Pentagon Trained Colombian Murderers of Haiti President, Denies Any Involvement in the Assassination

At least seven Colombians involved in the assassination of Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse have receive US military training in the past, Pentagon confirmed denying at the same time any connection with the hit.

Defense Department spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that so far they’ve identified seven individuals, former members of the Colombian military, that had received some sort of education and training funded and provided by the US.

Some of the Colombian nationals were trained at seminars in Washington, Pentagon officials say, while some also took courses at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Kirby stressed that such training is very common- but declined to provide details on an individual basis for the seven assassins- and did not encourage what happened in Haiti.

He explained that the instruction, among other things, included leadership development, counter-drug operations, small-unit leadership training, human rights training, emergency medical training, helicopter maintenance training ect.

Despite everything that’s happened, the United States will not reconsider the “very valuable, ethical leadership training” program it provides to foreign military members.

Regardless of Kirby’s repeated arguing that the US training courses played no role in the Moise’ hit, there’s long line of coups and murder plots involving US-trained foreign personnel.

Africa, for example, went through at least seven military coups spearheaded by American-trained fighters since 2008, with two separate coups in Mali since August 2020, both led by US-trained Colonel Assimi Goïta.

Although WHINSEC, where the Columbians received part of their training is established in January 2001, it replaced the heavily criticized School of the Americas after its graduates were implicated in human rights violations, including murders and disappearances, in El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Panama in the early to mid-1990s.

According to the research published in 2017 by Jonathan Caverley of the US Naval War College and Jesse Savage of Trinity College Dublin, the record on US training programs is much more damning and points that American-trained militants were involved in 165 coup attempts Worldwide between 1970 and 2009.