With interim president in place, Haiti elections now scheduled for April.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
For Haiti, crisis has become a way of political life. From 1957 to 1971, the country lived under a dictatorship--as corrupt as it was vicious--headed by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. After his death, his son and heir, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, ruled for 15 more years, until a popular revolt put an end to the clan's hold of this mercilessly impoverished country. A series of military regimes followed, and then came three interrupted administrations headed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Salesian priest with a popular stand (NotiCen, Dec. 7, 2000, Jan. 27, 2001, Sept. 8, 2005 and Feb. 23, 2006).
Political and social unrest continued, and then came the catastrophic, 7.0 earthquake of January 2010, which killed over 200,000 people, displaced another 600,000 and left 1.5 million more homeless (NotiCen, Jan. 21 2010,Feb. 18, 2010, and April 29, 2010).
Today, still struggling to recover from that devastating natural event, Haiti is yet again in political chaos. This French- and Creole-speaking Caribbean nation is now in a crisis-management scenario, with a caretaker government headed by Jocelerme Privert, who only last month had become the president of the country's Senate.
As interim president, Privert--who was elected by a congressional majority and is scheduled to be in power until May--is in charge of putting together a provisional government and naming a caretaker prime minister. He is also charged with renewing the heavily criticized, nine-member electoral council, the Conseil Electoral Provisoire (CEP), and guiding the country through the three-times-postponed, critical presidential election runoff, now scheduled to take place April 24.
Delayed elections
This time, the crisis stems from repeatedly delayed legislative and presidential elections.
The postponement of the legislative vote--which should have taken place by Jan. 12, 2015, and would have chosen 20 of 30 senators and all 119 members of the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies--prevented the country's Congress from working last year. Thus, then-President Michel Martelly was left to rule by decree (NotiCen, Aug. 20, 2015, and Jan. 14, 2016).
Finally, the last round of the congressional election was held Aug. 9--amidst major irregularities, including acts of violence--and parliament again went to work last month.
But the postponement of the runoff for the presidential contest, originally scheduled for Oct. 25, has further exacerbated the political crisis in Ayiti--as the...
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