Two or more men on a motorcycle shot and killed Haitian journalist and political activist Georges Honorat on the evening of March 23 in front of his home in Delmas in the north of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. National Police of Haiti (PNH) spokesperson Inspector Gary Desrosiers said on March 24 that there were still no suspects. The police had also not determined a motive for the murder. The victim had been "receiving threats, anonymous phone calls," according to Yves Joseph, an administrator at Honorat's newspaper, Haïti Progrès [3], a weekly published in Port-au-Prince and Brooklyn.
Honorat was the editor in chief of the paper, which was started in 1983 as a leftist weekly fighting the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971-1986). Honorat was a longtime member of the editorial team headed by the paper's founder, former Haitian ambassador-at-large Ben Dupuy, but the two men fell out later. Honorat also had a leadership position in the small National Popular Party (PPN). At time of his death he was working as a consultant at the office of Laurent Salvador Lamothe, the prime minister in the government of rightwing president Michel Martelly.
Both Prime Minister Lamothe and the Association of Haitian Journalists (AJH [4]) expressed "consternation" at the killing. The French-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF [5]) called for a thorough investigation, noting that the April 3, 2000 murder of Radio Haïti Inter director Jean Dominique [6] and the March 5 murder of Radio Boukman director Jean-Liphète Nelson remain unsolved. Haiti ranks as number 49 of the 179 countries rated in RSF's most recent survey on press freedom. (Radio Kiskeya [7], Haiti, March 24; AlterPresse [8], March 25, March 25 [9]; RSF statement, March 26, via Maximini.com [10], Guadeloupe and Martinique)
From Weekly News Update on the Americas [11], March 31.
