“Rock-throwing clashes with police have been a near-daily occurrence” since Haiti’s much-questioned Nov. 28 national elections, the AP writes this morning. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, “furious discussions” are ongoing as members of the country’s provisional electoral council, the CEP, try to prepare to release preliminary results from last Sunday’s vote. Initial word about those vote tallies is expected to be released sometime today.
On their face, the rules seem relatively straightforward. If no presidential candidate among the nineteen contenders wins more than 50 percent of the alleged national vote, the top two vote-getters will face-off in a January 16 runoff. But electoral officials suggested Monday that those rules were flexible, at best. According to the AP, CEP officials said Monday they may allow at least three candidates to move on to round two if the Nov. 28 tally is determined to be “close.” Responding to that, Colin Granderson, head of the OAS-Caricom observation mission to Haiti, indicated he’s prepared to back the CEP on that decision. “If it's a question of a few hundred (votes), it's up to the CEP,” he tells the AP.
The three candidates most see as the favorites are musician, Michel Martelly, former first lady, Mirlande Manigat, and current president Rene Preval’s handpicked successor and state construction company chief, Jude Celestin. The latter candidate has stirs up the significant antipathy on the streets of Haiti, and, together with his ally, Mr. Preval, provoked a declaration of “massive fraud” issued by twelve presidential candidates while votes were still being cast on Nov. 28. Martelly and Manigat, after allegedly being told by electoral officials they were frontrunners, backtracked from their support that declaration one day later, maintaining they were prepared to let the results stand. Even so, all declarations by major candidates seem to be written in pencil at this point. On Monday, Mr. Martelly, for example, said he would call his supporters to the street if Mr. Celestin was allowed to advance to runoff. For his part, Mr. Celestin, speaking to the Miami Herald on Monday, appeared anything but unconfident. Celestin:
“We have all of our tally sheets from all across the country in our possession, and we know we are ahead.”
Little discussed but also of great significance will be vote totals for the national legislature. On that, Mr. Celestin says he believes the ruling coalition which supports him, INITE (Unity), stands ready to pick up seats in that body when vote totals are announced.
As for the issue of voting irregularities, again, one report, from the AP, which hardly seems unique:
“[V]ote-counters under U.N. peacekeepers' guard at a Port-au-Prince warehouse are working on a new problem: Separating clearly fraudulent tally sheets and eliminating them from being included in the final vote count. On one tally sheet, a candidate had 200 votes against other leading candidates with about one-tenth that many, Granderson told AP. But a separate list tallying the number of voter-registration cards that had been validated at the same poll showed that only about 20 people had voted in all.”
Nevertheless, the international community seems intent believing a respectable result can still be produced as final votes are tabulated. Earlier this week, US ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten told the Miami Herald he was “interested in results of the election that demonstrably reflect the will of the Haitian people” – something many who actually observed last Sunday’s vote doubt could actually be gleaned from the events of Nov. 28.
A final note, for those in Washington DC, two events on the Haitian elections worth noting, with some distinguished panelists – one today at 2pm the US Institute for Peace (also available on webcast here) and another on Thursday, Dec. 9, 6pm at Trans-Africa Forum.
To other stories:
· Speaking to the Assembly of Member States at the International Criminal Court yesterday, EFE reports that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos said he fully backs the work of the court and is committed to the fight against impunity in his own country. “Justice must be carried out to achieve peace,” Santos said Monday. Interestingly, Mr. Santos was the first head of state, according to the Spanish news agency, to participate in a meeting with the international body. The assembly session was the ninth since the signing of the Treaty of Rome. The court’s top prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, accompanied Mr. Santos to the meetings, along with UN Sec. General, Ban Ki Moon.
