Mr. Moïse’s “anti-democratic abuses” reminded them of the run-up to the dictatorship that terrorized Haiti in decades past, the Biden administration publicly threw its weight behind Mr. Moïse’s claim on power.

And when American officials urged the Biden administration to change course, alarmed that Haiti’s democratic institutions were being stripped away, they say their pleas went unheeded — and sometimes never earned a response at all.

Through Mr. Moïse’s time in office, the United States backed his increasingly autocratic rule, viewing it as the easiest way of maintaining stability in a troubled country that barely figured into the priorities of successive administrations in Washington, current and former officials say.

Even as Haiti spiraled into violence and political upheaval, they say, few in the Trump administration took seriously Mr. Moïse’s repeated warnings that he faced plots against his life. And as warnings of his authoritarianism intensified, the Biden administration kept up its public support for Mr. Moïse’s claim to power, even after Haiti’s Parliament emptied out in the absence of elections and Mr. Moïse ruled by decree.

When Mr. Moïse was assassinated this month, it left a gaping leadership void that set off a scramble for power with the few elected officials remaining. The United States, which has held enormous sway in Haiti since invading the country more than 100 years ago, was suddenly urged to send in troops and help fix the mess.

But in interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, a common refrain emerged: Washington bore part of the blame, after brushing off or paying little attention to clear warnings that Haiti was lurching toward mayhem, and possibly making things worse by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse.

“It was predictable that something would happen,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. “The message that we send by standing alongside these people is that we think they are legitimate representatives of the Haitian people. They’re not.”

Critics say the American approach to Mr. Moïse followed a playbook the United States has used around the world for decades, often with major consequences for democracy and human rights: reflexively siding with or tolerating leaders accused of authoritarian rule because they advance American interests, or because officials fear instability in their absence.

Mr. Moïse’s grip on power tightened notably under Mr. Trump, who spoke admiringly of a range of foreign autocrats. Mr. Trump was also bent on keeping Haitian migrants out of the United States (they “all have AIDS,” American officials recounted him saying). To the extent that Trump officials focused on Haitian politics at all, officials say, it was mainly to enlist the country in Mr. Trump’s campaign to oust his nemesis in the region: Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.

The Biden administration arrived in January consumed by the pandemic and a surge of migrants at the border with Mexico, leaving little bandwidth for the tumult convulsing Haiti, officials say. It publicly continued the Trump administration policy that Mr. Moïse was the legitimate leader, infuriating some members of Congress with a stance that one senior Biden official now calls a mistake.

“Moïse is pursuing an increasingly authoritarian course of action,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, now the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a joint statement with two other Democrats in late December, warning of a repeat of the “anti-democratic abuses the Haitian people have endured” in the past.

“We will not stand idly by while Haiti devolves into chaos,” they said.

In a February letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, they and other lawmakers called on the United States to “unambiguously reject” the push by Mr. Moïse, who had already ruled by decree for a year, to stay in power. They urged the Biden administration to push for “a legitimate transitional government” to help Haitians determine their own future and emerge from “a cascade of economic, public health, and political crises.”

But Mr. Biden’s top adviser on Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, said that at the time, the administration did not want to appear to be dictating how the turmoil should be resolved.

“Tipping our finger on the scale in that way could send a country that was already in a very unstable situation into crisis,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

Past American political and military interventions into Haiti have done little to solve the country’s problems, and have sometimes created or aggravated them. “The solution to Haiti’s problems are not in Washington; they are in Port-au-Prince,” Haiti’s capital, Mr. Gonzalez said, so the Biden administration called for elections to take place before Mr. Moïse left office.

“The calculus we made was the best decision was to focus on elections to try to use that as a way to push for greater freedom,” he added.

In reality, critics say, the Biden administration was already tipping the scales by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse’s contention that he had another year in office, enabling him to preside over the drafting of a new Constitution that could significantly enhance the president’s powers.

Mr. Moïse was certainly not the first leader accused of autocracy to enjoy Washington’s backing; he was not even the first in Haiti. Two generations of brutal Haitian dictators from the Duvalier family were among a long list of strongmen around the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere who received resolute American support, particularly as allies against Communism.

