Pompeo heads to Dominican Republic with message for Haiti
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to use this weekend’s visit to the inauguration of Dominican Republic President-elect Luis Abinader to show U.S. support for the country and to step up pressure on its neighbor, Haiti, to schedule its long overdue legislative elections.
Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, who also has announced plans to travel to Sunday’s swearing-in, is among two foreign officials — the other is Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu — whom Pompeo is scheduled to have talks with along with Abinader and outgoing Dominican President Danilo Medina.
“Our push here is to say there are a lot of things that you can be doing right now during the COVID crisis to prepare yourself so that you’re ready to do elections as soon as it’s technically feasible,” Michael Kozak, the U.S. acting assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said about Haiti. “We’re trying to build a little bit of a fire there and say, ‘Come on, get the groundwork laid because if you’re going to have a democracy that means all three branches of democracy need to be in place. It just can’t be one or two.’ ”
The trip to the Dominican
Republic is scheduled to be a one-day affair for Pompeo, who will head the U.S. delegation. The group will first attend Abinader’s swearing-in at the National Congress in the capital, and then meet with Medina. Medina’s center-left Dominican Liberation
Party (PLD) was booted from office last month after 16 years in power when Abinader, an economist, and his Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) defeated both Medina’s chosen successor and former President Leonel Fernandez.
“The inauguration of President Abinader is a fitting occasion to reaffirm our shared commitment to upholding democracy in our hemisphere of freedom,” Kozak said. “The Dominican Republic is a really important partner of ours . ... The U.S. is the, I think the biggest investor in the country. It’s a rapidly growing economy in our region . ... We just want to manifest the support for their democracy and the successful election they have.”
Under Medina, who was barred from seeking a third term after serving two consecutive presidential terms, the Dominican Republic’s economy thrived. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created in just the last three years, and thousands of new classrooms have been built. The country, which shares the island of
Hispaniola with Haiti, also invested heavily in tourism and medical infrastructure.
But the Dominican Republic also struggled with transparency, corruption and the rule of law, subjects Pompeo plans to address in discussions with Abinader over strengthening U.S. relations and the investment climate. The Dominican Republic also, to the Trump administration’s dismay in 2018, switched its allegiance from Taiwan to China.
Kozak said while he doesn’t want to predict which topics will come up in the discussions between Pompeo and Abinader, the message on China has been the same to every country in the region: Deal with China “on your modern, 21st century, transparent, open good-businesspractices terms,” he said. “People can deal successfully with China; they just have to be tough minded about it and we find that that message resonates very well in the region.”
Another challenge for the Dominican Republic has been its tense relations with Haiti, which worsened this week when a Dominican
flag was hoisted on Haitian territory at one of the border crossings. During Medina’s presidency, more than 70,000 Haitians were deported from the country, and more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent were stripped of their Dominican nationality in a 2013 controversial constitutional court ruling that removed citizenship from anyone born after 1929 to parents who were undocumented.
The high-level visit comes as Pompeo’s own State Department warns Americans to steer clear of the Dominican Republic because of the surge in COVID-19 cases, and a lack of hospital beds. The epicenter of coronavirus infections in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic has registered more positive cases — 83,134 as of Friday — than the entire rest of the Caribbean combined. It also has had more coronavirus deaths than any other in the region adjusting for population.
“The secretary feels that with proper precautions we can navigate the COVID environment and still do our jobs of tying to advance America’s diplomacy,” Kozak said.
After attending Mass, the U.S. delegation will head to an inauguration lunch, where the meeting between Pompeo and Moïse is scheduled to take place.
In January, the terms of the entire Haitian Lower Chamber of Deputies expired and Moïse announced on Twitter that the terms of two-thirds of the Senate had also expired, rendering the body dysfunctional. In July, the terms of all the country’s mayors and local elected officials also expired, leaving Moïse as one of only 11 elected officials in the country of 11 million.
While elections were due in October, they did not happen because Haiti was in the midst of violent, anti-government protests and Moïse never sent an electoral law to the Parliament to be voted on. He also did not resend a budget to be voted on after the president of the Lower Chamber of Deputies, who was an ally, rejected the budget he sent.
“At the time, the fault for [the Parliament] not having an elected successor was that the Parliament had failed to pass an elections law and failed to pass a budget for elections; this, mind you, was all preCOVID. They hadn’t done anything. So we didn’t hold President Moïse responsible for the failure of the legislature to do its job,”
Kozak said. “But President Moïse has been ruling ... since that time by decree and does have it within his power to pass an elections law.”
While Moïse has been discussing elections, he’s also talking about rewriting the Haitian constitution. At the same time, there are questions about whether Haiti is headed into a new crisis with the slow registration of millions of eligible voters due to COVID-19, and distrust of a new voter identification system purchased by the Moïse administration without a bidding process.
There is also a debate about whether Moïse’s presidential term ends in February 2021 or 2022, as well as worrying concerns about growing insecurity and armed gangs being used as election tools.
After Moïse’s prime minister, Joseph Jouthe, publicly slammed the acting police chief in a televised town hall earlier this week, the U.S. Embassy and United Nations quickly issued statements to show support for the Haiti National Police.
But the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti also expressed concerns about the resurgence of violence, which has left at least 159 dead, including babies, and 92 injured from armed gang clashes. It called on Haitian authorities to fund the police and to execute a warrant for the arrest of a notorious gang leader, Jimmy Cherizier, alias “Barbecue,” believed to be involved in several murders and massacres.
In a new report issued Friday illustrating the deteriorating environment, the National Human Rights Defense Network, documenting recent attacks by gangs in the Cité Soleil slum, said that between June 1 and July 28, 2020, at least 111 people were murdered, 48 went missing and 20 others were wounded. Also, 18 women and girls were repeatedly raped by armed bandits and at least six houses were burned.
As for Sunday’s meeting between Pompeo and Moïse, the message will be clear.
“They need to pass or establish a budget. They need to figure out how to deal with [voters’] registration issues,” Kozak said, noting that to Moïse’s credit he has written to various sectors of Haitian society to make nominations to the nine-member elections commission following the resignation of members last month.
“The danger in Haiti is if you make everything dependent on everything else getting resolved, nothing gets resolved.”