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 In the media coverage of Haiti's ongoing
electoral crisis, presidential candidate
Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly,
whom ruling Unity party candidate
Jude Célestin edged out of Haiti's Jan.
16 run-off by less than 1%, has been
portrayed as the victim of voting fraud
and the leader of a populist upsurge
against Haiti’s crooked Provisional
Electoral Council (CEP). Some have questioned his presidential
suitability by pointing to his vulgar
antics as a konpa musician over the
last two decades, where he often made
demeaning comments about women
and periodically dropped his trousers to
bare his backside.
The real problem with Martelly,
however, is not his perceived immorality,
but his heinous political history and
close affiliation with the reactionary
“forces of darkness," as they are called
in Haiti, which have snuffed out each
genuine attempt Haitians have made
over the past 20 years to elect a democratic
government. Far from a champion
of democracy, Martelly has been
a cheerleader for, and perhaps even a
participant in, bloody coups d'état and
military rule. Duvalierist Affinities
Under the Duvalier dictatorship,
Martelly ran the Garage, a nightclub
patronized by army officers and members
of Haiti’s tiny ruling class.
At a recent press conference,
Martelly spoke nostalgically of the Duvalierist
era, when François "Papa Doc"
Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude
"Baby Doc" enforced their iron rule with
gun and machete wielding Tonton Macoutes,
a sort of Haitian Gestapo.
“Today the dog is eating its
vomit," lamented Marcus Garcia of Radio
Mélodie FM in a Dec. 8 editorial.
While "Michel Martelly openly defends
the Duvalier regime in a press conference,”
the youth who have been duped
into supporting him are “without memory
of [the infamous political prison]
Fort Dimanche-Fort La mort, without
memory of the Nov. 29, 1987 electoral
massacre,” when neo-Duvalierist thugs
killed hundreds of would-be voters. In a 2002 article, the Washington
Post explained how the konpa singer
was a long-time “favorite of the thugs
who worked on behalf of the hated
Duvalier family dictatorship before its
1986 collapse.” But the mainstream
media of late has yet to pick up on the
singer’s past affiliations.
Duvalierist affinities should not
be taken lightly. Human rights groups
such as the League of Former Political
Prisoners and Families of the Disappeared
compiled a partial list of several
thousand of the Duvalier regime’s
victims, which was published in Haïti Progrès in 1987, but total estimates
of those killed under the U.S.-backed
29-year long dictatorship range from
30,000 to 50,000 people.
After Baby Doc’s fall in
February 1986, a mass democratic
movement, long repressed by the
Duvaliers, burst forth and became
known as the Lavalas, or flood. Martelly
quickly became a bitter Lavalas
opponent, making trenchant attacks
against the popular movement in his
songs played widely on Haitian radio. The Rise of Aristide and
the 1991 Coup Following his dramatic election
with 67% of the vote in Dec. 16,
1990 elections, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
a former parish priest and Lavalas
movement leader, was inaugurated on
Feb. 7, 1991 as Haiti’s democratically
elected president, but then deposed by
a military coup, for the first time, on
Sep. 30, 1991, only eight months into
his first term. Martelly “was closely
identified with sympathizers of the
1991 military coup that ousted former
President Jean- Bertrand Aristide,” the
Miami Herald observed in 1996. The military junta that ruled Haiti
between 1991 and 1994 was bloody
and brutal. According to Human Rights
Watch, some 5,000 people were murdered
by the junta’s soldiers and paramilitaries,
and thousands more tortured
and raped. Hundreds of thousands were
driven into hiding and exile. Martelly
became the coup’s joker, applauding
the junta while it was in power.
