Protests in Port-au-Prince to demand the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse VALERIE BAERISWYL / AFP
The political and social crisis in Haiti took another step towards ungovernability after President Jovenel Moïse announced on Sunday an attempted coup against him and confirmed his intention to continue in office until February 2022. The reaction of Moïse was the answer to several weeks of violent demonstrations in different cities of the country to ask for his resignation on the grounds that his term ended this weekend.
Moïse spoke at the Port-au-Prince airport before traveling to Jacmel, where one of the most famous carnivals in the Caribbean began, and which will be held despite the pandemic and unrest, in an effort of forced normality.
"There was an attempt on my life," said the president in reference to an alleged plot that began on November 20.
But Moïse did not limit himself to criticizing the press and announced the arrest of 23 people whom he accused of trying to assassinate him.
Among those arrested is Supreme Court Judge Yvickel Dabrézil, the man supported by the opposition to become interim president in the event that Moïse left power and remained in office until the call for elections.
According to the authorities, Judge Dabrézil even had a copy of the inauguration speech.
The arrests are the attempt to neutralize an opposition movement that moves in the streets and in the institutions to try to overthrow the government of the poorest country in America.
The opposition demands his departure on the grounds that his term ended on Sunday.
Moïse, for his part, has repeatedly stated that his five-year term ends in February 2022.
The political origin of the conflict is in the convulsive elections of 2017. A year earlier, Michel Martelly ended his term, but the chaotic elections forced him to appoint a provisional president for a year until Moïse took office.
According to Francisco Fernández, advisor to the president, "the street is being agitated by violent groups that do not exceed 30 people and that generate violence and uncertainty," he said in an interview with EL PAÍS from Port-au-Prince.
“There is a coup attempt underway.
The opposition wants to count the first year, but that first year another president in interim conditions was at the helm and he was also from the opposition, "said the political advisor of the Sola firm.
The opposition also denounced the authoritarian turn of the president since he dissolved Parliament a year ago and governs by decree, fueling criticism.
At the same time, violence and kidnappings have soared in the country and are the main fear of a population subjected to violent gangs.
According to the experts consulted, all this has created one of the most tense scenarios in recent years in a country that has lived on the wire for decades.
Since the Duvalier dynasty was overthrown 35 years ago, Haiti is the Latin American country that has had more governments in less time.
From 1986 to the present, it has had 20 different presidents ranging from generals to acting ministers.
Moïse's tenure is even more delicate given his weakness on the street, as he was barely elected with some 600,000 votes in a country of 11 million inhabitants.
"Activities are paralyzed and the streets were empty throughout the weekend, transportation does not work and the situation is very tense and with general fear among the population," the journalist Milo Milfort described to EL PAÍS from the capital.
"Everything indicates that the protests will grow in the coming days and the repression could increase, although for the opposition the persecution against them has already begun with the arrest of these 23 people," the reporter explained.
With the streets in turmoil and the opposition mobilized, Moïse's main support comes from the international community, mainly the United States.
After a management very close to Donald Trump, the 52-year-old president, son of a merchant and a seamstress of poor origin, has obtained the support of the new Joe Biden Administration whose team defended that his term would end until 2022. To this Support has been added by the Core Group, the group of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Spain and Germany.
However, in December, the Core Group joined the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) in criticizing the authoritarian turn of the latest Moïse decrees that served to create an intelligence agency and classify acts as "terrorism". vandalism.
According to Olga Regueira, a Spanish resident in Haiti who has worked for 13 years for cooperation organizations, the international community supports Moïse because his fall "could mean destabilization in a geopolitically important area of the Caribbean," she explains to this newspaper.
Located near Cuba, between Miami and Venezuela, Haiti is an important point for the United States for drug trafficking and emigration.
According to Regueira, in Haiti there has always been “instability, but never so many weapons distributed among the population as now.
In the country there are at least 76 armed gangs, not political or ideological, but destined to rob and kidnap for little money and made up of gang members who are more powerful than the State itself.
"The president is a cowering man who moves surrounded by a strong entourage of bodyguards and the opposition is a corrupt and not very hopeful amalgam made up of the families that have always controlled the economy," he summarizes.