“We are behind
him; we have a great deal of enthusiasm.”
-Hillary
Clinton on new Haitian President Michel Martelly
Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly was
declared the victor of the Haitian elections earlier this year to
great acclaim from both the U.S. government and media. His election
win with two-thirds of all ballots cast was dubbed a historic
landslide, a true mandate to lead.
The one fact left out of the
pro-Martelly love-fest is the most important. While he did win
two-thirds of the vote, only 16 percent of the electorate voted for
him. That means roughly three-fourths of those eligible chose not to
vote. This is not surprising given the transparently fraudulent
nature of the elections and the deeply flawed nature of the process.
First, Haiti’s largest political
party, Fanmi Lavalas, was banned from the election. Removed from
power by a U.S. coup in 1991 and again in 2004, Lavalas and its
leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide have been banned from the election
process despite being far and away Haiti’s most popular political
party.
Additionally, in the first round of the
election numerous irregularities were documented. This fraud was so
transparent that even Martelly, who had come in third, denounced the
results. Martelly then began to organize his supporters into a
campaign of violent protests over the elections.
In the midst of this turmoil, the U.S.
government entered the fray, putting pressure on Haitian election
authorities to accept the results of an unreliable Organization of
American States recount, and place Martelly back on the ballot. The
U.S. government also convinced Martelly to drop his opposition to
participating in the election’s second round. Despite all the
hypocritical rhetoric about “democracy” that flows from the Obama
regime about the “Arab Spring,” its actions in Haiti show yet
again that U.S. foreign policy is the self-serving policy of
neo-colonial imperialist domination.
Martelly himself shows all indications
that he will fulfill the role of pro-Western Haitian despot. His
campaign was run and partially funded by far-right elements from the
United States and Europe, including a former member of John McCain’s
2008 election team.
This is not to mention significant
support from Haiti’s pro-U.S. ruling class, notably including
former Haitian President Gerard Latortue. Latortue was the puppet
ruler, put in charge after the United States removed Aristide in the
coup of 2004. Latortue became most well known for the wave of
killings and trumped-up arrests he unleashed on Aristide supporters
to help solidify his rule.
Martelly not only revels in support
from right-wing coup organizers, he has even admitted to being a
former member of the Tonton Macoutes. The Macoutes were a militia
that very freely used rape and murder to help sustain the rule of
Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and then his son Jean-Claude “Baby
Doc” Duvalier. It is not surprising, then, that during the campaign
itself Martelly referred to former-President Aristide with an
anti-gay slur and threatened him with sexual violence and death.
Martelly has also promised to
reconstitute the Haitian army, a thuggish outfit that was involved in
everything from coups to drug trafficking and had a truly brutal
record of murder, rape and imprisonment. Demobilized soldiers were
often at the forefront of the attempts of Haiti’s right wing to
destabilize Aristide and terrorize the population.
If all this was not enough, Martelly
has suggested that what Haiti required was a “Fujimori-style
solution.” The Fujimori mentioned by Martelly is Alberto Fujimori,
president of Peru from 1990 to 2000. Fujimori, who himself was
contemptuous of “free” elections, waged a semi-fascist style
“counter-insurgency” against the Shining Path communist guerrilla
group. Death squads roamed the countryside, and executions, massacres
and torture were all key instruments in Fujimori’s toolbox. Not
content with torture and murder, Fujimori also sponsored a campaign
that forcibly sterilized thousands of peasant women.
Since the death of its Cold War ally
Francois Duvalier, and the fall of his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, the
United States government has twice removed the exceedingly popular
elected ruler of Haiti. Each time it has replaced that president with
various flotsam and jetsam that have focused on parceling out state
responsibilities to NGOs and maintaining Haiti as a republic of
sweatshops and struggling farmers. Martelly is just another of these
right-wing rulers, a thug trained in the traditions of Duvalierist
gangsterism and deployed by Haitian capitalist elites and U.S.
imperialism.
