THE FOREIGN ROOTS OF HAITIS CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
By Mark Schuller, NACLA.org.
February 8, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Jovenel Moïse speaks at his inauguration ceremony after taking
the oath of office, Port-au-Prince, February 7, 2017. UN Photo / Igor
Rugwiza / Flickr.
Popular Resistance
Haitis Presidents Term Has Come To An End, But He Refuses To Step Down.
Solidarity is urgent.
As per usual, news on Haiti in the United States remains limited, except for
during periods of crisis. As if on cue, U.S. media began reporting on
Haitis constitutional crisis this week.
Sunday, February 7 is the end of Haitian President Jovenel Moïses term,
according to the constitution. He refuses to step down. This week, the
opposition called for a two-day general strike, uniting around a transition
with the head of Haitis Supreme Court stepping in.
Most reporting failed to note the international role, and particularly that
of the United States, in creating this crisis. And nearly all focused only
on one segment of the opposition: leaders of Haitis political parties.
Predictably, foreign media led their stories with violence. True, the
security situation is deteriorating: Nou Pap Dòmi denounced 944 killings in
the first eight months of 2020. But leaving the discussion at gang
violence whitewashes its political dimensions: on January 22, leaders of
the so-called G9 (the group of 9), a federation of gangs led by former
police officer Jimmy Chérisier, alias Barbecue, held a march in defense of
the Haitian president. National Network for the Defence of Human Rights
(RNDDH) reported in August 2020 that the government federated the gangs in
the first place.
This gangsterization occurred without parliamentary sanction. On January
13, 2020a day after the 10th anniversary of Haitis devastating
earthquakeparliaments terms ended, leaving President Moïse to rule by
decree. One such decree came in November as the wave of kidnapping
increased: the president outlawed some forms of protest, calling it
terrorism.
Readers in the United States should not need to be reminded of white
supremacists violent attack on Congress and the U.S. Constitution on
January 6 that killed at least six people, on the heels of coup attempts in
Michigan and other vigilante attacks. In the United States, police killed
226 Black people last year. The irony of U.S. officials opining on violence,
democracy, or the rule of law is apparently invisible to some readers.
In addition to parallels of state violence against Black people in the
United States and Haiti, missing from most stories is context about the
specific roles played by previous U.S. administrationsfrom both partiesin
fomenting and increasing that violence.
Haitis ruling Tèt Kale party got its start in 2011, when bawdy carnival
singer Michel Martelly was muscled into the elections second round by
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the United Nations Special Envoy and
co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) Bill Clinton.
This support from the Clintons, the United States, and the so-called Core
Group (including France, Canada, Brazil, the European Union, and the
Organization of American States), never wavered, despite the increasingly
clear slide toward authoritarianism. In 2012, Martelly installed allied
mayors in all but a handful of towns. Then parliaments terms expired in
2015, the five-year anniversary of the earthquake, with promises of holding
elections never materializing. The vote that did finally lead to the
election of Martellys hand-picked successor, Jovenel Moïse, was fraudulent.
Yet the United States and the Core Group continued to play alongand offer
financial supportuntil finally the electoral commission formally called for
its annulment. Because of international pressure, the final round was held
weeks after Hurricane Matthew ravaged large segments of the country. It was
the lowest voter turnout in the countrys history.
Why would so-called democratic countries continue to support the Tèt Kale
state? What was in it for Empire?
Having to thank his friends in high places, Martellys reconstruction effort
focused on providing opportunities for foreign capitalist interests to
invest in tourism, agribusiness, sweatshops, and mining. Not surprisingly,
donors to the Clinton Global Initiative made out like (legal) bandits.*
Ironically, $4 billion available to help fund this disaster capitalism was
from Venezuelas PetroCaribe program, which offered low-cost oil and
low-interest loans. With the Haitian state safely under the Clintons watch,
the transformative potential of this alternative to neoliberal globalization
and example of South-South solidarity was squandered. Cue foreign mainstream
medias focus solely on corruption of this complex movement demanding
#KòtKòbPetwoKaribe? Where are the PetroCaribe funds?
This popular movement was an extension of the uprising against International
Monetary Fund-imposed austerity. On July 6, 2018, during the World Cup, the
Haitian government announced a price hike for petroleum products. Right
after Brazil lost the match, the people took to the streets all across the
country and shut it down. In Kreyòl, this was the first peyi lòka lockdown
or general strike.
It was the first time in my 20 years working in Haiti that a mobilization
brought together people from every socioeconomic status, at one point
reaching two million people across the country (out of a population of 11
million). Faced with this popular swell of dissent, the government
increasingly turned to violence, including a massacre in Lasalin, a
low-income neighborhood near the port and a stronghold for the party of
former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Thinking back to my time in Haiti during the 2003-2004 coup against Aristide
and comparing the people on the streets then and now, it seemed likely that
Moïse would be forced out by November 2018. Certainly he would be gone by
February 7, 2019two years ago.
So why is he still in office?
Like his predecessor Sweet Micky, Martellys stage name, the Banana Man
as Moïse was known during the campaign, had friends in high places.
President Donald Trump met with Moïse and other right-of-center hemispheric
heads of state at his Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2019. Haiti was crucial in
the U.S.-led effort in the OAS to not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the
legitimate president of Venezuela. Despite the billions in aid Haiti
received from Venezuela through PetroCaribe, and bilateral cooperation that
began in 1815 when Haitian president Alexandre Pétion provided crucial arms
and support for Simón Bolívar, President Moïse sided with Trump. In 1962,
Haitian president Papa Doc Duvalierwhom history and solidarity movements
judged as a dictatordid the same thing to Cuba, and the United States
generously rewarded him.
Given the new White House occupant, and campaign promises to the key
battleground state of Florida, one might think that President Joe Biden
would reverse course vis-à-vis Haiti. Why, then, would Immigration and
Customs Enforcement continue to deport 1,800 people, some not even born in
Haiti, sending not one but two deportation flights on February 4 alone?
Making the connections, the Florida-based Family Advocacy Network Movement
(FANM) sent an open letter denouncing state violence and violations of human
rights.
The voices within Haiti that foreign corporate media amplify are those of
political parties. The Kolektif Anakawona outlined at least two other much
larger opposition segments connected to grassroots organizing. On November
29, the popular organization coalition Konbit issued a five-language call
for solidarity. The workers movement Batay Ouvriye outlined popular demands
for whomever takes office. A group of professionals, Fowòm Politik
Sosyopwofesyonèl Pwogresis Ayisyen (FPSPA), denounced the United Nations for
rushing elections and its support for what FPSPA qualifies as a
dictatorship. David Oxygène, with the popular organization MOLEGHAF,
critiqued the political party consensus as olye yon lit de klas, se yon lit
de plasrather than a class struggle, its a struggle for position (power).
Both he and activist Nixon Boumba underscore that the opposition plan is a
short-term solution, when Haitian movements are asking for long-term
solutions and changing the system. Activist-journalist Jean Claudy Aristil
and others point out the fundamental hypocrisy and limits of Western
democracy. Moneyed interests, including imperial powers, who dominate the
political process in Haiti are by no accident part of the same transnational
capitalist class that has rigged the system in the United Statesthe model
for other political systems in the Americas.
These Haitian activists and scholars are not asking for U.S. intervention in
support of what Oxygène called 2 zèl yon menm malfinitwo wings of the same
vulture.
They are asking for us to dismantle imperial interference and to join them
in transforming our institutions so that people-to-people solidarity and a
democratic global economy can then be possible.
