Elections

Nicholas Kristof, the award-winning columnist for The New York Times, is considering running in the Democratic primary race for governor of Oregon.Mr. Kristof, who grew up on a farm in Yamhill, about 25 miles west of Portland, said in a statement that friends were trying to recruit him into the race to replace Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat who is prevented from running for re-election by term limits. Last month, he decided to take a leave from The Times to consider the possibility of a political campaign.Any bid for governor would most likely be difficult for an outsider, even one with local roots and a national media platform. At least six candidates are considering entering the race, including the state treasurer, the speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, the state attorney general and a top union leader. News of Mr. Kristof’s potential candidacy was earlier reported by The Willamette Week.Mr. Kristof, 62, is known for his coverage of human rights abuses and women’s rights, winning Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests in China and on genocide in Darfur.Last year, he published a book, “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, that explored stories of poverty, addiction and inequality through the stories of several of his childhood schoolmates.He became more involved in managing his family farm two years ago, when he returned to the state with Ms. WuDunn, to transition its business from growing cherries to cider apples and wine grapes.“Although Nick has not made up his mind about whether to pursue a political candidacy, we agreed he’d go on leave from The Times, in accordance with Times standards, after he brought this possibility to our attention last month,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the newspaper.Mr. Kristof, a Democrat, said in his statement that he was interested in hearing what Oregonians thought about his possible bid.“I have friends trying to convince me that here in Oregon, we need new leadership from outside the broken political system,” he said. “All I know for sure is that we need someone with leadership and vision so that folks from all over the state can come together to get us back on track.” More

ATLANTA — Senate Democrats took their campaign for far-reaching federal voting rights legislation on the road to Georgia on Monday, convening a rare hearing in a state at the center of a national fight over elections.At a field hearing in Atlanta, lawmakers and voters decried the restrictive new voting law signed this spring by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as an attempt to disenfranchise Black and young voters and consolidate Republicans tenuous grip on power.“There is much talk about not being able to give food and water to voters on line, but the actual law is much more abhorrent than that,” said Representative Billy Mitchell, the chairman of the Georgia House Democratic caucus. “What I am most concerned about — and hope you come up with a solution for — is cheating umpires that these laws are creating.”But the hearing’s real aim is to sway a debate more than 500 miles away in Washington, where Democrats are trying to revive a stalled elections overhaul in the Senate to make it easier to vote and offset many of the changes Republicans have pushed through in states like Georgia.“If you just stay in Washington and get doused down and gridlocked out by our archaic procedures in the Senate, you lose sight of what you are fighting for,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which is convening the session, said in an interview.An initial attempt by Democrats to debate their overhaul, the For the People Act, failed in the Senate last month in the face of unified Republican opposition. Now, Democrats are trying to retool, but it is unclear if their chances of success will improve as long as key moderate senators refuse to alter the Senate’s filibuster rule, which in effect gives Republicans veto power over their agenda.Party leaders are working with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the measure, to draft a narrower compromise bill, which could come up for another vote in August or the fall. They are also readying additional legislation, named after the late civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, too, could come to a vote in the fall.Given the likelihood that both those efforts would fall amid Republican opposition, Democrats have begun work to try to include more modest voting rights measures in the party’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, which they are working to muscle through the Senate on a simple majority vote.The hearing at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights here is the first time in two decades the Rules Committee has convened outside the Capitol. Ms. Klobuchar has said additional field hearings will follow.Among the witnesses are Sally Harrell, a Democratic state senator from suburban Atlanta; Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; and José Segarra, a voter from south-central Georgia. Senator Raphael Warnock, whose improbable victory in a runoff election here in January delivered control of the Senate to Democrats, also addressed the panel.Republicans on the Rules Committee, who have fought to stymie Democrats’ election overhaul in the Senate, did not attend the hearing.“This silly stunt is based on the same lie as all the Democrats’ phony hysteria from Georgia to Texas to Washington, D.C., and beyond — their efforts to pretend that moderate, mainstream state voting laws with more generous early voting provisions than blue states like New York are some kind of evil assault on our democracy,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said in a statement. More

