WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is no longer calling for elections in Haiti to be held this year as it assesses the political repercussions of the recent earthquake, which devastated part of the country just weeks after the president was assassinated.
The 7.2 magnitude earthquake that leveled buildings in Southwest Haiti on Saturday has only heightened U.S. concern over the security situation as gang activity and the investigation into President Jovenel Moïse’s July 7 killing has overstretched the Haitian National Police.
“It’s too early to tell what the impact on the political process of the earthquake is,” Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser, said at a press briefing. “We’re in the process of assessing that.”
A senior administration official told McClatchy earlier Tuesday that the White House supports Haiti holding new elections when possible, citing the earthquake, assassination and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“We strongly support holding elections as soon as they are viable,” the official said. “Even pre-earthquake, they’re in the middle of a pandemic, and the security situation was one that was concerning.”
The comments from both officials are a step back from repeated calls from the State Department for elections in Haiti to be held this year after Moïse’s murder.
“The policy remains that we want to make sure Haitians can freely and fairly exercise their right to vote,” the senior administration official said. “Right now the focus is on an immediate response to the aftermath of the earthquake.”
Officials do not anticipate the scale of the devastation to compare with the 2010 earthquake that struck near the Haitian capital and resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths.
But the humanitarian crisis around the recent earthquake is still expected to be severe, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The death toll from the weekend earthquake is now over 1,400.
Haiti’s hospitals have been understaffed, ill-equipped, and filled with COVID-19 patients in a country where very few people have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
On the day of the assassination, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that “it is still the view of the United States that elections this year should proceed” — a position the administration has repeated multiple times since.
Days before the quake, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council published a new calendar for elections and a controversial constitutional referendum — dates that now seem uncertain.
“The earthquake may delay that process even more now, probably into early 2022,” said Georges Fauriol, an expert on Haiti and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“That puts a burden on key international supporters, in particular the United States,” Fauriol said, “because the more you move into 2022, the more you hit the historical calendar of presidential terms – and that essentially means you run into ‘22 with the delayed beginning of a normal presidential term.”
Moïse was already governing Haiti by decree before his assassination because the country had failed to hold elections on time. U.S. officials had been pressing Haiti to hold elections as soon as technically feasible to reconstitute parliament and fill local offices.
The new calendar calls for the first round of presidential elections to take place on Nov. 7 and runoffs in January. But in an interview with the Miami Herald on Sunday, Prime Minister Ariel Henry dismissed the new dates.
“We do not have an election calendar,” Henry said.
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(McClatchy White House correspondent Francesca Chambers and Miami Herald Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles contributed reporting.)
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