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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

> “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked [...]”

This is peculiar. Might just be too early for the dust to have settled, but both tagesschau.de [1] and Le Monde [2] report both Spanish and English for to be spoken by the attackers.

Edit: The Guardian [3] also quotes only Spanish, but later speaks of an English-language announcement on a megaphone. Guess we'll have to wait for a bit until things converge to The Truth™ here.

[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/haiti-praesident-m...

[2]: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2021/07/07/hait...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/haiti-presiden...

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It is a peculiar clue. For context, the majority language in Haiti is Haitian Creole, a French-derived local dialect. About half of the population, typically those better educated, involved in business, or involved in government, also speak French. Spanish and English are extremely minor languages in comparison.

Spanish is spoken throughout Central America, including across the land border on the divided island in the wealthier Dominican Republic, and English is used by travelers and tourists. With a comparable economic disparity and ongoing immigration dispute, it would be analogous to an attack in Mexico by a group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking English - the implication seems to be that the group is not native to Haiti.

(Note that I did some fact checking, but I have no special or particularly recent knowledge here; this is speculation based on historical demographics - I haven't paid attention to Caribbean politics much at all in the past decade).

I have a sister that lived in the DR for a few years.

Here's a bit of context from what I recall.

* The Dominican Republic is the second poorest nation in the northern hemisphere. Haiti is the poorest. (so yes, technically wealthier, but not exactly swimming in the dough).

* From what my sister describes, the people of the DR HATE the Haitians.

* The DR itself is filled to the brim with corruption.

All of the sources I could find have DR as significantly wealthier than Haiti, and wealthier than most countries in Central America and the Caribbean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)...

That list is incorrect. It list the incorrect order for certain nations there. I know where these countries should rank and how poor they are because I lives in some and travelled to others since childhood and had business there enough to know.

I have never been to Haiti but I will tell you what. The DR is one of the few Caribbean islands I travelled to where I saw kids on the side of the road begging. I was take a back given the number of huge resort there.

I also met someone whose wife was promised to him but her family because he was in a better financial state than they were. He said this kind of thing happens there.

Anecdotal data is... not particularly useful.

IMO "anecdotal data" is perfect to show what's going on. It's like "Abstract" section from RFCs or similiar things in scientific papers.

And it is usually used that way: as colorful summary.

yeah but also a list someone typed is just a list someone typed.

But a list derived from a data set is as valid as the data set.

yes, i agree.

My concern is where and how this data is collected.

Apparently, the World Bank. Middling trustworthiness.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.PP.CD?year_h...

> the implication seems to be that the group is not native to Haiti.

Pure and wild speculation - but Spanish and English is what one would expect from graduates of the school of Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) or CIA/DEA training programs. Although I suppose at this point former graduates are running their own training under various cartels etc.

That's possible, but Moise Jovenal was relatively buddy buddy with the state department. It could also be random mercenaries.

Bingo

Keep in mind that this would also be the easiest way to cast the assassins as “outsiders.” Trust but verify.

Here they have the video where you can hear that announcement:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...

You mean the megaphone part, right? Yeah, that seems to be it.

I'm just curious because all four outlets I checked marked the "Spanish" or "English and Spanish" as direct quotes so I'm not sure if they got different sources or what happened.

What the megaphone guy says? I can't understand it.

I think: “DEA operations everybody stand down. DEA operations everybody back up, stand down.”

The speaker definitely has a Southern American accent. The caption under the video makes it sound like the speaker was part of the security(?) team responding to the intrusion/assassination which is perhaps why there is confusion about the assailants speaking Spanish/English.

The accent is off a bit. It sounds like somebody trying to impersonate an American southern drawl. I got $20 that says that there wasn't any American on the megaphone.

Ah, he was a recently naturalized American, thus the accent. Merde.

Having lived in the south for many years, it’s definitely not a southern draw. It sounds more like South African. You can hear that many of the words are sharp at the end - which is opposite of southern accents that accentuate or “draw” verb endings. It’s definitely someone that speaks english, but highly unlikely US born.

And there are many mercenaries from South Africa. Doing a Bayesian.

> The speaker definitely has a Southern American accent.

Are you referring to the southern United States or the South America continent? I live in the southern Mississippi and it doesn't really sound much like how people typically talk here, so I suspect you might be referring to the continent. But also, the accents can vary widely across the southern United States so I'm not really sure.

I wached the video again, the guy that is leaving is asking in Spanish "is this one of us?" about the guy in the floor, I think.

I think it could be Dominican Spanish accent, but I could be wrong. I suppose it would make sense to hire mercenaries from Dominican Republic to something like this.

I doubt a response team in Haiti speak English with that accent - let alone would use English over a megaphone.

Could the megaphone be a pre-recorded recording designed to delay identification of the perpetrators?

> I doubt a response team in Haiti speak English with that accent - let alone would use English over a megaphone.

Could there be some kind of DEA SWAT team or something that was stationed there that may have been called?

> Could the megaphone be a pre-recorded recording designed to delay identification of the perpetrators?

Could be. One possibility is that is there were Americans involved, but they were private mercenaries (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...). It sounds like there are also similar private Latin American mercenaries (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/world/middleeast/emirates...). The Miami Herald article says the Haitian government is saying these were mercenaries, not DEA agents. It also sounds like this president was highly unpopular and arguably illegitimate, so he likely had a lot of enemies. It's not inconceivable that some those may have decided to hire a mercenary group for an assassination. Maybe they hired a mixed group, which would explain the use of Spanish and English.

I agree it’s very odd. I also just noticed there seems to be a person laying injured in the street and none of the armed “security response” people are rendering aid or seem to care at all. They’re just kind of casually milling around.

Something that surprise me is that nobody mention the bodyguards. I doubt the president of a country was unguarded (Olof Palme case showed how unwise that is even in Sweden).

Maybe this unlucky guy in the floor was one and just nobody care enough about them to mention them?.

Some of the videos have the sounds of multiple gunshots which are audibly different, suggesting to me that different guns were firing. Perhaps there were bodyguards but they were engaged by the assassins.

The article directly contradicts your assessment, though of course it is still unverified.

The New York Post (ugh) has a longer version, and it doesn't include the American voice at the start shouting about DEA operations. https://nypost.com/2021/07/07/haitian-president-jovenel-mois...

Poor country but still a LOT of money to be made for certain elements. Probable someone paid a hit squad to do the deed for a reason or another. A lot of people have that kind of money to pay for killings, so that is not an issue. What comes after can be...

Someone that follows Haitian politics could tell us the power struggle inside the country.

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