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Washington dismissed warnings that democracy was unraveling under President Jovenel Moïse, leaving a gaping leadership void after his assassination.As protesters hurled rocks outside Haiti’s national palace and set fires on the streets to demand President Jovenel Moïse’s resignation, President Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago in 2019, posing cheerfully with him in one of the club’s ornate entryways.After members of Congress warned that Mr. Moïse’s “anti-democratic abuses” reminded them of the run-up to the dictatorship that terrorized Haiti in decades past, the Biden administration publicly threw its weight behind Mr. Moïse’s claim on power.And when American officials urged the Biden administration to change course, alarmed that Haiti’s democratic institutions were being stripped away, they say their pleas went unheeded — and sometimes never earned a response at all.Through Mr. Moïse’s time in office, the United States backed his increasingly autocratic rule, viewing it as the easiest way of maintaining stability in a troubled country that barely figured into the priorities of successive administrations in Washington, current and former officials say.Even as Haiti spiraled into violence and political upheaval, they say, few in the Trump administration took seriously Mr. Moïse’s repeated warnings that he faced plots against his life. And as warnings of his authoritarianism intensified, the Biden administration kept up its public support for Mr. Moïse’s claim to power, even after Haiti’s Parliament emptied out in the absence of elections and Mr. Moïse ruled by decree.President Donald Trump welcomed Mr. Moïse and other Caribbean leaders to his Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2019.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Moïse was assassinated this month, it left a gaping leadership void that set off a scramble for power with the few elected officials remaining. The United States, which has held enormous sway in Haiti since invading the country more than 100 years ago, was suddenly urged to send in troops and help fix the mess.But in interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, a common refrain emerged: Washington bore part of the blame, after brushing off or paying little attention to clear warnings that Haiti was lurching toward mayhem, and possibly making things worse by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse.“It was predictable that something would happen,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. “The message that we send by standing alongside these people is that we think they are legitimate representatives of the Haitian people. They’re not.”Critics say the American approach to Mr. Moïse followed a playbook the United States has used around the world for decades, often with major consequences for democracy and human rights: reflexively siding with or tolerating leaders accused of authoritarian rule because they advance American interests, or because officials fear instability in their absence.Mr. Moïse’s grip on power tightened notably under Mr. Trump, who spoke admiringly of a range of foreign autocrats. Mr. Trump was also bent on keeping Haitian migrants out of the United States (they “all have AIDS,” American officials recounted him saying). To the extent that Trump officials focused on Haitian politics at all, officials say, it was mainly to enlist the country in Mr. Trump’s campaign to oust his nemesis in the region: Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in Caracas in 2018.Miraflores Palace, via ReutersThe Biden administration arrived in January consumed by the pandemic and a surge of migrants at the border with Mexico, leaving little bandwidth for the tumult convulsing Haiti, officials say. It publicly continued the Trump administration policy that Mr. Moïse was the legitimate leader, infuriating some members of Congress with a stance that one senior Biden official now calls a mistake.“Moïse is pursuing an increasingly authoritarian course of action,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, now the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a joint statement with two other Democrats in late December, warning of a repeat of the “anti-democratic abuses the Haitian people have endured” in the past.“We will not stand idly by while Haiti devolves into chaos,” they said.In a February letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, they and other lawmakers called on the United States to “unambiguously reject” the push by Mr. Moïse, who had already ruled by decree for a year, to stay in power. They urged the Biden administration to push for “a legitimate transitional government” to help Haitians determine their own future and emerge from “a cascade of economic, public health, and political crises.”But Mr. Biden’s top adviser on Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, said that at the time, the administration did not want to appear to be dictating how the turmoil should be resolved.Rep. Gregory Meeks during a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs after testimony from Secretary of State Antony Blinken in March.Pool photo by Ken Cedeno“Tipping our finger on the scale in that way could send a country that was already in a very unstable situation into crisis,” Mr. Gonzalez said.Past American political and military interventions into Haiti have done little to solve the country’s problems, and have sometimes created or aggravated them. “The solution to Haiti’s problems are not in Washington; they are in Port-au-Prince,” Haiti’s capital, Mr. Gonzalez said, so the Biden administration called for elections to take place before Mr. Moïse left office.