Late last year, Fernández Huidobro’s predecessor, Luis Rosadilla, struggled gamely to deflect embarrassing questions relating to Uruguay’s participation in UN peacekeeping duties, a key element of the country’s foreign policy. Retired members of the armed forces had informed the local press that Uruguay’s air force (FAU) had falsified data on the flight hours completed by pilots in order to meet UN requirements, allowing some of them to serve on missions such as Minustah without the requisite qualifications.
Now the reputation of the armed forces is on the line again. The video captured on a mobile phone camera shows the sexual assault on the man by four laughing and joking Uruguayan marines, prompting a deluge of criticism in the international media, with the title of a piece in Britain’s The Guardian on 3 September going as far as to ask “Is this Minustah’s ‘Abu Ghraib moment’ in Haiti?”
A Uruguayan navy lieutenant, Nicolás Casariego, the commander of the base in the southern coastal town of Port Salut where the incident took place, confirmed the authenticity of the video but insisted it was “a game, a joke” which amounted to “bullying, but nothing more”. Fernández Huidobro apologised unreservedly for the behaviour of the Uruguayan servicemen. Military justice sentenced the five marines to prison on 19 September. The government also sent the case to civil courts, which apparently have been trying, without success, to track down and interview the victim of the crime, Jhonny Jean Biulisseteth.
However, speaking to reporters on 4 October after appearing before the defence commission of the lower chamber to discuss the incident, Fernández Huidobro paid credit to the 35,000 Uruguayan men and women who have been engaged in UN peace missions across the world to serve the common good - 30 of them losing their lives. He said that, without wanting to diminish the seriousness of the crime committed by “a small minority”, it was inexcusable that the majority should suffer the consequences of “a political campaign” against UN peacekeepers in Haiti waged by “powerful economic and political interest groups; people who want to wrest control of Haiti.” Left unsaid, but heavily implied, was that these “interests” wanted Minustah out of Haiti and for the Haitian armed forces, disbanded in 1995, to be restored.
Fernández Huidobro questioned the “exaggerated and quite unusual” request for US$5m in compensation demanded by three US lawyers representing the youth. He claimed that the attempt by the three lawyers who had taken on the case - Edwin Marger, Mike Pugliese and a former US congressman Bob Barr - to extract US$5m in compensation from the Uruguayan state was part and parcel of a plot to discredit the Uruguayan armed forces. These lawyers, he pointed out, were advisers to Baby Doc, who returned to Haiti in January after 25 years in exile in France, and his father François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, before him. “Duvalier did not arrive in Haiti by chance,” he said somewhat enigmatically.
Fernández Huidobro was necessarily vague but the implications were clear: how, for instance, did a poor young Haitian manage to hire such powerful lawyers? Fernández Huidobro appears to be implying that the lawyers in question are acting on Duvalier’s instructions to discredit Minustah (the reputation of Uruguay’s armed forces is collateral damage) in the hope of expediting its departure from Haiti and paving the way for the restoration of the armed forces.
Minustah is already unpopular after eight years in Haiti and the widespread conviction that Nepalese peacekeepers were responsible for introducing a deadly cholera epidemic to the country. Restoring the armed forces is a longstanding objective of Duvalierists. Since 1995, it has never been so high on the agenda, as President Michel Martelly, who took office in May, favours its reestablishment.
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