He was friends with the dreaded
Lt. Col. Michel François, who, as Police
Chief, was the principal director of
the coup's executioners. For instance,
according to a fact-finding report by
former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey
Clark's Haiti Commission of Inquiry into
the Sep. 30 Coup d'Etat, François drove
a red Jeep leading several buses full of
soldiers into large crowds demonstrating
against the coup on the Champ de
Mars in front of the National Palace on
the night of Sep. 30, 1991. (A January
1991 coup d'état, nine months earlier,
had been turned back by such massive
demonstrations.) The crowds applauded
the soldiers, thinking they had come
to put down the coup. Instead, on François'
signal, the bus windows opened,
then police and soldiers mowed down
hundreds of demonstrators with machine-
gun fi re. Martelly claims his moniker
“Sweet Micky” (also the name of his
band) came from a nightclub performance
in 1988, but it's a nickname
Col. Michel François also shared. U.S.
documentary filmmaker and writer
Kevin Pina recalls a concert at the El
Rancho Hotel in Port-au-Prince in July
1993 where Colonel “Michel François,
... who was also called ‘Sweet Micky’
after the coup of 1991 because people
claimed he would have a broad smile
on his face as he killed Lavalas partisans,
took to the stage” and “held
up Martelly’s hand announcing to the
crowd, ‘This is the real Sweet Micky.’”
Pina adds, “That’s the first time I ever
heard Martelly referred to as such.”
One concert that Martelly performed
at the request of Michel François
and military junta leaders was billed as
a demonstration against Dante Caputo,
the United Nations special representative
to Haiti who was attempting to
deploy UN human rights observers
into the country. At that same time, the
Haitian army and the infamous FRAPH
death squads were slaughtering members
of the anti-coup resistance. Martelly, known at the time to
have many friends throughout the
military, explained to the Miami New
Times: “I didn’t accept [the request to
play] because I was Michel François’s
friend, I did not accept because it was
the Army. I went because I did not
want Aristide back.”
Most shockingly, Father Jean-
Marie Vincent (who was killed by a
coup death-squad on Aug. 28, 1994)
accused Martelly of accompanying the
Haitian police on deadly night-time
raids to track down suspected Lavalas
resistance leaders. “We have information
that Michel Martelly has been
traveling with death squads from the
police when they go out at night to
hunt and kill Lavalas leaders,” Vincent
told filmmaker Pina in a videotaped interview. After Aristide returned to Haiti in
October 1994, Martelly spent most of
his time living “in a condo on Miami
Beach,” where he “had a regular gig at
the Promenade on Ocean Drive, where
his band Sweet Micky performed compas,
rhythmic Haitian dance music,”
according to the Miami New Times.
In 2000, Aristide was overwhelmingly
elected to a second term.
But the George W. Bush administration,
also coming into power at that time,
launched a destabilization campaign to
overthrow Aristide, which is detailed in
Peter Hallward’s 2007 book Damming
the Flood. Martelly became a willing
participant in that germinating coup. In 2002, the noose was tightening
around Aristide. Former soldiers had
attempted a coup on Dec. 17, 2001,
and the U.S. aid embargo was taking its
toll. Nonetheless, Aristide’s government
had launched several social investment
programs including food cooperatives,
the building of unprecedented numbers
of schools, subsidization of school
books, and other literacy promotion.
In his 2002 Carnival song, Martelly
referred “to recent riots at a dockside
warehouse here that were sparked by
word that officials from Aristide’s party
were stealing from a food program
for the poor,” wrote the Washington
Post. Although corruption under Aristide
paled next to that under the 1991
military junta that Martelly supported,
his Carnival song hit a nerve.
By 2003, Martelly was on average
spending $150,000 to $200,000
on his floats for Port-au-Prince’s annual
Carnival, according to the Miami
Herald. During Carnival, in which
mockery of the government is a tradition, Martelly aimed extremely sharp
and vulgar criticism at Aristide. During
that time, “Kolonget manman ou Aristide"
was one of Sweet Micky's refrains,
perhaps the worst curse one can make
in Kreyòl, meaning literally "the slave
master fucked your mother.” The 2004 Coup and its aftermath
In February 2004, Aristide was
driven from power yet again. A U.S.
Navy Seal team took the president from
his home – Aristide called it “a modern
kidnapping” – and sent him into exile
in Africa, where he remains to this
day.
In the build-up to that coup, so-called
“rebels” composed of former Haitian
Army soldiers and former FRAPH
death-squad paramilitaries, ran raids
into Haiti’s Central Plateau and North,
savagely executing dozens of Aristide
supporters, government officials and
some of their family members. Wyclef
Jean, a friend of Martelly, described the
“rebels” as freedom fighters “standing
up for their rights.”
