Haiti is a roiling, boiling mess. But in so many ways, it's our mess, too. Haiti suffers in our hemisphere; and for South Florida, it's our backyard.
Yes, in the long term, Haiti, and Haitians, must solve the country's problems. And they are, unfortunately, prodigious.
However, the United States remains the 800-pound gorilla in the hemisphere. And where the administration has gone after Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, a veritable dictator who has overstayed his welcome and whose incompetence has tanked the country's economy, undercut its legal institutions and sent millions of citizens fleeing across its borders, it has been too passive in thwarting Haiti's dubious leader.
Haiti, at best, is receiving mixed messages from the United States.
We applaud Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's call for Haiti to set a firm date for elections. In an exclusive interview in January with the Miami Herald, Pompeo said: "That is the most important thing. We need to have the elections. That is important."
Very important.
PARLIAMENT DISSOLVES
In January, President Jovenel Moise announced _ by tweet _ the end of the bicameral Parliament. All members of the lower chamber and two-thirds of the Senate are gone. There are just 10 senators left. All this after Haiti failed to hold legislative and local elections in October 2019.
Moise is carrying out one-man rule _ badly. He is ruling decree. He is confiscating private property and canceling government contracts. He has constitutional "reforms" in his sights and, in a push to reform the energy sector, is trying to arrest private power providers.
This alone should raise eyebrows in the United States and the rest of the hemisphere. But the administration has not made a peep; nor did it last week, when an embattled Moise installed as prime minster, without a political agreement with the opposition, Joseph Jouthe, his fifth in three years.
Meanwhile, violence is ever present: Gangs who control one-third of the country are armed to the teeth, despite a U.S. arms embargo; tensions are so high that Carnival was canceled last month when disgruntled, underpaid Haiti National Police _ funded by the United States, among other countries _ staged a deadly shootout with soldiers from the newly formed Haitian Armed Forces; and, as detailed by the Herald's Jacqueline Charles, kidnapping has escalated just since December. No Haitian citizen is safe from being taken for what little ransom poor families can scrape up, and U.S. citizens and other foreign nationals have been among the victims, too. Last week, the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory for the country to Level 4 _ Do Not Travel.
LESS FOOD AID
However, the Trump administration has cut drastically USAID funds for Haiti's starving people; and it has quietly terminated the Haitian Family Reunification Program, which gave those already approved to relocate legally to the United States expedited status. These are the people who would find employment and send home desperately needed remittances.
But Moise gets a pass. His extraordinary OAS vote to recognize Juan Guaido as Venezuela's leader, spurning Maduro, no doubt bought him a ton of goodwill from the United States _ the enemy of my enemy, and all that.
Unfortunately, his citizens are collateral damage. It's time to step up the pressure on Moise to bring law and order and to set an election date _ and to stick to it.
The United States must show that, just as it loathes the autocrat in Venezuela, it will not tolerate the autocrat-in-the-making in Haiti.
