Imperial Management

American diplomatic chief Hillary Clinton paid a brief visit yesterday to a Haiti in agony to insist on the withdrawal of Presidential candidate Jude Celestin from the second round of elections, as had been decreed by the Organization of American States (OAS), in a barefaced intervention in the internal affairs of a poor country.

Without any pretense, Mrs. Clinton summoned President René Préval and the candidates Celestin, Mirlande Manigrat and Michel Marteelly, to whom she then made known the imperial order, which it seems was received without any raised eyebrows.

According to the results provided by the Electoral Council of Haiti, in the Nov. 28 presidential elections Manigat received 31.3 percent of the votes, Celestin 22.4 percent and Marteelly 21.84 percent.

A subsequent report by the OAS took away six-tenths of a percent from the vote total of Celestin and added four-tenths to that of Marteelly, with the result that the governing party candidate was relegated to third place.

Faced with Celestin’s tardiness in withdrawing his candidacy for the second round of elections, Secretary Clinton decided to travel to Port-au-Prince to personally insist that he comply with the instructions of the OAS.

After resorting to such a coarse form of meddling, the Secretary of State then took the time to ask about the progress of reconstruction in Haiti and the efforts to combat the cholera epidemic, without anyone demanding that the United States unblock approved aid amounting to more than a billion dollars.

It is clear that in Haiti, as in most of the Latin American backyard, not even a mosquito moves without Washington’s consent, but this time they did not even maintain the minimum formalities or appearances, which only serves to confirm that for the U.S. government terms such as “sovereignty” and “self-determination” are merely euphemisms.

For those imperial purposes, the return of a dictator, Jean Claude Duvalier, was permitted; the return of a constitutionally-elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was blocked; and the results of a farcical election were touched up and a candidate ordered to be excluded.

It hurts to see the Haitian political class — in all its stripes — prostrate itself in the face of such orders and illegal demands, without anyone even making the slightest protest.

Secretary Clinton was not a messenger bearing good tidings, such as, say, the anxiously desired announcement that the United States Senate had unblocked the more than a billion dollars destined for the reconstruction of Haiti. This visit was one of imperial management, and nothing more.