27018: Lemieux: LATimes: Haiti Candidates' Faces Familiar but Not Comforting (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Haiti Candidates' Faces Familiar but Not
Comforting
The 35 contenders in the first presidential vote
since Aristide's exile include former leaders, a
rebel tough guy and an accused killer.

By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer
12/26/06

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? A cocky guerrilla chief,
an accused assassin, a sweatshop industrialist
and several stalking-horses for presidents
previously deposed are among the candidates vying
to become head of state in this most troubled of
Western nations.

With 35 presidential contenders approved for the
Jan. 8 vote, Haiti's first election since
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into
African exile nearly two years ago offers a
rogues' gallery of the notorious and
controversial but few new faces because of four
high-profile exclusions.

Two wealthy businessmen, Texas food-service
tycoon Dumarsais Simeus and Florida investment
banker Samir Mourra, recently returned from
exile. They were deemed ineligible because they
hold U.S. citizenship, and the Haitian
Constitution prohibits a president of dual
nationality. Evans Nicolas won't be able to run
under the banner of exiled dictator Jean-Claude
"Baby Doc" Duvalier because of a registration
technicality. Defrocked priest and vocal Aristide
ally Gerard Jean-Juste was nixed because he's
been jailed since June for his alleged
involvement in a journalist's slaying.

With the leadership slate crowded and the contest
wide open, the election offers a cornucopia of
choices that span the political spectrum, from
socialists to populists to advocates of
iron-fisted law and order. Among them:

Rene Preval

The man who kept the presidential seat warm
during the five years separating Aristide's two
terms is widely thought to be the leading
contender despite making no public appearances
since the campaign began in October. "I intend to
campaign while lying on my back," he told a
journalist in declining an interview.

Preval, 62, has been keeping a low profile,
probably to avoid the question most supporters
ask: Would he allow Aristide to return to the
country? Although Aristide is ineligible to run
for president again, having served two terms, he
could wield influence over the masses through a
proxy, as he did during Preval's 1996-2001
tenure.

A veritable recluse at his remote bamboo
plantation in recent years, Preval and other
disenchanted defectors from Aristide's Lavalas
Party have reorganized within the Lespwa
movement, which has candidates competing in all
129 legislative and 140 local races.

"He's going to speak about Aristide when the
right moment arrives," explained Steven Benoit,
Preval's brother-in-law and a candidate for the
lower house of parliament, the Chamber of
Deputies.

Benoit says Preval can serve as a unifying force
by attracting Aristide's constituency, the
moneyed elite and Haitians who want the comfort
of a familiar face and "a corrected version of
Lavalas" dedicated to improving education,
healthcare, employment and security.

During the inaugural Nov. 3 march supporting
Preval, however, crowds from the slums chanted
for Aristide's return and became unruly. Police
broke up the rally.

Leslie Manigat

Another former president, the 75-year-old Manigat
makes a virtue of the mere 4 1/2 months he spent
in office in 1988. His was one of the numerous
short-lived leaderships between Baby Doc's 1986
departure for French exile and Aristide's
landslide election about four years later.

"We are the only party out of power throughout
all these disasters," argues the courtly
ex-president, who spent the Duvalier years in
exile, much of it in U.S. and European academic
circles. He remained in Haiti, though, through
most of Aristide's tenure to nurture a
center-right opposition through his Assembly of
Democratic National Progressives.

Manigat believes his countrymen see him as the
candidate best positioned to break with the
unrelenting tumult, exploitation and corruption
that have beset Haitians since their slave
ancestors ousted French colonial rulers 201 years
ago.

"It's true that Preval has a strong position in
the minds of traditionalists," he said. "But
people who feel that things can't go on in this
way anymore feel we have to do something new."

The veteran political scientist observed that
Preval may become a victim of his own popularity,
noting that Haitian candidates tend to form
alliances against the strongest rather than along
ideological lines.

Guy Philippe

The brash, young man who led the armed rebellion
of February 2004 makes no apologies for the
uprising that drove Aristide into exile,
instigated gang warfare in the slums and
unleashed such widespread insecurity that the
U.N. had to send troops.

"George Washington was a rebel. Charles de Gaulle
was a rebel. I am a rebel, and I am proud of what
I've done," the 37-year-old former Cap-Haitien
police chief said. "You can't save a country
without breaking the law sometimes. People have a
natural right to fight against tyranny, and
Aristide was a tyrant."

Philippe was initially a devout Aristide backer
when the president was seen as the voice of hope
among the millions of desperate poor, long
exploited by a few hundred elite families who
controlled more than 90% of the economy.

