Protests by angry supporters of late Haitian President Jovenel Moise convulsed the slain leader’s hometown for a second successive day as workers labored into the night to finish a makeshift auditorium in time for his funeral on Friday. Moise was gunned down in his home in Port-au-Prince earlier this month, setting off a political crisis in the Caribbean country already struggling with poverty and lawlessness.
Wielding hammers, pick-axes and shovels, laborers scrambled to set up stages, lights and pave a brick road to Moise’s mausoleum on a dusty plot of several acres enclosed by high walls in the northern city of Cap-Haitien. Elsewhere in the city, protesters set tires on fire to block roads on Thursday afternoon.
Built on land held by Moise’s family where he lived as a boy, the partly built tomb stood in the shade of fruit trees, just a few steps from a mausoleum for Moise’s father, who died last year. Foreign dignitaries are flying to Cap-Haitien from around the Americas to pay their respects to Moise, joining mourners who have taken part in a string of commemorations in Haiti this week.
