Frantz Bourget’s mother arrived in the United States in March to visit family and see her doctors, with plans to return to Haiti at the beginning of June.
Her return home, though, was postponed twice — once because of safety concerns after fighting broke out between rival gangs in her Port-au-Prince neighborhood and later after learning of the brazen early morning assassination of 53-year-old President Jovenel Moïse in his Port-au-Prince home on July 7.
At least two Haitian Americans and several Colombians have been implicated in his slaying, according to CNN and other news sources.
“She just got stuck this time,” said Bourget, an Atlanta businessman and treasurer for the United Front of the Haitian Diaspora, a nonprofit that does advocacy work for the Haitian diaspora. “It’s not going to get better any time soon. A lot of folks are out for revenge.”
In an interview, Bourget, who came to the United States in 1970 when he was 13, said Haitians in the diaspora have long rode wave after wave of crises, including political upheavals, a devastating earthquake, floods, poor health care, disease, gender violence and extreme wealth inequities.