Former Haitian President Michel Martelly has registered to run for the presidency of the Caribbean nation, joining a growing list of candidates hoping to lead a troubled Haiti despite facing sanctions from the United States, Canada and the European Union — or in the case of the former singer, all three.
Martelly’s name was among 16 listed Friday on the Provisional Electoral Council’s website as having preliminary registered to run. The list also includes another former president, Jocelerme Privert, and a former member of the lower house of Parliament, Gary Bodeau. Privert who oversaw the country’s last general elections in 2016, has been sanctioned by Canada. Bodeau has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department under a federal act that targets perpetrators of serious human rights abuse and corruption, and faces Canadian sanctions as well.
Prince would not disclose the annual fee he receives for work with the Task Force, claiming only that it is a “fraction” of the cost of the short-lived Multinational Security Support mission — an initiative backed financially and logistically by the United States, that once envisaged 5,500 foreign police in Port-au-Prince.
“Our cost is one-sixth of what their annual camp cost was,” Prince said. The sum is likely in the tens of millions of dollars.
His income will be augmented by a deal to help control Haiti’s porous border with the Dominican Republic for the next 10 years in return for 10% of any new customs revenue collected. The long-term contract has raised criticism locally of how Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé is using his mandate as interim leader.
Les États-Unis ont annoncé, le 15 octobre, plus de 340 millions de dollars de nouveaux engagements financiers en faveur des Caraïbes, destinés notamment à la sécurité portuaire, au renforcement des forces de l’ordre, aux infrastructures numériques et aux capacités sanitaires. Derrière cette enveloppe régionale, Haïti occupe une place particulière : lors de l’ouverture du Dialogue États-Unis-Caraïbes, le vice-secrétaire d’État américain Christopher Landau a directement évoqué les armes acheminées vers le territoire haïtien depuis les États-Unis et les démarches entreprises par Washington pour tenter d’endiguer ces flux.
The paper makes the case for prioritizing agreement on a detailed framework for the electoral process and specific benchmarks for assessing progress. It identifies four areas for attention – the scale and representativeness of voter registration; independent and robust mechanisms for vetting candidates; secure, transparent and efficient procedures for collecting and tabulating votes; and minimum security conditions for a safe electoral process – and makes detailed recommendations on each.
