The unsolved murders of three Haitian radio journalists in Miami three decades ago resonate today in how the mainstream media fails to adequately cover ethnic communities in U.S. cities, according to a journalist who first covered the murders and dove back into the story in a recent podcast.
The cultural and political dynamics that seeded the murders in Little Haiti, a Miami neighborhood that is home to many Haitian exiles, raises bigger questions about how new arrivals to this country are treated, said Ana Arana, a Club member who discussed the podcast, "Silenced: The Radio Murders," at the National Press Club Thursday evening, July 27.
“I think the Haitian community in Miami felt abandoned when that was going on,” Arana said. “I think few of us understood it.”
Little Haiti at that time was “a new community that didn’t have any power,” Arana said. There are parallels to other ethnic communities living in the U.S. today, such as Colombians in New York, who thought they were safe from the violence they were fleeing only to discover they can still be in the crosshairs.
“It’s the stuff that keeps getting repeated in ethnic communities across the country,” she said.
The true crime podcast, produced by iHeartRadio and Kaleidoscope, took Arana, an award-winning investigative journalist, back to 1990s Miami. It was there she investigated the murders for the Committee to Protect Journalists, as floods of people were arriving from Haiti as the country went through spasms of violence.
Arana’s recollections of Little Haiti were fleshed out by other panelists: Garry Pierre-Pierre, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist and the founder and publisher of The Haitian Times, and Michele Montas, who spent 20 years as news director and news anchor of Haiti’s leading radio station, Radio Haiti.
Because pro-democracy radio reporting was broadcast in Creole, the lower classes of Haitians were alerted to what was going on.
“People knew what was happening in Haiti, so that was a problem for the power structure,” Pierre-Pierre said.
As Arana reported – using Freedom of Information Act requests and interviews with federal agents, police and people who remember searching for justice – the police led a shoddy investigation in which a “cultural schism” led to false leads and forced confessions.
Some investigators knew the killings were linked to the Haitian military but said their supervisors didn’t care. U.S. policy on trying to help – but often meddling in – Haiti complicated the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations’ responses. The killers were never apprehended.
The podcast, in some ways, followed in the Haitian radio journalists’ footsteps, Pierre-Pierre said. “If we use the act of journalism well, to me, that’s activism. We can use that to bring it in front of the authorities.”
Oz Woloshyn, founder of the Kaleidoscope, said he began work on the podcast after wrapping up a two-year reporting project on the disappearance of hundreds of women in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez. When he heard about the Little
Haiti murders, he was struck by the idea that, even in the U.S., journalists don’t feel free to speak their minds. One clip played during the panel quotes a man saying, “when you speak your mind, you’re never safe.”
The true crime genre has gained popularity in recent years, and Woloshyn said he hopes the series will inspire listeners to think more about the purpose of journalism.
Montas, whose husband was murdered in 2000 by killers who were never caught, said she decided to keep fighting for justice for Haiti.
“I didn’t feel alone anymore when I heard a 30-year-old case was being revived in this podcast,” Montas said.
