With Lamothe, Zenny, Mayard-Paul, and Sophia Out of the Running:
Can Martelly’s Elections Now Be Trusted?

Former Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, previously considered the preferred candidate of both Haitian President Michel Martelly and Washington, was among the 12 presidential contenders disqualified by Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) last week, creating a surge of excitement and optimism among many Haitian voters who had been skeptical of the polling scheduled for August, October, and December.

The CEP’s Departmental and National Offices of Electoral Challenges (BCED and BCEN) both recommended that Lamothe should be disqualified because he did not have a Parliament-approved décharge (clearance from financial or administrative irregularities) following his 31 months as Martelly’s Prime Minister. He was forced to step down last December in the face of massive weekly street protests.

Also among the disqualified candidates were Martelly’s former Interior Minister and advisor Thierry Mayard-Paul and Sen. Edwin Zenny, both considered the president’s close political allies. Last month, the CEP disqualified Martelly’s wife, Sophia St. Rémy Martelly, from running for a Senate seat in the West Department.

“Sophia Martelly and Laurent Lamothe were not able to be candidates because for these elections it was necessary to create a certain credibility and to inspire trust which will allow everybody to think that they can win,” President Martelly said in an interview with the daily Le Nouvelliste. “For some time I’ve told Lamothe that he would not be my candidate because I had realized that we were going to have elections with political parties that were very uncomfortable with Lamothe, who appeared to be the president's candidate and who could surely win,” Martelly said. “Since December 2014, I had told Laurent Lamothe that he would not be my candidate, that it was not desirable that he be a presidential candidate. I had said the same thing to Sophia Martelly, my wife.”

The U.S. had made well-known its approval of Lamothe. When the Haitian people were chasing Lamothe from his post, former U.S. President Bill Clinton declared that he had done “a really good job.”     

“This is the most consistent and decisive government I’ve ever worked with across a broad range of issues,” Clinton said as Lamothe was on the way out. “And I think if you look at the sheer volume of investments they’ve attracted, everything from hotels to clean energy to healthcare, you have to ask yourself, ‘Why is this being done?’ ”

Then last week, hard-right Republican senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) sponsored an amendment aimed at conditioning U.S. funding for Haiti’s elections on whether the CEP made “attempts to disqualify candidates” for “political reasons.”

If there was any doubt that Rubio was defending Lamothe with his move, former International Republican Institute (IRI) officer Damian Merlo, now a senior adviser to Lamothe, clarified the matter by saying “we are glad that Sen. Rubio stepped in to ensure the State Department pays the attention to this urgent matter that it deserves.” Throwing the usual diplomatic and non-interventionist posturing to the wind, Merlo desperately argued that Washington “cannot just stand on the sidelines and claim this is a ‘Haitian issue.’ Free and fair elections do not seem to be shaping up in Haiti if Lamothe is left out of race, and U.S. interests are also at stake.”

Indeed, they are at stake. So the question now becomes: with Lamothe and other Martelly allies out of the race, are free, fair, and sovereign elections possible under the current political conditions?

The answer: there’s still a long way to go.

Having had few long-lived institutionalized political parties over the past century, Haitians tend to focus on individual leaders, like the charismatic former presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide or Daniel Fignolé, or the infamous despots François and Jean-Claude Duvalier or Gen. Raoul Cédras.

So when a prominent political actor like Lamothe is knocked out of the running, there is a tendency to rejoice and forget the underlying political structures (and limits) still in place. The hard reality remains: the Martelly regime was illegally installed in power by Washington’s intervention in Haiti’s sovereign elections in early 2011, and this intervention was facilitated by the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), the foreign military occupation force which has been illegally deployed in Haiti for over 11 years.

“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests,” said Henry Kissinger, the infamous U.S. Secretary of State and foreign policy advisor who waged merciless, bloody wars against Vietnam, Chile, Angola, and many other nations.

In this respect, the U.S. always has a Plan B, Plan C, and Plan D for its agenda and can easily find a replacement for its lost pawn Lamothe. There remains a field of 58 presidential candidates (not to mention the thousands of parliamentary and municipal candidates), out of which many would be more than happy to benefit from Washington’s approval, largesse, and support.

Perhaps it could be university director Jacky Lumarque, the candidate of former President René Préval’s political platform Verité (Truth). Although Washington openly sabotaged Préval’s presidential candidate Jude Celestin in 2011 (perhaps due to Préval’s timid protests against the U.S. disregarding and steam-rolling him during Haiti’s earthquake aftermath), Préval has shown himself willing to “work with” Washington in the past and would likely be willing to do so again.

Or perhaps it could be former police chief Mario Andrésol, whom the U.S. loves, or former well-known journalist Jean Clarens Renois of the right-wing bourgeois Radio Métropole. Notary Jean Henry Céant certainly shows no signs of having any political objection to being “the U.S. candidate,” and the same could be said of former Senate president Simon Dieuseul Desras, the OPL’s leader Sauveur Pierre Etienne, or former Sen. Steven Benoit. All of this holds true for many of the lesser known long-shot candidates.

In short, the final arbiter of the elections, as things now stand, will not be the CEP, as the Haitian Constitution dictates, but the U.S., France, and Canada, through the services of its handmaiden, MINUSTAH, as we saw in 2010 and 2011. And President Martelly, as a puppet looking forward to a comfortable retirement in Miami to enjoy the ill-gotten fruits of his reign, will do nothing to change that equation.

That is why, practically alone among political parties, the Dessalines Coordination (KOD) continues to insist that the only real guarantee of a free, fair, and sovereign election is for Martelly to cede power to a provisional government selected by a representative swath of Haiti’s civil society and for MINUSTAH to completely remove itself from Haiti.