Gunmen announcing a drug agency raid kill the president at home

Jovenel Moise spent the evening of 6 July 2021 at his house in Pelerin 5 above Port-au-Prince, watching a Copa America semifinal with his wife and two of their children. He had barely left the residence for a week and was frightened for his life. He came off the telephone at about one in the morning. Shooting started nearby half an hour later. At 1:34 he called an officer of his security detail asking for backup, then the chief of police, then the commander of the presidential guard. At 1:46 he telephoned a friend and shouted that he needed help. Outside were at least twenty-one former Colombian soldiers, a justice ministry official dismissed days before, three Haitian police officers and two Haitian Americans, one of them a former informant for the American drug agency. They passed the checkpoints by announcing a DEA operation over a loudspeaker in English and Creole. Officers reached the house at about 2:20 and found the president dead, shot twelve times.

A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.

The website Marronnage in Saint-Domingue transcribes advertisements for enslaved people who had run, together with the lists jails kept of those recaptured. Every document appears twice, as a photograph of the original page and as a searchable transcription. By 2020 the project had taken in material from newspapers in Guadeloupe, Guyane, Jamaica, Louisiana, Lower Canada and South Carolina, and was renaming itself Marronnage in the Atlantic World. Those additions carried the advertisements to 15,638 and the jail lists to 6,846. The figure the site gives for people identified, 22,638, cannot be right. An advertisement usually named one person and occasionally a few, while a jail list was generally longer and sometimes very much longer, so the count of individuals recorded has to be considerably higher. Jail lists appear to be peculiar to the French colonies, which is why historians have rarely been able to compare who escaped with who was caught. Saint-Domingue still supplies most of the material.

Anise Boisrond was twenty two years old when she was dismembered and decapitated in 2020. Evelyne Sincere was twenty two when she was raped, brutalised and murdered in 2020. Antoinette Duclaire was thirty three, a journalist working on human rights, when she was killed in 2021. They stand in a line that runs back at least to Alerte Belance, who was mutilated by paramilitaries after the military coup of 1991 and survived to say so in public. Belance closes a chapter of Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously by asking people of conscience to hear her and to hear what she has been through. Naming these three is a deliberate act, because the killing of Haitian women in these years is otherwise carried in the record as a number with no faces in it. Three decades separate Belance from Duclaire, and in both cases armed men were acting on a woman's body with nothing to stop them.