Haiti's rigged election

Source: The Nation.com, 16 Jun 2011
by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives

The United States, the European Union and the United Nations decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections even though they believed the country’s electoral body, “almost certainly in conjunction with President Preval,” had “emasculated the opposition” by unwisely and unjustly excluding the country’s largest party, according to a secret US Embassy cable.

The cable was obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to the Haitian newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the country.

At a December 1, 2009, meeting, a group of international election donors, including ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, Spain and the United States, concluded that “the international community has too much invested in Haiti’s democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative, according to US Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s cable that month.

Haiti’s electoral body, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), banned the left-leaning Fanmi Lavalas from participating in the polls on a technicality. Lavalas is the party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown on February 29, 2004, and flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état supported by France, Canada and the United States.

This history made Canadian Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the December donor meeting that “support for the elections as they now stand would be interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Preval and the CEP’s decision against Lavalas.” He said that the CEP had reneged on a pledge to “reconsider their exclusion of Lavalas.”

“If this is the kind of partnership we have with the CEP going into the elections, what kind of transparency can we expect from them as the process unfolds?” Rivard asked.

Despite the Lavalas exclusion, the EU and Canada proposed that donors “help level the playing field” -- they could, for instance, “purchase radio air time for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.” They were presumably referring to “opposition candidates” who would come from parties other than Lavalas.

That plan was nixed by the UN, but when the election finally did take place, on November 28, 2010, followed by a runoff on March 20, Washington and the international donor community played an influential role in determining its outcome.

When the first-round results were disputed, international donors arranged for an evaluation by the Organization of American States, which pronounced that pro-coup candidate Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, a former konpa musician, should face another neo-Duvalierist candidate, Mirlande Manigat, in the final round. Martelly emerged as the victor in the runoff.

Less than 23 percent of Haiti’s registered voters had their vote counted in either of the two presidential rounds, the lowest electoral participation rate in the hemisphere since 1945, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Furthermore, the second round was illegal because the eight-member CEP could never muster the five votes necessary to ratify the first-round results.

The December donor meeting took place just over a month before the January 12, 2010, earthquake, which derailed the elections originally planned for February 28, 2010.

When the polling was rescheduled, there was even more at stake, primarily how billions of dollars in pledged earthquake aid would be spent and the future of the 11,500-strong UN military force that has occupied Haiti since the 2004 coup.

According to the December 4, 2009, cable, US officials pushed hard for the election. Ambassador Merten urged a minimal donor reaction to Lavalas’s exclusion, saying they should just “hold a joint press conference to announce donor support for the elections and to call publicly for transparency,” because “without donor support, the electoral timetable risks slipping dangerously, threatening a timely presidential succession.”

His cable was classified “Confidential” and “NOFORN,” meaning “not for release to foreign nationals.”

The US State Department declined to comment on the disclosures in this article, citing a policy against commenting on releases of documents that purport to contain classified information.

Merten explained in the cable that he had opposed Lavalas’s exclusion because the party would come out looking “like a martyr and Haitians will believe (correctly) that Preval is manipulating the election.”

The election’s low turnout has been ascribed to Haitians’ sense of futility in the choice between two unappealing candidates, to a grassroots boycott campaign and primarily to popular dismay over the exclusion of Lavalas, the very issue that gave rise to the December 2009 meeting.

Former President Aristide, who returned to Haiti from exile on March 18, two days before the second round, drove the point home when he declared on his arrival, “The problem is exclusion; the solution is inclusion.”


Dan Coughlin covered Haiti for Inter Press Service from the UN and Port-au-Prince between 1992 and 1996. He was formerly the news director and executive director of Pacifica Radio. He is currently executive director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Kim Ives is an editor with Haïti Liberté.

The PetroCaribe Files

WikiLeaks Haiti: The PetroCaribe Files
Source: The Nation, 01 June 2011.
by Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives

When René Préval took the oath of Haiti’s presidential office in a ceremony at Haiti’s National Palace on May 14, 2006, he was anxious to allay fears in Washington that he would not be a reliable partner. “He wants to bury once and for all the suspicion in Haiti that the United States is wary of him,” said US Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a March 26, 2006, cable. “He is seeking to enhance his status domestically and internationally with a successful visit to the United States.”

This was so important that Préval “declined invitations to visit France, Cuba, and Venezuela in order to visit Washington first,” Sanderson noted. “Preval has close personal ties to Cuba, having received prostate cancer treatment there, but has stressed to the Embassy that he will manage relations with Cuba and Venezuela solely for the benefit of the Haitian people, and not based on any ideological affinity toward those governments.”

Soon, however, it became clear that managing relations with those US adversaries “solely for the benefit to the Haitian people” would be enough to put Préval in Washington’s bad graces—especially when it came to the sensitive matter of oil.

Immediately after his inauguration ceremony, Préval summoned the press to a room in the National Palace, where he inked a deal with Venezuelan Vice President José Vicente Rangel to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe. Under the terms of the deal, Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest.

As the press conference rolled on, just a mile away from the National Palace, in the bay of Port-au-Prince, sat a tanker from Venezuela carrying 100,000 barrels of PetroCaribe diesel and unleaded fuel.

Préval’s dramatic inauguration day oil deal won high marks from many Haitians, who had demonstrated against high oil prices and the lack of electricity. But it ushered in a multiyear geopolitical battle among Caracas, Havana and Washington over how oil would be delivered to Haiti and who would benefit.

The revelations come in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to the Haitian weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté by the transparency group WikiLeaks. As part of a collaboration with Haïti Liberté, The Nation is publishing English-language articles based on those cables [1].

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the disclosures in this article.

Martelly: Haiti's second great disaster

Source: Al Jazeera.
by Greg Grandin, 04 May 2011.

Haiti's new president is a friend of coup-plotters, fascists, and armed right-wing groups in his country and abroad.
No sooner had Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly been confirmed the winner in Haiti's deeply flawed presidential election than he jumped on a plane and headed to Washington, where he met with his country's real power brokers: officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the US Chamber of Commerce and the State Department.

There, he committed his desperately poor country - where some 700,000 people are still homeless as a result of last year's earthquake - to fiscal discipline, promising to "give new life to the business sector". In exchange, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave him a strong endorsement. "We are behind him; we have a great deal of enthusiasm," she said. "The people of Haiti may have a long road ahead of them, but as they walk it, the United States will be with you all the way," she added.

Martelly, a well-known kompa singer, is an unusual choice to lead Haiti. With no political experience, he represents a clear break with the country's other democratically elected presidents since the island nation ousted the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and ushered in an unprecedented era of democracy.

The US press billed his victory as "overwhelming". But with Haiti's most popular political party, Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas, banned from participating in the election, a vast majority of Haitians didn't vote. Martelly took the presidency with just 16.7 per cent of the electorate.