Haiti’s interim government said it has asked the US to deploy troops to protect key infrastructure as it tries to stabilise the country and prepare the way for elections in the aftermath of President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination. “We definitely need assistance and we’ve asked our international partners for help,” Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph said. 

The request for US military support recalled the tumult following Haiti’s last presidential assassination, in 1915, when an angry mob dragged President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam out of the French Embassy and beat him to death. In response, President Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Haiti, justifying the American military occupation—which lasted nearly two decades—as a way to avert anarchy.