Caribbean & Central America - May 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

After a spectacularly uneventful start to his mandate when he was unable to set up his government due to differences with parliament over his choice of prime minister, things have been getting rather too eventful for President Michel Martelly. First his prime minister, Garry Conille, resigned in late February having spent less time in the job than it took to appoint him, and the whole painful procedure of appointing a replacement is underway. Then, while Martelly was out of the country being treated for a pulmonary embolism, a band of paramilitaries invaded the parliament and insisted that the government re-establish the armed forces. To cap it all there are strange rumours of an attempted coup conspiracy. On the plus side, despite all this instability and uncertainty, the economy is showing signs of recovering.

Martelly’s chosen replacement for Conille, Laurent Lamothe, was approved with reasonable speed (by Haitian standards) in the senate on 10 April although he must also get the green light from the chamber of deputies. Lamothe’s candidacy was approved by 19 votes to three, with one abstention. Mariano Fernández, head of the UN stabilisation mission in Haiti (Minustah) made a pertinent, and indeed prescient, comment, however: “Every time that Haiti is without a government, a prime minister and cabinet… violence and the feeling of lack of security grow”.

On 12 April Rafael Núñez, the spokesperson for the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, revealed details of a plot apparently uncovered by Dominican authorities to topple the Martelly government. Behind the alleged plot were a retired Dominican colonel, Pedro Julio Goico Guerrero, and a Haitian national, Pierre Kanski. Haiti’s justice minister, Michel Brunache, attended a press conference in Santo Domingo at which the plot was announced. The Dominican attorney general, Radhamés Jiménez, said that a thorough investigation would be conducted into the alleged coup conspiracy, details of which, in the public domain at least, are sketchy.

Former Dominican president Hipólito Mejía (2000-2004), the presidential candidate for the opposition Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD), expressed deep scepticism about the plot. Mejía implied that it had been fabricated by the Fernández administration to try and damage the PRD ahead of the presidential election on 20 May - Goico was in charge of his security detail - and to divert attention from a corruption scandal which not only implicates Dominican companies involved in Haiti’s reconstruction efforts but also both the Dominican and Haitian governments [RC-12-04]. Set against the backdrop of this scandal, the timing of the conspiracy denounced in the Dominican Republic looks convenient. The evidence provided was also distinctly underwhelming. The Dominican presidential spokesperson, for instance, presented the press with an alleged recording of Goico telling Kanski to watch one of the weekly TV shows of Nuria Piera – the Dominican investigative journalist who broke the scandal involving the construction companies - as if this somehow provided sufficient motivation to stage a coup to oust Martelly.

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