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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/haiti-hillary-clinton-elections-martelly-fraud/">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/haiti-hillary-clinton-elections-martelly-fraud/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
<br>
<b><big><big>Haiti’s Permanent Resistance</big></big></b><br>
Kim Ives April 11, 2016<br>
<br>
Our next issue, “Between the Risings,” is out this month. To
celebrate its release, international subscriptions are $25 off.<br>
<br>
Haiti is no stranger to political crises — and it is in the midst of
its most severe one in decades.<br>
<br>
The latest upheaval, which looks set to last many months, began in
January 2016, when massive demonstrations aborted the final round of
patently fraudulent, US-sponsored elections. An unelected interim
government stepped in to try to reestablish an elected and
constitutional regime, but it’s still too early to know if the
outcome will be revolutionary or a further tightening of US
imperialism’s chokehold on the country.<br>
<br>
Although Haitian progressive forces are splintered and weakened
after twelve years of foreign military occupation and internal
turmoil, the shifting social and economic terrain in Latin America
and the United States may offer the Haitian people an opportunity
for change.<br>
<br>
Haiti, after all, has a long history of resistance. All Haitian
children learn how their ancestors carried out history’s only
successful slave revolution and, in 1804, founded the first
independent nation in Latin America (the second in the Western
Hemisphere) and the first black republic. These accomplishments are
the core of the Haitian identity.<br>
<br>
From the beginning, the small Caribbean nation clashed with elites
in the United States. During the early nineteenth century, US slave
owners were deeply alarmed by this neighboring nation founded by
self-liberated former slaves. Its existence and survival inspired
and emboldened slave uprisings throughout the United States and
Caribbean. US governments embargoed Haiti and did not recognize it
until 1862, during the Civil War.<br>
<br>
But recognition did not bring reconciliation. US tensions with Haiti
— which gave support and refuge to Latin American revolutionaries
ranging from Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar to José Marti —
continued in the form of gunboat and diplomatic skirmishes. US
Marines invaded the island nation on July 28, 1915, beginning a
nineteen-year military occupation.<br>
<br>
Haitians responded to the invasion by forming the Cacos, a guerrilla
army with thousands of members. And when Marines killed Caco leaders
Charlemagne Péralte in 1919 and Benoit Batraville in 1920, Haitians
continued resisting through demonstrations, marches, and general
strikes.<br>
<br>
The resistance paid off, and US troops finally withdrew in 1934.
But, in a template that would later be used in the Dominican
Republic and Nicaragua, Washington left behind a surrogate Haitian
force known as the Garde d’Haïti, which later became the Armed
Forces of Haiti (FADH). For more than two decades this army
installed or ousted regimes at will, until a popular movement drove
General Paul E. Magloire from power in 1956.<br>
<br>
Two tumultuous years of power struggles and coups followed
Magloire’s ouster, culminating in the election of Dr François “Papa
Doc” Duvalier on September 22, 1957. Using a paramilitary force
known formally as the Volunteers for National Security and
informally as the “Tonton Macoutes,” Papa Doc established a reign of
terror and dictatorship that he liked to call “Presidency for Life.”
