Miami Jury Convicts Four in Plot to Assassinate Haitian President Moïse

A Miami federal jury convicted four South Florida men in the plot to assassinate Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, closing a major chapter in a case that has shadowed Haiti’s collapse since the killing in 2021. The defendants, Arcangel Pretel Ortiz, Antonio Intriago, Walter Veintemilla, and James Solages, were found guilty after an eight-week trial in federal court in Miami.

Prosecutors said South Florida was not just a loose meeting point but a central hub for planning and financing the scheme. Jurors accepted the government’s case that the men conspired to kill or kidnap Moïse, Haiti’s last elected president, and that the plot also involved an effort to replace him with someone chosen by the conspirators. The defendants were also convicted of providing material support for the plot and of violating the U.S. Neutrality Act. They now face the possibility of life sentences when they are sentenced.

The killing itself was as stark as it was destabilizing. Moïse was assassinated in his bedroom in Port-au-Prince on July 7, 2021, in an attack that ripped through Haiti’s already fragile political order. His wife, Martine Moïse, was shot multiple times during the assault. She later took the stand in Miami, becoming the prosecution’s first witness and describing the wounds she suffered that night.

Her testimony carried a raw, personal weight in a case built on paper trails, travel, money, and coordination. The Miami trial turned the assassination from a sprawling international mystery into a federal conspiracy case centered on four men with South Florida ties and a wider network of foreign mercenaries and Haitian-American intermediaries. That is what made the verdicts so important: prosecutors did not just argue that Moïse was killed, but that the plot was organized, financed, and advanced from within reach of the United States.

Even with these convictions, the larger story is still unresolved. Moïse’s death deepened Haiti’s political crisis and fueled a surge in gang violence that has since hardened into a governance collapse and security emergency. The verdict in Miami delivers accountability for four defendants, but it does not end the damage his assassination unleashed, or settle the question of who ultimately benefited from a president’s murder in the middle of the night.