"I fought Aristide not because I hated him but
because I loved him too much, and he betrayed
us," said the warrior with the boyish face, an
American wife and two young children.

Philippe says his relative youth works in his
favor and that his rebellious activities
demonstrate his determination to end poverty and
corruption. "All the leaders of Latin America who
changed the course of their countries were
between 25 and 40," he contended, noting that 74%
of Haitians are under 40.

His plans for the country involve immediately
reinstating the army Aristide disbanded in 1995
and cleaning out the corrupt and politicized
police forces. Then he would seek to boost
Haitian agriculture by limiting rice and other
imported commodities that he argues have
devastated the national food market.

Marc Louis Bazin

Known as "the Chameleon" for his service in every
government since Baby Doc was in power, the
73-year-old Bazin can boast the broadest range of
government experience. He was finance minister to
Duvalier, prime minister under the military junta
that ousted Aristide in 1991 and held two Cabinet
posts during Aristide's second term.

"I have the capacity to align myself for the
public good," Bazin said. "For me, it's a plus.
No experience I've had has tarnished my image."

In his presidential run, Bazin has taken up the
mantle of Lavalas, the movement from which he was
recently estranged.

"We feel some responsibility to address the
frustration of the masses," he said from his
hillside headquarters in the fashionable Pacot
neighborhood.

A long-standing member of the foreign-educated
elite, Bazin has campaigned for land reform and
better distribution of wealth among Haiti's
citizens.

"You can't have 4,000 people in this country
earning 50% of the national income. We have to
get them to understand there is no future in
this," he said of the small elite that controls
the levers of production.

Bazin made it clear in an interview that he would
regard Aristide's return from exile as
potentially destabilizing and that Lavalas must
"turn the page" and reinvent itself without its
charismatic founder. But, like Preval, he has
sidestepped the issue on the campaign trail.

Charles Henri Baker

Running under the slogan of
"Order-Discipline-Work," the 50-year-old
businessman has broken with the industrial
elite's centuries-old practice of staying away
from the political front lines.

A poster boy for the hated bourgeoisie during
Aristide's era, Baker has amassed significant
support among the impoverished masses by building
on an alliance between the business community and
the main farmers union forged ahead of last
year's rebellion. Once a tobacco plantation
owner, Baker has been trumpeting that experience
20 years ago to galvanize support in the
countryside.

In the capital, Port-au-Prince, the heavy
security at his campaign headquarters speaks to
the emotions his candidacy evokes among
Aristide's militant supporters, who see him as
exploiting his 400 apparel assembly workers, most
of whom receive the minimum wage of $1.64 a day.
Ten-foot walls topped with coils of barbed wire
encircle the new building donated by a
well-heeled supporter. Armed sentries man the
iron gates, on guard against enemies and vandals.

He said his visibility in the opposition to
Aristide "gives me a little bit of credibility"
with those who recognized that the ousted leader
was corrupt and deceptive.

Asked about his association with the elite,
Baker, the only white candidate in the
presidential race, said he was proud of his place
in Haitian society.

"We have to let the people of Haiti know that
rich people are needed by the poor for them to
get richer," he said, espousing the trickle-down
theory of free enterprise.

Dany Toussaint

A former army major who became Aristide's
bodyguard during his first exile and returned
with him in 1994, Toussaint made his money
selling uniforms, weapons and ammunition to
security companies and his dubious reputation by
possibly being involved in the unsolved 2000
killing of crusading journalist Jean Dominique.

Aristide loyalists on trial in the United States
for drug trafficking have called Toussaint "the
assassin," but the candidate contends that he was
actually the target.

Toussaint, 48, has honed his candidacy around a
promise to restore law and order, warning
Haitians that security will trump human rights as
long as lawlessness continues. If elected, he
said, he would impose a 9 p.m. curfew to keep
minors off the streets so adults could go out
without fear of being ambushed by youth gangs. He
would also have police arrest drivers who block
the city's perpetual snarl of traffic.

"If we don't restore order, the international
community can give Haiti any amount of money and
it won't make a difference," he said, noting that
the slum gangs agitating for Aristide's return
have reinvigorated themselves with proceeds from
ransom kidnappings that bring in an estimated
$100,000 a day.

Although most serious candidates have been
fundraising among the 800,000 Haitian emigres in
New York and South Florida, Toussaint's campaign
has been limited. He remains barred from entering
the United States because of accusations in the
Dominique killing.

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