Alarmed and clear-eyed Americans have said that they are fighting to preserve the foundation of our democracy. In fact, across most of the country, save Florida, they voted that sentiment in November’s general election.
Sure, last week’s near-brawl over the election of a Republican speaker of the House showed another crack in the illusion that our democracy is a well-oiled machine. But, there still are guardrails, a structure and institutions to protect the U.S. Constitution.
Imagine if those guardrails didn’t hold, as many feared on Jan. 6, 2021?
What few barriers, what little structure to which Haiti clung have disappeared. Starting Monday, the terms of Haiti’s final 10 elected senators expired. Because of Haiti’s failure to hold timely legislative elections in October 2019, the last tier of the 30-seat Senate is resigning, leaving the nation without a Parliament.
Bereft of officials
The nation, with a population of 12 million, has not a single elected official. There is Prime Minister Ariel Henry, but he was named by President Jovenel Moïse, who was assassinated in July 2021.
According to an article by Miami Herald Caribbean Correspondent Jacqueline Charles: “Now, for the first time since the adoption of the 1987 Constitution . . . there are few constitutional entities in existence beyond the struggling, ill-equipped Haiti National Police, a reconstituted army and the court of auditors and administrative disputes, whose members’ 10-year mandates are also nearing expiration.
“There is no functioning electoral commission; no functioning Supreme Court, no constitutional court. There is not a single elected official in the entire country of nearly 12 million people — not a council member, not a mayor and certainly not a president.”
This is new-level dystopia, even for Haiti. And we in South Florida should care, for the state of the nation and, especially, for the people surviving under such desperate conditions. This latest deterioration of law and order and structure should further inform our understanding of and empathy for the waves of Haitian migrants seeking entry and asylum here. What impacts Haiti eventually affects South Florida.
Haiti, effectively, has completed it slide into becoming failed state, with both Haitian leaders and the international community watching it happen.
Who will help?
“The worst it’s ever been,” Georges Fauriol, a Haiti specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told Charles.
After all, according to the United Nations, violent gangs rule the nation, in charge of roughly two-thirds of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
For a country that has withstood, barely, military takeovers, rigged elections, a cholera epidemic spawned by U.N. peacekeepers, an unlikely earthquake — 13 years ago Thursday — in which 220,000 people died and the murders of judges, journalists and, last year, a president, the situation has never been this bleak, experts say.
It’s almost impossible to grasp the enormousness of Haiti’s challenge.
Prime Minister Henry announced a start of an electoral process in a speech on Jan. 1 to commemorate Haiti’s 219th anniversary of independence from France. How likely elections will come to pass is anyone’s guess.
Haiti needs a hero and a miracle. More urgently, it needs other countries’ help boosting its beleaguered national police. Still, international help can’t fix this without the guidance of Haitians, from politicians to civil-society groups to, yes, gang leaders, who should take the lead in rescuing their country.