“The calculus we made was the best decision was to focus on elections to try to use that as a way to push for greater freedom,” he added.In reality, critics say, the Biden administration was already tipping the scales by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse’s contention that he had another year in office, enabling him to preside over the drafting of a new Constitution that could significantly enhance the president’s powers.Mr. Moïse was certainly not the first leader accused of autocracy to enjoy Washington’s backing; he was not even the first in Haiti. Two generations of brutal Haitian dictators from the Duvalier family were among a long list of strongmen around the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere who received resolute American support, particularly as allies against Communism.“He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly said of one of them (though accounts vary about whether the president was referring to American-backed dictators in Nicaragua or in the Dominican Republic).Supporters of the former dictators held photos of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier during a court hearing in Port-au-Prince in 2013.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressThe debate has continued in both Democratic and Republican administrations about how hard to push authoritarian allies for democratic reforms. Once the threat of Communist expansionism faded, American administrations worried more about instability creating crises for the United States, like a surge of migrants streaming toward its shores or the rise of violent extremism.Elliott Abrams, a foreign policy official in multiple Republican administrations and a special representative on Venezuela in the Trump administration, argued that Washington should support democracy when possible but sometimes has few alternatives to working with strongmen.“In Haiti, no one has developed a good formula for building a stable democracy, and the U.S. has been trying since the Marines landed there a hundred years ago,” he said.Early on in the Trump administration, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former co-star on “The Apprentice” and new adviser to the president, began pressing Mr. Trump and his aides to engage with Haiti and support Mr. Moïse.Officials were wary. Haiti supported Venezuela at two meetings of the Organization of American States in 2017, turning Mr. Moïse into what one official called an enemy of the United States and scuttling her efforts to arrange a state visit by him..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I believed that a state visit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Moïse would have been a strong show of support for Haiti from the U.S. during a time of civil unrest,” Ms. Newman said, adding in a separate statement: “Jovenel was a dear friend and he was committed to being a change agent for his beloved Haiti.”Mr. Moïse just after being sworn in as president of Haiti in February 2017.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressThe episode underscored the degree to which some top Trump officials viewed Haiti as just a piece of its strategy toward Venezuela. And in the eyes of some lawmakers, Mr. Trump was not going to feel empathy for Haiti’s problems.“We are all aware of his perception of the nation — in that he spoke about ‘s-hole’ countries,” said Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus.By 2019, nationwide protests grew violent in Haiti as demonstrators demanding Mr. Moïse’s ouster clashed with the police, burned cars and marched on the national palace. Gang activity became increasingly brazen, and kidnappings spiked to an average of four a week.Mr. Trump and his aides showed few public signs of concern. In early 2019, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Moïse at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of a meeting with Caribbean leaders who had lined up against Mr. Maduro of Venezuela.By the next year, Mr. Moïse’s anti-democratic practices grew serious enough to command the attention of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who publicly warned Mr. Moïse against delaying parliamentary elections.A Haitian police officer aimed his weapon at protesters who were calling for the resignation of President Moïse in Port-au-Prince in 2019.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressBut beyond a few statements, the Trump administration did little to force the issue, officials said.“No one did anything to address the underlying weaknesses, institutionally and democratically,” over the past several years, said Peter Mulrean, who served as the American ambassador to Haiti from 2015 to 2017. “And so we shouldn’t really be surprised that the lid blew off again.”After Mr. Biden’s election, lawmakers and officials in Washington took up the issue with new urgency. Mr. Moïse, who came to office after a vote marred by low turnout and allegations of fraud, had been ruling by decree for a year because the terms of nearly all members of Parliament had expired and elections to replace them were never held.Mr. Moïse won a five-year term in 2016, but did not take office until 2017 amid the allegations of fraud, so he argued that he should stay until 2022. Democracy advocates in Haiti and abroad cried foul, but on Feb. 5, the Biden administration weighed in, supporting Mr. Moïses’s claim to power for another year. And it was not alone: International bodies like the Organization of American States took the same position.Port-au-Prince at dusk last week.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Blinken later criticized Mr. Moïse’s rule by decree and called for “genuinely free and fair elections this year.” But the Biden administration never withdrew its public position upholding Mr. Moïse’s claim to remain in office, a decision that Rep. Andy Levin, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, blamed for helping him retain his grip on the country and continue its anti-democratic slide.“It’s a tragedy that he was able to stay there,” Mr. Levin said.The Biden administration has rebuffed calls by Haitian officials to send troops to help stabilize the country and prevent even more upheaval. A group of American officials recently visited to meet with various factions now vying for power and urge them “to come together, in a broad political dialogue,” Mr. Gonzalez said.The Americans had planned to visit the port to assess its security needs, but decided against it after learning that gangs were occupying the area, blocking the delivery of fuel.“How can we have elections in Haiti when gang members control 60 percent of the territory?” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network. “It will be gangs that organize the elections.”David Kirkpatrick contributed reporting. More

