Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide faced no serious challengers in a cakewalk contest that was boycotted by the country’s main opposition parties. Polling precincts that drew long lines of voters for a legislative election only six months ago stood empty throughout much of the day. And when Aristide begins his five-year term next February he will enjoy little legitimacy beyond the shores of the impoverished Caribbean island nation.
But none of that stopped the onetime apostle of Haitian democracy from hailing the vote and promising a role for the opposition in his future government. “We observed a huge majority of the Haitian people expressing their right through their vote,” the 47-year-old Aristide told reporters on Monday, during his first press conference in six years. “To have a peaceful Haiti, the opposition is indispensable, and there will be a place for everyone in my government.”
But the nation’s main opposition leaders quickly spurned Aristide’s invitation, and his vicotry provides a shabby epilogue to what the Clinton Administration once touted as one of its greatest foreign-policy triumphs. In 1994, the United States dispatched 20,000 troops to oust a military regime accused of involvement in drug trafficking and restore Aristide as Haiti’s first democratically elected president. Washington then poured hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid into the country as a sign of support for Aristide, who continued to wield effective power after he was succeeded as president by a hand-picked political lackey named Rene Preval in 1996.
By last May, though, the White House had run out of patience. The amount of cocaine streaming into the United States through Haiti had more than doubled since the years of military rule, and Preval’s government was a democracy in name only. Haiti’s return to the ranks of the world’s pariah states appeared complete–and as a sign of their displeasure, U.S. officials refused to provide financial assistance or election observers to this week’s presidential vote in which an estimated 15 percent of eligible Haitians bothered to take part. “The United States bet on a horse that disguised itself as the (champion) of democracy,” says opposition politician Gerard Pierre-Charles. “But the state doesn’t function, and drug traffickers could become the masters of the country.”
Many believe that has already occurred with the consent of corrupt Haitian judges, legislators and police. The State Dept. estimates that nearly 70 tons of cocaine moved through Haiti in 1999, and Drug Enforcement Administration officials say that at least 15 major Colombian drug trafficking syndicates have set up shop in recent years.
Drug-related corruption is flourishing throughout the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. The head of police at Port-au-Prince International Airport was fired last March after he allegedly failed to seize a 405-kilo shipment of cocaine, and U.S. officials have linked three prominent senators from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party to drug trafficking activity. A senior police commander says that up to three-quarters of the country’s 4,500-member police force have accepted bribes from drug lords and their lieutenants, and the country’s justice minister says the going price for a judge starts at $5,000. “There is no element of that system in Haiti you can’t buy your way out of,” says one frustrated DEA agent. “(Traffickers) face a greater law enforcement infrastructure anywhere else in the Caribbean.”
But Haiti’s newfound status as an emerging narco-state isn’t the only cloud hanging over Aristide as he prepares to return in triumph to the gleaming white Presidential Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince. Any remaining pretense of democratic rule under Aristide’s designated stand-in Rene Preval evaporated nearly two years ago when the figurehead president dissolved parliament. U.S. officials criticized the move, and their concerns hardened into loud condemnation after Haitians went to the polls last May to elect a new legislature. A controversial vote-counting formula awarded 18 of the 19 seats at stake in the national senate to candidates from Aristide’s Lavalas Family party. Independent election observers argued that ten of those seats should have been decided by a runoff vote, but the Preval government refused to hold a second-round election. Washington retaliated by suspending aid for this month’s presidential election and announcing plans to channel $75 million in US economic assistance exclusively through private, non-governmental organizations. “Seldom in recent history has a country received such a level of international support in its effort to establish democracy,” Luis Lauredo, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, said last September. “The Haitian people deserve better than this.”
Aristide is likely to get an even colder shoulder from George W. Bush if the Texas governor is sworn in as president next January. In one of his few clear-cut disagreements with Vice President Al Gore on foreign policy, Bush vowed never to use American troops in any future “nation-building” exercise and publicly cited Haiti as a failed example of that approach. Republican Congressmen started taking aim at Aristide and his inner circle for alleged involvement in drug trafficking long before the Clinton Administration soured on him. One of their recurrent targets is Dany Toussaint, a former army major and longtime Aristide loyalist who was elected to the senate last spring. Toussaint reportedly engineered the removal of a police inspector general earlier this year who was investigating several police superintendents implicated in the cocaine trade. The 43-year-old legislator dismisses those accounts as part of a Republican smear campaign aimed at portraying the charismatic Aristide as a closet leftist who will cozy up to Fidel Castro in short order. “All they are talking about is garbage,” shrugs Toussaint. “They have to go through me to attack Aristide.” Now that he is president-elect, Aristide may find himself more directly in the firing line.