Following the coup, U.S., French,
and Canadian soldiers occupied Haiti
and set up an illegal de facto regime.
As outcry against the February coup
grew, Martelly held a concert in Port-au-Prince in April 2004 to counter calls
for Aristide’s return. The concert was
entitled: “Keep him out!” In September 2004, Tropical
Storm Jeanne flooded the northwest
city of Gonaïves, killing some 3,000
people. U.S.-installed de facto Prime
Minister Gérard Latortue was widely
criticized for his ineffective and belated
response to the disaster. One of his few
initiatives was to hold a fundraiser with
business leaders of the Haitian American
Chamber of Commerce. Martelly,
who had used his music only to undermine
Aristide, headlined the Latortue
gala, the Miami Herald reported.
In 2006, with Lavalas militants
driven into hiding, jailed, or murdered,
the Latortue regime held an election
which brought former-President René
Préval back to power. The Lavalas base
supported Préval, thinking he would
bring Aristide back, free all the coup's
political prisoners, and reverse the neo-liberal
march of the Latortue dictatorship. But Préval betrayed these expectations,
creating a government dominated
by coup supporters and working
closely with the foreign military occupation
which had now been handed
off to the UN. He soon became reviled
by large swathes of the poor for failing
to enable Aristide's return or to restart
many of Aristide's popular social investment
programs. By 2009, Préval's
CEP banned Aristide's party, the Lavalas
Family (FL), from partial senatorial
elections and later presidential and
parliamentary elections. Préval's weak
response to the catastrophic January
2010 earthquake accelerated his decline. The 2010 Selections and
Martelly’s Rise Finally, the CEP fixed general
elections for Nov. 28, 2010. The Associated
Press reported Dec. 10 that
Martelly’s “political popularity took off
in the weeks before the vote and seems
to have surged since it appeared he
had been narrowly disqualified from
the race.”
This surge owes a lot to Martelly’s
hi-tech campaign, which outgunned
and outclassed his 18 rivals by
launching tens of thousands of computerized
messages asking people to
vote for him.
Martelly hired a slick Spanish
public relations firm to manage his
campaign and break into the spotlight.
“The Madrid-based Sola, who played
an indispensable role in getting Mexico's
Felipe Calderón into the president's
chair in 2006, has been running the
Martelly campaign for the past seven
weeks, which goes a long way toward
explaining how the antic-prone musician
suddenly emerged as a leading
contender for Haiti's presidency,” reported
The Toronto Star on Dec. 6. Calderón is widely considered
to have stolen the 2006 election from
leftist candidate López Obrador, a dirty
victory which pleased Washington. The
firm Ostos & Sola has also helped the
campaign of Lech Walesa, the transnational
elite's darling in Poland. Damian
Merlo, Ostos & Sola's executive director
and Martelly campaign point-man,
worked on the presidential campaign
of U.S. Republican John McCain before
joining the fi rm. All of these associations
raise questions about what "hidden
hand” may be behind the Martelly
campaign.
“Today’s $50 million question:
who is the Miami businessman who
reached out to Antonia Sola to be Michel
Martelly’s campaign fixer?” wrote
the Toronto Star. “Sola smiles at the
question, all Spanish charm. He’s not
saying. ‘A friend, a businessman, presented
Michel to us in the U.S.,’ he
says.”
The key to Sola’s formula for
Martelly was to present him as an
“outsider,” even though he had been
the ultimate “insider” with the pro-coup
bourgeoisie that overthrew Aristide
twice. On Nov. 28, as it became apparent
that Haiti’s election was riddled with
fraud and disenfranchisement, Martelly
joined with 11 other candidates to call
for election’s annulment. But later that
day, Edmond Mulet, who heads the UN
Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH),
personally called Martelly to tell him
that he was leading, Al Jazeera reported.
Sweet Micky, without even telling
the other candidates in the impromptu
front, jumped back in the race.
The next day, Martelly denied he
had ever signed the joint letter read in
his nodding presence at the candidates’
joint press conference on Nov. 28 calling
for the election’s annulment. He
explained “his change of position by
saying his candidacy had been leading
in polling stations where there had
not been fraud,” Chicago’s Daily Herald
reported. “He saw all the fraud happening
on election day,” motorcycle taxi driver
Weed Charlot told IPS about Martelly.
