Four men have now staked claims to either the presidency or the prime minister’s post — including Joseph, who has been broadly recognized internationally but faces a serious challenge to his authority at home. The power contest underscores the extreme fragility of the Haitian state, whose foundations were already on the brink of collapse before the first bullets were fired early Wednesday at Moïse’s compound in the hills above the capital, Port-au-Prince. Since the assassination, Haiti has plunged deeper into a complex crisis that risks creating a Somalia in the Caribbean — a failed state 800 miles off the coast of Florida ridden by violence, overcome by disease, inflation and deepening hunger and controlled by warlord-like factions and weak nominal governments. The Joseph government’s request for troops, meanwhile, is presenting the Biden administration with its greatest foreign policy test in the Western Hemisphere. But in Haiti, the prospect of U.S. forces also divides a nation burdened with painful memories of foreign intervention. “We do not have any answer for this in the constitution,” said Bernard Gousse, a former justice minister and legal expert. “We are in a constitutional desert.”