Haiti: Down With Imperialism, Elections

HAITI, January 26—Thousands of angry workers have taken to the streets throughout the country, burning tires, breaking windows, fighting with the police. PLP has participated in the demonstrations, calling for workers to build revolution, not electoral reforms.
The demonstrations have been in response to the widespread election fraud and incompetence in the presidential elections held in October with 54 candidates and the run-off scheduled between Jovenel Moïse, hand-picked front-man of the current president, Martelly, and Jude Celestin, protégé of previous president Préval. The government and its senior partners in the U.S. Embassy were forced to cancel the run-off because their complicity was exposed.
The United States has spent $33 million on these elections (The Nation, 1/27).
The first wave of protests was peaceful; no one paid attention. U.S. ambassador Peter Mulrean advised they be ignored.
Then the protest turned violent. Many chanted, “Down with Obama”; “we are rebels. We will not obey.” The workers in Haiti are exposing the hand of U.S. imperialism and its long history of occupying the country. The United Nations occupying force, an arm of U.S. imperialism, brought cholera to Haiti and killed over 9,000 people.
But the election debacle is neither fraud nor incompetence on the part of the ruling class. It is, in fact, part of an ongoing plan to suck workers into getting behind a capitalist system of mass exploitation and oppression. Democracy and elections are nothing but a cover to build popular support for a system that offers nothing to the working class but suffering: unemployment, hunger, toxic water (like Flint, Michigan), illiteracy and illness.
It matters little to the masses here which section of the ruling class wins the election: Jovenel the banana exporter or Jude the fake-left construction boss. Nor does it matter if Martelly stays beyond his Feb. 7 term end, as demanded by Guy Phillipe, a known drug dealer and former army leader behind the ouster of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Phillipe has threatened an armed insurrection by former army members to support Martelly.
Only by organizing the masses into a revolutionary communist party that fights to end capitalism and its imperialist masters, can workers build a society that responds to its own interests.
In the anti-imperialist Haitian song “Y’a Danger,”  Jean Jean Roosevelt warns the bosses of the coming dangers. Indeed, the ruling class should be shaking; once armed with communist consciousness, the might of the working class will move mountains.