“But now he sees he has some votes
and power. So he’ll accept the election.”
The same day he spoke to Martelly,
Mulet called candidate Mirlande
Manigat to also tell her she was leading
in the vote. She too pulled out of the
candidates’ annulment front.
Then, on Dec. 7, the CEP announced
that Manigat was leading with
Unity's Célestin in second-place, and
hence the second-round. Martelly, who
apparently came in third with just over
21%, about 6,800 votes short of Célestin,
switched back into protest-mode.
Popular anger was already high
with Préval and the CEP for excluding
the Lavalas Family (only 23% of Haiti's
4.7 million voters turned out, according
to the CEP). The election mess was the
last straw. Furthermore, there was rage at
MINUSTAH for attempting to cover-up
that its troops in Mirebalais had accidentally
introduced cholera into Haiti,
where the disease is now a pandemic.
With Wyclef Jean at his side predicting
“civil war,’ Martelly channeled
the deep popular frustration to attack
the government for “robbing” him of
a victory he claimed should have been
his.
The result has been a wave of
election-related mayhem. “It is clear
that most of the acts of violence in
Haiti around the election have been
carried out by Martelly’s supporters,"
said Ricot Dupuy of Radio Soleil d'Haïti,
based in Brooklyn.
“Thousands of his supporters
have paralyzed the capital and other
cities in protests that included attacks
on public buildings,” Reuters reported.
Some people have died in drive-by
shootings and skirmishes between
Martelly's supporters and those of Célestin.
In late November, Haitian journalist
Wadner Pierre witnessed a group
of Martelly supporters at the Building
2004 voting center in Port-au-Prince
throw rocks and chant: “If you don’t
let us vote, we will burn this building
down.”
Martelly supporters are responsible
for burning a number of government
buildings in the capital and in the
southern city of Aux Cayes. They have also assaulted some opponents, while
Célestin backers have been accused of
killing at least one Martelly supporter. Former Col. Himmler Rébu said
on Haiti's Signal FM that he had witnessed
the tactics of Martelly's troops
in the street. "This is not something
simple," he said, a Kreyòl understatement
that implies there are hidden
forces at work.
In short, there are two movements
in Haiti today which are being
simplified into one. There are the
Lavalas masses mobilized against
Préval's fraudulent exclusionary elections
and the UN occupation, as well
as for Aristide's return. Then there is the bid by Martelly,
using his and Wyclef's celebrity
and Ostos & Sola's scientific techniques,
to co-opt this movement to
bring him to power. To confuse people,
he equates Préval with Aristide,
pretending they are the twin governments
responsible for the "failed policies”
of the past two decades.
In reality, Haiti's sad state today
can be mostly attributed to the
1991 and 2004 coups which Martelly
supported. Furthermore, the power
behind Préval - Haiti's pro-coup
bourgeoisie - is close to Martelly, and
imperialism is not threatened by him.
We are witnessing a fi erce rivalry between
two factions which share the
same two backers: Haiti's anti-Lavalas
business class and transnational
elites with the U.S. as their most
powerful state apparatus. As Martelly explained to the
Huffington Post’s Georgianne Nienaber,
he is very much in tune with
Washington’s prescription for Haiti,
supporting “anything that will help
exports... anything that will help the
private sector.”
Secondly, Martelly does not
support the people’s call to end the
UN occupation of Haiti: “I want
to say to the international community,
the diplomatic corps, and
non-governmental agencies that we
need them,” he said in the same interview.
Ultimately, Martelly is not a
“dark horse” candidate, as Canada’s
Globe & Mail suggests, who has
come out of nowhere to lead “Haiti’s
young and dispossessed.” He is a
man with a long history of service to
Haiti’s “Morally Repugnant Elite.”
During his campaign, Martelly
was fond of saying that in Haiti “it’s
more about the man than about the
plan.” If this is true, Haitians should
have grave misgiving about a man
who has backed two coup regimes
that used death-squads to silence the
poor majority and throttle Haiti’s nascent
democracy. |
