It is still unclear who murdered Haiti’s president

THE LAST time a president was murdered in Haiti, in 1915, troops from the United States occupied the Caribbean country for 19 years. They introduced racial-segregation laws, built infrastructure with forced labour and left a bloody legacy by stamping down on cacos, the insurgents who defied the occupation. Writing in the New Yorker in 2015, Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American novelist, described how her uncle recalled seeing marines kicking a man’s decapitated head around like a football, to scare the rebels in their area.

A week on from the murder, on July 7th, of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s increasingly autocratic president, much remains unclear. No one knows who ordered the hit, or why. And no one knows how the United States will react if its poor and chaotic neighbour once again slides into mayhem.