Haiti’s poor say Aristide ally Préval won

As of Feb. 13 poor people in neighborhoods in an around Port-au-Prince were burning tires and setting up barricades to protest what they saw as manipulation of the vote count in the presidential election. Witnesses said the occupation MINUSTAH forces killed one protester in the Tabarre neighborhood.

The poor and working people had their candidate for the Feb. 7 presidential election—René Préval—and they were not going to let a foreign military occupation, threats to drown the election in blood— something that has happened more than once in Haiti—and the skulduggeries of a brutal government imposed on them by the forces of the United States, France and Canada, keep them from voting.

Reports as of Feb. 10 from Haiti had Préval leading by well over 50 percent in a field of 32 candidates. He appeared likely to win without a run-off, but by the evening of Feb. 11 the electoral commission announced that Préval’s total had fallen below 49 percent. Few believed the report, especially as a graph to illustrate the totals showed Préval with 52 percent. No other candidate had more than 12 percent.

Préval himself said from Port-au-Prince news conference on Feb. 14, “We have the conviction that massive frauds tarnish the election process.”

Préval won 90 percent of the vote in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest communities in Haiti, and 70 percent of the vote in Petionville, a neighborhood where many wealthy, well-off Haitians live along with the workers who serve them.

Well before 6 a.m., the time the polls opened, tens of thousands of people pour ed through the gates in the walls around Cité Soleil, heading for their polling places. The illegal government currently in power and the UN forces occupying Haiti had decided it was too dangerous to establish polling places in Cité Soleil. If the local polling places were closed, the people opened them. Where the polling places were already open, the people waited in huge lines for their turn.

Where the population was prevented from voting, they demonstrated, pro tested, and put intense pressure on the election officials to find some way of opening up the polls. As one poor Haitian told Reuters, “I’m 46 years old and never had a job. But I should be able to vote!”

The intense mass pressure on election officials forced them to keep the polls opened four hours beyond their scheduled closing time and to adopt the rule that no polling place would close while anybody was waiting on line. Well over 50 percent of Haitians voted.

In Gros Morne, a small, very poor town in northwest Haiti, a police officer shot and killed someone waiting to vote. By standers pulled out their machetes — a common tool for farm workers in Haiti - and killed the cop. Voting continued.

Préval said in his election platform that he will allow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to return. He also promises to institute a program of people’s literacy and take immediate steps to improve Haiti’s agriculture, where two-thirds of Haitians make their living. Literacy is a big issue, since well over half of all adult Haitians can neither read or write.

Préval’s Lespwa party is highly unlikely to win a majority in parliament, which places him even more on the defensive with respect to his political opponents, who are mainly wealthy bourgeois supporters of the coups against Aristide.

Préval, a businessperson who used to run a bakery in Port-au-Prince, was trained as an agronomist in Belgium and worked on Wall Street in New York—as a messenger and porter—before returning to Haiti. He was Aristide’s prime minister in his first government, followed him into exile and then was president between Aristide’s first and second term. Some elements of Aristide’s Lavalas Party have backed Préval. Fr. Gérard Jean-Juste, for example, recently endorsed Préval.

Should Préval be elected in the first round, this is not expected to bring substantial changes to daily life in Haiti. But it is obvious that neither the U.S. nor the right-wing forces in Haiti that overturned Aristide’s government want him in office. It is already apparent that the mass of the poor population are ready to struggle for Préval’s right to take office.