“He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly said of one of them (though accounts vary about whether the president was referring to American-backed dictators in Nicaragua or in the Dominican Republic).

The debate has continued in both Democratic and Republican administrations about how hard to push authoritarian allies for democratic reforms. Once the threat of Communist expansionism faded, American administrations worried more about instability creating crises for the United States, like a surge of migrants streaming toward its shores or the rise of violent extremism.

Elliott Abrams, a foreign policy official in multiple Republican administrations and a special representative on Venezuela in the Trump administration, argued that Washington should support democracy when possible but sometimes has few alternatives to working with strongmen.

“In Haiti, no one has developed a good formula for building a stable democracy, and the U.S. has been trying since the Marines landed there a hundred years ago,” he said.

Early on in the Trump administration, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former co-star on “The Apprentice” and new adviser to the president, began pressing Mr. Trump and his aides to engage with Haiti and support Mr. Moïse.

Officials were wary. Haiti supported Venezuela at two meetings of the Organization of American States in 2017, turning Mr. Moïse into what one official called an enemy of the United States and scuttling her efforts to arrange a state visit by him.

“I believed that a state visit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Moïse would have been a strong show of support for Haiti from the U.S. during a time of civil unrest,” Ms. Newman said, adding in a separate statement: “Jovenel was a dear friend and he was committed to being a change agent for his beloved Haiti.”

The episode underscored the degree to which some top Trump officials viewed Haiti as just a piece of its strategy toward Venezuela. And in the eyes of some lawmakers, Mr. Trump was not going to feel empathy for Haiti’s problems.

“We are all aware of his perception of the nation — in that he spoke about ‘s-hole’ countries,” said Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus.

By 2019, nationwide protests grew violent in Haiti as demonstrators demanding Mr. Moïse’s ouster clashed with the police, burned cars and marched on the national palace. Gang activity became increasingly brazen, and kidnappings spiked to an average of four a week.

Mr. Trump and his aides showed few public signs of concern. In early 2019, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Moïse at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of a meeting with Caribbean leaders who had lined up against Mr. Maduro of Venezuela.

By the next year, Mr. Moïse’s anti-democratic practices grew serious enough to command the attention of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who publicly warned Mr. Moïse against delaying parliamentary elections.

But beyond a few statements, the Trump administration did little to force the issue, officials said.

“No one did anything to address the underlying weaknesses, institutionally and democratically,” over the past several years, said Peter Mulrean, who served as the American ambassador to Haiti from 2015 to 2017. “And so we shouldn’t really be surprised that the lid blew off again.”

After Mr. Biden’s election, lawmakers and officials in Washington took up the issue with new urgency. Mr. Moïse, who came to office after a vote marred by low turnout and allegations of fraud, had been ruling by decree for a year because the terms of nearly all members of Parliament had expired and elections to replace them were never held.

Mr. Moïse won a five-year term in 2016, but did not take office until 2017 amid the allegations of fraud, so he argued that he should stay until 2022. Democracy advocates in Haiti and abroad cried foul, but on Feb. 5, the Biden administration weighed in, supporting Mr. Moïse’s claim to power for another year. And it was not alone: International bodies like the Organization of American States took the same position.

Mr. Blinken later criticized Mr. Moïse’s rule by decree and called for “genuinely free and fair elections this year.” But the Biden administration never withdrew its public position upholding Mr. Moïse’s claim to remain in office, a decision that Rep. Andy Levin, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, blamed for helping him retain his grip on the country and continue its anti-democratic slide.

“It’s a tragedy that he was able to stay there,” Mr. Levin said.

The Biden administration has rebuffed calls by Haitian officials to send troops to help stabilize the country and prevent even more upheaval. A group of American officials recently visited to meet with various factions now vying for power and urge them “to come together, in a broad political dialogue,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

The Americans had planned to visit the port to assess its security needs, but decided against it after learning that gangs were occupying the area, blocking the delivery of fuel.

“How can we have elections in Haiti when gang members control 60 percent of the territory?” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network. “It will be gangs that organize the elections.”

David Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.