Jean-Claude Louis’ phone rang around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, July 7, jolting him awake in his home outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

On the other line, a friend told him he heard Jovenel Moïse, the country's president, may have been assassinated. Louis scoured the news for more information, and the official confirmation came about an hour later. “It was on all the networks, the social networks, everybody interpreting it their own way” recalled Louis, the coordinator of Panos Institute, a Haitian nonprofit that trains journalists and youth on media literacy and identifying disinformation. 

The attack plunged Haiti—which has no functioning parliament and has long been riven by protests calling for Moïse’s resignation over corruption allegations—into a deeper political abyss. 

When I reached Louise by phone on Wednesday night, Haiti’s acting prime minister, Claude Joseph, had imposed martial law, and people were still struggling to make sense of a shocking act of political violence that left Moïse’s body riddled with bullets and signs of torture. “There are still issues that are still not clarified, so there are many unknowns about this assassination,” he told me.