We gotta quit the Haiti habit of making bad bets on loser leaders | Opinion

Assembling a new transitional governing council in Haiti will be grueling, writes WLRN Americas editor Tim Padgett, but it's an opportunity to promote better leadership than the toxic ruling class Ariel Henry represents.

Saving Haiti from its current hell will require more than just the resignation of Ariel Henry — it’ll take the exit of the toxic ruling class Henry represents.

To paraphrase the movie “Brokeback Mountain,” I doubt the U.S. and the international community know how to quit those folks. But if they don’t, we shouldn’t expect post-Henry Haiti to look better a year from now or even five years from now.

Constitutionally, the 74-year-old Henry probably shouldn’t have been Haiti’s prime minister for one day, let alone more than 30 months.

Although then-President Jovenel Moïse had tapped Henry to be his new PM a couple days before Moïse was brutally assassinated in July of 2021, Moïse had not yet made it official and Henry had not yet been sworn in. As a result, under Article 149 of Haiti’s Constitution, the still legitimate PM at that moment, Claude Joseph, should have continued leading Haiti’s government as president of the Council of Ministers until a replacement for Moïse could be elected.

And the thing is, for all the criticism we heap on Haiti’s dysfunctional democracy, most Haitians got that point. So they weren’t too pleased when the U.S., the U.N. and a Mount Olympus of other developed countries and organizations, known as the Core Group, overrode the constitutional thing and more or less forced Henry on them as their prime minister — because the Core Group considered Henry a better bet to stabilize Haiti after Moïse’s murder.

Memo to the Core Group: Stay out of Las Vegas, because your betting skills are really lame.

I don’t know if Joseph would have been a better bet, and I’m well aware Henry is a respected neurosurgeon and children’s health advocate. But I do know Joseph couldn’t have been a more disastrous caretaker-government chief than Henry.

Henry not only failed to stabilize Haiti and hold desperately needed elections, he’s cluelessly overseen its plank-walk to the edge of national abyss. Even the violent gangs that were already terrorizing Haiti before Moïse’s assassination considered Henry a sort of imperial imposition on the country. So they used their hatred for him, and his arrogant refusal to give up power, as an excuse for the orgy of murder, kidnapping and economic ruin they’ve sledgehammered down Haitians’ throats since 2021.

Yet the U.S. and the Core Group kept doubling down on Henry at the roulette table — until it became horrifically obvious this month that those gangs are now the real power in Haiti. Last week, the international community finally prodded its catastrophic bet to announce he’ll resign.

Resign, that is, as soon as a transitional governing council is in place to usher Haiti to the public security and presidential vote that Henry couldn’t or wouldn’t secure.

Assembling that council will be grueling. But it marks an opportunity to start identifying and promoting a fresher, less corrupt leadership cohort in Haiti. People who consider democracy an essential objective instead of an optional inconvenience.

People who want to disarm Haiti’s gangs rather than sponsor them as their personal political street enforcers.

Too many if not all of Haiti’s leaders since the fall of the monstrous Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 have fallen into the latter camp. And they’ve all too often, if not always, been endorsed by the U.S. and international community as “the best bet” — even a vulgar, authoritarian clown like Moïse’s predecessor, Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, who was the Obama administration’s bet.

Now is the moment to pass the torch in Haiti — and pass it with more input from Haitians themselves for a change than from Core Group diplomats. I often hear younger names like James Beltis, a leading member of the group of civic and political leaders known as the Montana Accord that’s put forth one of the stronger proposals for a path back to steady governance in Haiti, or Velina Charlier, who is one of the country’s leading anti-corruption voices, as examples of the sort of 21st-century democrats who are significantly better long-term bets.

I’m not saying Beltis or Charlier should necessarily be on Haiti’s new transitional council. I am saying they represent the contingent of Haitians who should occupy it.

The Haitians who give us reason to finally quit Haitians like Henry.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.