When Papa Doc died in April 1971, his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”
Duvalier took power. Baby Doc ruled until February 1986, when an
uprising forced him to flee to France.<br>
<br>
Baby Doc’s exile ushered in a period of crisis that would last
almost five years. Seven provisional or fraudulently elected
governments succeeded each other until a nationalist former parish
priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected president in a landslide
on December 16, 1990.<br>
Free and Fair<br>
<br>
The 1990 election was historic. It was the first truly free and fair
election in Haiti’s history. Since the assassination of the
country’s founding father, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in 1806, Haiti’s
two rival ruling classes — the comprador bourgeoisie and the big
landowning class, known as the grandon — had alternated power,
either through coups or indirect parliamentary elections. The US
occupation and FADH had brought to power a string of bourgeois
governments to which the grandon governments of Dumarsais Estimé
(1946–1950) and Papa Doc were reactions.<br>
<br>
Aristide didn’t fit into either camp. He was a people’s candidate
with an anti-Duvalierist, anti-imperialist agenda. Fearing for their
interests, Haiti’s rival ruling groups joined together into a grand
alliance to oppose him.<br>
<br>
Aristide’s victory also marked the first time the US’s election
engineering had been so grievously defeated. Setbacks in Cuba, Iran,
Nicaragua, and Vietnam pushed Washington to change its paradigm for
controlling states under its sway.<br>
<br>
Beginning in the late 1970s it let go of or phased out corrupt,
repressive strongmen like Duvalier, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua,
Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines,
and instead began empowering civilian puppet presidents through
“demonstration elections.”<br>
<br>
The demonstration elections would be won by the candidate with the
most money, just like in the United States. And if there were
trouble or surprises, Washington would no longer use the local army,
which was sent back to its barracks. Instead it would deploy the
empire’s new enforcer: the international “peacekeeping” force.<br>
<br>
After Baby Doc’s ouster, the United States figured it would be
fairly easy to get former World Bank official and Duvalier finance
minister Marc Bazin elected president, providing him coaching and
support from the newly formed National Endowment for Democracy
(NED). With a war chest of $36 million raised from the US and
Haitian ruling classes, Bazin outspent Aristide’s $500,000 campaign
72 to 1. It wasn’t enough. Aristide swept the election, from a field
of eleven candidates, garnering more than 67 percent of the vote.<br>
<br>
Just as Haiti’s 1804 independence inspired “the Great Liberator”
Simón Bolívar to wage similar wars to free Spanish colonies on the
continent (with pivotal Haitian financial and military support),
nearly two centuries later, Aristide’s 1990 victory inspired
Bolívar’s admiring descendant Hugo Chavez to attempt the same tactic
in Venezuela in 1999. Soon a wave of pink “electoral revolutions”
washed across Latin America, with countries like Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay all electing
progressive candidates.<br>
The Clinton Approach<br>
<br>
Washington didn’t take its defeat lightly. Eight months after
Aristide’s February 1991 inauguration — or, as Aristide called it,
“Haiti’s second independence” — the Haitian elites, with support
from George H. W. Bush, staged a bloody FADH coup. The nature of the
attack was clear. Haitians throughout Haiti and its international
diaspora rose up in spirited resistance, and an international
solidarity movement sprang into life.<br>
<br>
Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 and quickly saw the futility of
returning to the old paradigm to counter Haiti’s democracy movement.
The quintessential representative of the transnational “enlightened
bourgeoisie,” Clinton made a deal to bring Aristide back on the
shoulders of twenty thousand US troops if the former
anti-imperialist priest agreed to champion neoliberal reforms,
including nationalizing state industries and lowering tariff walls.
Aristide agreed, or pretended to.<br>
<br>
After US troops returned Aristide to power in October 1994, all
while protecting the FADH troops that had overthrown him, Clinton
turned to the United Nations to play its role as US occupation
surrogate, just as the Garde d’Haïti had replaced US Marines sixty
years earlier.<br>
<br>
In March 1995, US troops handed over command of Haiti’s military
occupation to the United Nations Mission in Haiti, which then
morphed into and spawned the United Nations Support Mission in
Haiti, the United Nations Transition Mission in Haiti, and the
United Nations Civilian Police Mission in Haiti (MIPONUH), which
lasted until March 2000. (Aristide had “demobilized” the FADH in
early 1995, so Haiti was left with only the Haitian National Police
after MIPONUH’s departure.)<br>
The Bush Approach<br>
<br>
Aristide was reelected by a landslide in November 2000, just as
George W. Bush was also coming to power. The new president brought
with him a pack of neoconservative officials keen to oust Aristide.
