When President Jovenel Moïse Spoke of “moun li yo”

This Thursday, December 4, 2025, between three and four in the afternoon, I was listening to a public expression or free forum program on my favorite radio station, hosted by one of the most credible and honest journalists in the Haitian press, Marvel Dandin. During a call, a listener, reckless to the point of blindness, asserted without flinching that when President Jovenel Moïse spoke of “moun li yo,” he was referring to his own armed men, those who today impose their law on entire sections of Artibonite, Centre, and Ouest. A sweeping statement, symptomatic of a deep-seated ill: the deliberate falsification of a head of state's words, even when he spoke in the clearest language, the common language of the Haitian people.

It must be reminded to this listener, and to all those who repeat the same absurdity, that the president had expressed himself in Creole, without circumlocution or ambiguity. He spoke of the most numerous and most needy class. Those who today claim to rewrite his words did not listen to or did not understand his speech: they distorted it to fit their political obsessions. Yet, the facts are stubborn: “moun li yo” was neither a nod to criminals nor a coded allusion. It was the simple and direct way for a president to identify a population that reactionaries label as « gros souliers » (big shoes), which he considered his own because he came from it.

Tragic irony: it was not the president's adversaries who invented the expression that obsesses them today. It is the gangs themselves who, since the heinous assassination of President Moïse, name their allies, their godfathers, their former protectors. The vocabulary of banditry has invaded public debate, to the point that some commentators now mix criminal codes and political language, unable to distinguish fabricated rumor from documented reality.

And what about those “sonic illiterates” of a certain opposition (to use an expression that perfectly summarizes them) who, from morning to night, proclaimed that President Moïse's mandate expired on February 7, 2021, when every elementary school student knows that a five-year presidential term beginning on February 7, 2017, inevitably ends in 2022?

These merchants of confusion, who transformed constitutional arithmetic into a propaganda tool, paved the way for the institutional chaos we have experienced. They sowed doubt, fueled discord, and provided their shadowy allies with a political justification for crossing the irreparable.

Those who proclaimed themselves “saviors,” those who swore to hold all solutions once President Jovenel was no more, are the same ones who plunged the nation into the abyss. The silent or vocal accomplices in the assassination of Jovenel Moïse bear a historical responsibility: that of having plunged the country into the turmoil they claimed to be fighting.