· Meanwhile, from Roque Planas at the Latin America News Dispatch, suggestions that some form of impunity may still apply to ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Since being served with a subpoena in Washington, DC to provide a deposition in a civil suit against the mining company, Drummond, Mr. Uribe has yet to appear, writes Planas. Drummond is accused of colluding with AUC paramilitaries in the state of Antioquia while Mr. Uribe was still governor of the state in the late 1990s. But, according to Greg Craig, Uribe’s lawyer and President Barack Obama’s former chief legal counsel, Uribe may never appear. Planas:
“Uribe’s attorney, Gregory Craig…said in a telephone interview that the government of Colombia had invoked sovereign immunity for Uribe, a doctrine that allows government figures immunity from prosecution for tort claims for acts committed as part of their duties in office. Craig said he informed Collingsworth of the Colombian government’s decision, but did not contest the subpoena.”
· I mentioned yesterday that Brazilian President Lula da Silva decided to grant diplomatic recognition to Palestine. Today it looks like that move has become regional policy – at least in the Southern Cone. Reuters reports that Argentina announced yesterday it too will recognize a Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders. (More from The Latin Americanist). Here’s Argentine foreign minister Hector Timerman on the region’s latest foray into international diplomacy:
“The Argentine government shares the belief of its Mercosur partners Brazil and Uruguay that the time has come to recognize Palestine as a free and independent state.”
· In The Guardian, Pratap Chatterjee, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, on some of the latest additions to the Wikileaks Latin America file, which also link the Middle East and Latin America. According to cables from 2008, it appears US diplomats remain concerned about the presence of Islamic terrorist organizations in and around the triple frontier region where Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil meet. Chatterjee goes through the rather long history of US suspicions about the Tri-border region, in light of the recent cables.
· Other new Wikileaks material includes a few more cables on Honduras. Nobody has covered the Honduran crisis better than anthropologist Rosemary Joyce and she offers her fair minded assessment here, as well as conclusions about what the new documents tell us about US policy toward the 2009 coup. Also, US cables, the latest from 2009, discussing assessing Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. El País reports that re-2007 election cables claim Mr. Ortega was a recipient of both international drug money and “suitcases” full of Venezuelan cash. Similar claims about Venezuelan money are made about Bolivia, according to 2008 cables from the US Embassy in La Paz. Meanwhile the Washington Post has an interesting report on Iranian cash in Bolivia. It’s not secret money, however, and its impact is seen through, for example, the construction of new hospitals in the country. For Bolivian officials, the new relationship is a matter of national self-determination. “For the first time we have the ability to decide who we can be friends with, who we can have relations with,” says Gustavo Guzman, an adviser to the Morales administration and former ambassador to the United States. “We finally have the ability to make our own decisions.”
· EFE reports on Arturo Valenzuela’s talks with Honduran leader Pepe Lobo yesterday, writing that security, aid cooperation, investment, and the return of ousted former president Manuel Zelaya were the central topics of discussion.
· From the AFP, Mario Vargas Llosa added his name to the list of former Latin American leaders and intellectuals who favor of drug decriminalization. From Sweden, he says the Mexican government has been courageous in its fight against narcotraffickers but added the issue could only be resolved through new drug decriminalization policies.
· The Miami Herald on how Raul Castro got religion. The Cuban leader attended his first Hanukkah ceremony with Havana’s Jewish community this week. He made no mention of detained Jewish-American contractor, Alan Gross, the paper reports. But a Washington Post editorial this morning does.
· The New York Times picks up news of the passing of perhaps Uruguay’s most important human rights activist, María Ester Gatti. Gatti helped found the Uruguayan Mothers and Families of Disappeared Prisoners after her daughter and granddaughter were disappeared in 1976.
· And finally, from last week’s Senate hearing on US Policy toward in Latin America in 2010, transcripts of remarks from the Wilson Center’s Cynthia Arnson and WOLA’s Joy Olson. Mark Schneider and Jaime Daremblum also offered comments. Video of the full hearing is available here.
Correction: Bullet point one above initially identified ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo as Colombian. He is, in fact, Argentine.
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