After Aristide’s 2001 inauguration, the Bush administration stepped
up a coordinated campaign of political isolation, economic
sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and paramilitary guerrilla attacks
to drive him from power.<br>
<br>
They finally succeeded on February 29, 2004. After a night of
threats from the US Embassy’s deputy chief of mission, Luis Moreno,
a US SEAL team took Aristide from his home in Tabarre (along with
his entire security detail) to an unmarked jet with all the window
shades closed and flew him to the Central African Republic. Aristide
later called it a “modern kidnapping.”<br>
<br>
Aristide’s rapid departure — the second coup d’état in thirteen
years — following on the heels of a relentless, punishing three-year
campaign, left the Haitian people exhausted and confused. US,
Canadian, and French troops immediately swarmed the island and
occupied Haiti from March until May 2004. Then, just like in 1995,
the United States passed off the mission to the United Nations
Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH).<br>
<br>
But Haitians were not quiescent. As in 1915, an armed resistance
sprang up to fight the foreign military occupation and President
Boniface Alexandre and Prime Minister Gérard Latortue’s puppet
regime.<br>
<br>
Most of the resistance fighters — called “bandits,” just like
Péralte and Batraville — were based in the teeming Port-au-Prince
slums of Belair and Cité Soleil, although the Dessalinien Army of
National Liberation (ADLN), a rural-based guerrilla force, carried
out a half dozen successful attacks in Haiti’s north against PNH
stations and MINUSTAH patrols.<br>
<br>
Resistance also showed its face in elections. Although Aristide’s
Lavalas Family party (FL) remained banned, his supporters voted
erstwhile Aristide ally René Préval into power in 2006 for a second
time. (He had succeeded Aristide from 1996–2001). The Lavalas masses
hoped Préval would bring Aristide back from exile in South Africa,
but he didn’t, and Lavalas began to splinter into factions as a
result.<br>
<br>
The party became divided between Préval supporters and those
remaining loyal to Aristide, and Préval used the divisions to keep
the FL out of elections planned for 2010.<br>
Devastation<br>
<br>
Then on January 12, 2010, an earthquake hit just outside of
Port-au-Prince. Tens of thousands died, and over one million were
left homeless. The United States unilaterally sent in 22,000 troops,
rapidly taking control of the main airport and the international
relief and aid response. Former president Bill Clinton designated
himself ringleader and became the co-chair of the International
Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which decided how some $13 billion
in aid would be spent to have Haiti “build back better.”<br>
<br>
The United States was not working to build a better Haiti. It was
using its reach to dismantle the last vestiges of Haitian
sovereignty and popular power that remained from the 1990 election.
Their puppet in the process was a vulgar neo-Duvalierist coup
cheerleader and konpa musician named Michel Martelly, also known as
Sweet Micky.<br>
<br>
Martelly was ushered in after Préval had appeared ineffectual in his
response to the earthquake and beholden to Washington. Préval made a
few symbolic protests, like walking out of a ceremony when Bill
Clinton took the microphone or pointedly typing on his Blackberry in
the back of a room while a US general gave a press conference on
earthquake response, but his lack of control was clear to all.<br>
<br>
Martelly, on the other hand, was a Donald Trump–like character:
tough talking, media savvy, simplistic, and charismatic — all the
things Préval was not. And he had a professional election team,
Ostos & Sola, whose personnel had engineered campaigns for John
McCain and Mexican president Felipe Calderòn, behind him.<br>
<br>
But Martelly’s slick campaign and US backing didn’t guarantee
success. Indeed, the first round of presidential elections held in
late November 2010 were a disorganized mess. The Provisional
Electoral Council (CEP) declared Mirlande Manigat and Swiss-trained
engineer Jude Célestin, Préval’s protégé, the two candidates that
would go to a run-off. Martelly came in a close third.<br>
<br>
Martelly’s partisans took to the streets to burn buildings and wreak
havoc, while Washington deployed the Organization of American States
(OAS) to review the election results. Unsurprisingly, the OAS —
using a thoroughly arbitrary calculation — declared Martelly the
second-place finisher.<br>
<br>
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Port-au-Prince in January
2011 to pressure Préval to supplant Célestin with Martelly. As
usual, Préval complied, although the CEP members — constitutionally
the “final arbiter” of any Haitian election — never validated the
US-altered election results. Martelly won a run-off victory in March
2011.<br>
<br>
The United States was also victorious. It had managed to stage, in
the words of dissident and later fired OAS representative Ricardo
Seitenfus, an “electoral coup d’état” — the type of soft-power play
that has come to epitomize the Clinton-Obama approach.<br>
The Martelly Regime<br>
<br>
Like Baby Doc’s, Martelly’s regime was a macouto-bourgeois alliance
marked by outrageous corruption, excess, infighting, dysfunction,
and repression. It was so unpopular that it sparked a mass rebellion
that nearly drove it from power in late 2014.<br>
<br>
To save his presidency, Martelly sacrificed his longtime business
partner and prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, who otherwise would
likely have been the 2015 presidential candidate of Martelly’s
Haitian Bald-Headed Party (PHTK). (Constitutionally, Haitian
presidents are limited to two non-consecutive terms.)<br>
<br>
For the first four years of his five in power, Martelly used an
array of stalling tactics to delay holding elections so that the
terms for the Chamber of Deputies, two-thirds of the Senate, and all
of Haiti’s municipal posts expired.<br>
<br>
The result was a rushed forced march to repopulate the entire
government, including the presidency, before parliament’s expiration
on January 12, 2016 (the earthquake’s sixth anniversary) and the end
of Martelly’s term on February 7, 2016.<br>
<br>
A three-round staggered electoral schedule was established for
August 9, October 25, and December 27, 2015. The August 9 round was
a complete fiasco, marred by violence and blatant fraud. Thugs from
Martelly-aligned parties guarded many voting center doors, keeping
out their rivals’ partisans. In the Artibonite Department, for
example, eight out of fifteen voting districts had to annul their
polling due to violence and fraud, but the CEP still opted to keep
the results.<br>
<br>
The second election on October 25 saw less violence, but was plagued
by massive fraud and, despite including the first round of the
fifty-four presidential candidates’ races, extremely low turnout.
