On
Jul. 15, arch-conservative presidential candidate Sen.
Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, will
preside over
a meeting of
the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western
Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security,
Democracy, Human Rights, and Global Women's Issues.
The hearing, which
will be held at 2:30 p.m. in the Dirksen Senate Office
Building in Room SD-419, is entitled an “Overview of
U.S. Policy Towards Haiti Prior To the Elections,” and
the principal witness will be Thomas C. Adams, the U.S.
State Department’s Special Coordinator For Haiti.
Sen. Marco Rubio has already
tacked on an amendment
to the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act (APHA) of 2014,
which now requires the State Department to provide “a
description of any attempts to disqualify candidates for
political office in Haiti for political reasons.”
Rubio’s amendment stems from concern in many U.S.
government quarters about the
disqualification last month
by the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) of former
Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, whom the U.S.
views as an ally in rebellious Haiti.
James Morrell, the executive director of the Haiti
Democracy Project (HDP), applauded Rubio’s amendment in
an
open letter where he
decried the “exclusion of certain high-profile
candidates who eschew violence, but seem to belong to
the wrong political faction.” Morrell also lamented “the
Haitian electoral commission’s inclusion of more than
thirty-five notorious criminals as candidates for
president, senate and lower house in Haiti, in violation
of Haiti’s electoral law.” Morrell then calls on the
U.S. government “to press the [CEP] for a reversal of
[its] decisions,” a blatant violation of Haitian
sovereignty.
The HDP was the principal Washington lobbyist and
information clearing house for the political forces
which supported the bloody Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’état
against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, so one
can easily devine whom Morrell views as “criminal” (i.e.
coup victims and opponents) and who he thinks would
“eschew violence” (i.e. coup supporters).
Stanley Lucas is another coup supporter and HDP
associate who is a member of Lamothe’s team. He, along
with former Lamothe minister Ralph Théano, apparently
registered Lamothe as a presidential candidate for the
Peasant’s Platform
(Platform Peyizan) without the candidate’s consent,
according to a
purported phone conversation by
Lamothe released on the Internet. Lucas
gained national and international notoriety in the
years leading up to the 2004 coup as a zealous
representative of the International Republican Institute
(IRI), an arm of the U.S. government’s National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which advances
Washington’s interests by meddling in the internal
political affairs of countries around the world. Lucas
was
fired from IRI when
he overstepped his paygrade by bad-mouthing and
undermining then U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Brian Dean
Curran.
Another Republican operative in Lamothe’s retinue
is former IRI political consultant Damian Merlo, who
left Haiti with the former prime minister when he
resigned in the face of massive demonstrations in
December 2014. In Haiti’s 2011 election,
Merlo worked for the
Spanish marketing firm Ostos & Sola, which was hired by
Lamothe, the long-time business partner of
then-candidate Michel Martelly. Prior to becoming the
Martelly campaign’s point-man, Merlo worked on the
presidential campaign of U.S. Republican John McCain,
who headed IRI.
So, once again, Haiti is inserting itself into
the U.S. presidential race, just
as it did in 1992
(Clinton vs. Bush I). Republican candidates like Sen.
Rubio, with IRI agents like Lucas and Merlo working with
Lamothe, can be expected to needle Thomas Adams about
whether the Democratic Obama administration is being
“forceful” enough in protecting U.S. interests (and
candidates) in Haiti, just as they are challenging
Obama’s policies with respect to Cuba, Iran, and ISIS.
As
reported a few weeks ago,
Damian Merlo has already complained that the Obama
administration “cannot just stand on the sidelines and
claim this is a ‘Haitian issue.’” He asserted that
elections will not be “free and fair... if Lamothe is
left out of race, and U.S. interests are also at stake.”
This will undoubtedly be the line of attack of Sen.
Marco Rubio on Jul. 15, as he tries to portray the Obama
administrations as too “soft” and “weak” and seeks to
muscle into Haiti’s sovereign electoral affairs. |