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Comment by ecedeno | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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