Most of the votes were cast by the candidates’ 916,000
poll-watchers, many of whom voted repeatedly and not for the
candidate they represented.<br>
<br>
The dubious and contested official result: Martelly’s PHTK led the
presidential pack with 33 percent of the vote. For his successor,
Martelly had picked an unknown provincial businessman, Jovenel “Neg
Banann” Moïse, who had developed, with a $6 million government
subsidy, a tax-free agro-industry, “Agritrans,” exporting bananas
mainly to Europe.<br>
<br>
Moïse is an apt candidate. With an export-oriented agribusiness
built on the dispossession of small peasants, he perfectly
represents the alliance between the bourgeoisie, which now invests
mainly in assembly industries, and the grandon, who have always
bullied and bulldozed the peasantry off their land.<br>
<br>
Moreover, many also speculate that the state lands currently leased
to Agritrans could eventually be turned over to foreign mining
interests to continue their now-stalled exploration and
environmentally destructive gold mining in Haiti’s north.<br>
<br>
But whether or not Moïse was the macouto-bourgeois alliance’s
favored choice, a reliable Brazilian exit poll suggests that he
didn’t win, coming in fourth, not first, with just 6 percent of the
vote. Even a Martelly-appointed verification commission found
widespread voting fraud.<br>
<br>
Nevertheless, Martelly and the US continued to push for a third
round of the scandalous elections. It was postponed twice, until
January 24. But a final giant march on January 22 forced its
indefinite postponement and the disbanding of the CEP.<br>
<br>
Reluctantly, under huge pressure, Martelly stepped down on February
7, and a provisional government with a 120-day mandate (which will
surely be extended) was installed.<br>
Washington’s Chaos<br>
<br>
There were fifty-four presidential candidates, but only three were
heavyweights in the opposition to Jovenel, and two of them are
Lavalas. The first Lavalas candidate is Dr Maryse Narcisse of
Aristide’s FL, who supposedly placed fourth with 7 percent of the
vote.<br>
<br>
Then there is the breakaway Dessalines Children platform (PD) of
former senator Moïse Jean-Charles, who supposedly placed third with
14 percent of the vote. The third heavyweight is the supposed
second-place finisher (with 25 percent), Jude Célestin of the
Alternative League for Haitian Progress and Empowerment (LAPEH),
which is affiliated (albeit informally) with Préval’s platforms
Vérité and Inite, under whose banner Célestin ran in 2010.<br>
<br>
Both Washington and Martelly wanted to marginalize the two Lavalas
currents and keep them out of any runoff. Although their leaderships
adopt moderate positions, their popular bases remain mobilized and
dangerously radical.<br>
<br>
Instead, the United States favors a monolithic two-party system in
Haiti, which would establish a regular alternation between
“acceptable” players, parameters of debate, and political programs.
The Republican analog would be the PHTK, while the Democratic
surrogate would come from the current Préval constellation: LAPEH,
Vérité, or Inite.<br>
<br>
Not surprisingly, Lamothe (who felt betrayed by Martelly and hews
closely to US positions), singer Wyclef Jean, and large sectors of
Haiti’s ruling elite had thrown their support behind Célestin, who
could be expected to give the United States the same grudging but
faithful collaboration that Préval did.<br>
<br>
Although it has faded into the background, Célestin and seven of the
other leading presidential runners-up (except the FL) were in a
“Group of Eight” (G8) whose unity was more formal than real.<br>
<br>
Nonetheless, while the masses in giant demonstrations demanded the
elections’ annulment and Martelly’s arrest, the G8 and FL did not.
Even today, they insist on an “independent evaluation commission” to
review the October 25 results, and each of the heavyweight
candidates asserts that they won the election in the first round.
Whatever results any evaluation commission finds, it will surely
explode the opposition’s tenuous unity.<br>
<br>
Senate and National Assembly president Jocelerme Privert, under OAS
supervision, became the interim president in the meantime and, as of
April, has a prime minister, Enex Jean-Charles. Both are under
pressure to convene a verification commission, but the US
ambassador, Peter Mulrean, opposes it.<br>
<br>
Washington knows that an election verification commission would even
further ruin their plans. The fraud in the presidential election was
so extensive and profound that the first round would have to be
scrapped.<br>
<br>
Moreover, and more importantly, any election review would discover
that most of the Senate and Deputy races were just as fraudulent as
the one for president, thereby invalidating the largely US-friendly
parliament.<br>
<br>
This would leave the road open for the more radical provisional
governments being proposed by Haiti’s left-wing parties, like the
Dessalines Coordination (KOD), and like-minded popular and student
organizations.<br>
Opportunities for the Left<br>
<br>
The missing element in this revolutionary cocktail, at the present
moment, is a revolutionary party or front strong enough to lead and
champion the masses’ increasingly radical demands. Currents like KOD
and others were seriously weakened in 2015, when many of their
comrades were caught up in the electoral euphoria sweeping Haiti.<br>
<br>
Although one of KOD’s founders, Moïse Jean-Charles, had repeatedly
vowed to respect the party’s position to never participate in an
election held under Martelly and MINUSTAH, he couldn’t resist taking
the plunge, especially when the FL refused to join him in a boycott
and said it would go into the elections “head first.”<br>
<br>
The seductive illusion that another December 16, 1990 miracle can be
performed infects almost the entire political class, but
particularly its Lavalas offshoots.<br>
<br>
A similar wave of electoral fever and defections swept the leftist
Patriotic Democratic Popular Movement coalition, one of whose
clearest and most active currents is the Democratic Popular Movement
(MODEP). In the aftermath of the crash of the US/Martelly
“selections,” KOD and MODEP have been talking but have not yet
forged an operational unity.<br>
<br>
However, if history is any guide, Haiti’s political crisis and
revolutionary potential promises to continue for several months at
least. The window after Baby Doc’s fall in 1986 lasted for four
years, until the popular movement carried out a political revolution
with Aristide’s first election.<br>
<br>
Many veterans and students of the 1980s and ’90s struggles now
realize that a deeper social revolution — changing Haiti’s property
relations, above all land reform — is necessary for any progressive
government to survive. As long as Haiti’s tiny ruling class controls
92 percent of Haiti’s wealth, it can continue to buy and corrupt
enough desperately poor Haitians to do their bidding — whether it is
to demonstrate for them, vote for them, or kill for them.<br>
<br>
Most important now is that the ruling class is either divided on or
unsure of how to go forward and maintain power. This offers a unique
opportunity for Haiti’s left. Privert and Jean-Charles are weak
functionaries, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Martelly’s
right-wing allies, like former death-squad leaders Senator Youri
Latortue and Senate candidate Guy Philippe, are just waiting for
their opportunity to strike with their paramilitary thugs.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, the US empire is weakened by its own interminable
overseas wars and beset by internal rebellions that are threatening
the “establishment,” particularly the right-wing populist support
around Donald Trump and the social-democratic Bernie Sanders
movement.<br>
<br>
All these factors offer hope that the democratic, anti-imperialist
movement among peasants, workers, and the urban unemployed that
began with Duvalier’s ouster thirty years ago can finally make some
headway after its many setbacks.<br>
<br>
Haiti remains the only nation in the Western Hemisphere militarily
occupied by UN “peacekeepers,” making it the victim of Washington’s
greatest show of force in the Americas. But like their ancestors did
to Napoleon’s legions, Haitians may once again succeed in taking on
colonialism, now in its multinational twenty-first century form, and
winning.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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