Washington desestimó las advertencias de que la democracia se desmoronaba durante el mandato de Jovenel Moïse, lo que ha dejado un vacío de liderazgo después de su asesinato.Mientras los manifestantes lanzaban piedras afuera del palacio nacional de Haití y encendían hogueras en las calles para exigir la renuncia del presidente Jovenel Moïse, el presidente de Estados Unidos Donald Trump lo invitó a Mar-a-Lago en 2019, para luego posar sonriente junto a él en una de las entradas decoradas del club.Después de que miembros del Congreso advirtieron que los “abusos contrarios a la democracia” de Moïse les recordaban el periodo previo a la dictadura que aterrorizó a Haití en décadas pasadas, el gobierno de Biden respaldó en público el reclamo del poder de Moïse.Y, cuando los funcionarios estadounidenses instaron al gobierno de Biden a cambiar de rumbo, alarmados por el hecho de que las instituciones democráticas de Haití estaban desapareciendo, según dicen, sus súplicas no fueron escuchadas y en ocasiones no obtuvieron respuesta alguna.Durante el mandato de Moïse, Estados Unidos apoyó su gobierno, cada vez más autócrata, por considerarlo la manera más sencilla de mantener la estabilidad en un país con problemas que apenas figuraba en las prioridades de los sucesivos gobiernos de Washington, según funcionarios actuales y de gobiernos anteriores.Incluso cuando Haití entró en una espiral de violencia y agitación política, dicen, pocos en el gobierno de Trump tomaron en serio las repetidas advertencias de Moïse de que había complots para acabar con su vida. Y mientras se intensificaban las advertencias sobre su autoritarismo, el gobierno de Biden mantuvo su apoyo público al reclamo de poder de Moïse, incluso después de que el Parlamento de Haití quedó vacío por falta de elecciones y Moïse gobernó por decreto.El presidente Donald Trump recibió a  Moïse y otros líderes caribeños en Mar-a-Lago en marzo de 2019.Tom Brenner para The New York TimesEl asesinato de Moïse este mes dejó un enorme vacío de liderazgo que desencadenó una lucha por el poder entre los pocos funcionarios electos que quedaban. Estados Unidos, que ha tenido una enorme influencia en Haití desde que invadió el país hace más de cien años, de repente, se vio instado a enviar a su ejército y a ayudar a arreglar el desorden.Sin embargo, en entrevistas con más de una decena de funcionarios actuales y anteriores un comentario se repitió con frecuencia: Washington tiene parte de la culpa, después de haber ignorado o prestado poca atención a las claras advertencias de que Haití se tambaleaba hacia el caos y de que tal vez haya empeorado las cosas al apoyar de manera abierta a Moïse.“Era predecible que ocurriera algo”, aseveró el senador de Vermont Patrick Leahy. “El mensaje que enviamos al apoyar a estas personas es que creemos que son representantes legítimos del pueblo haitiano. No lo son”.Los críticos afirman que la estrategia que Estados Unidos aplicó con Moïse se basó en un manual que este país ha usado en todo el mundo desde hace décadas, a menudo con serias consecuencias para la democracia y los derechos humanos: aliarse o tolerar por reflejo a líderes acusados de gobernar de manera dictatorial porque promueven los intereses estadounidenses o porque los funcionarios temen la inestabilidad en su ausencia.El control de Moïse sobre el poder se fortaleció de manera importante durante el mandato de Trump, quien profesó su admiración por varios autócratas extranjeros. Trump también se empeñó en mantener a los migrantes haitianos fuera de Estados Unidos (funcionarios estadounidenses recordaron haberlo escuchado decir que “todos tienen SIDA”). Según fuentes oficiales, si los funcionarios de Trump se centraron en la política haitiana, fue principalmente para reclutar al país en la campaña de Trump para derrocar a su némesis en la región: el líder de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.El presidente Nicolás Maduro de Venezuela en Caracas en 2018Palacio de Miraflores, vía ReutersLos funcionarios agregan que el gobierno de Biden llegó a la Casa Blanca en enero consumido por la pandemia y una oleada de migrantes en la frontera con México, lo que dejó poco espacio de maniobra para el tumulto que convulsiona a Haití. El nuevo gobierno dio continuidad a la política del gobierno de Trump, según la cual Moïse era el líder legítimo, postura que enfureció a algunos miembros del Congreso y que un alto funcionario de Biden ahora califica de error.“Moïse está siguiendo un curso de acción cada vez más autoritario”, dijo el representante Gregory Meeks, quien preside la Comisión de Asuntos Exteriores de la Cámara de Representantes, en una declaración conjunta con otros dos demócratas a finales de diciembre en la que advirtió de una repetición de los “abusos antidemocráticos que el pueblo haitiano ha soportado” en el pasado.“No vamos a quedarnos de brazos cruzados mientras Haití se sumerge en el caos”, dijeron.En una carta enviada en febrero al Secretario de Estado Antony J. Blinken, ellos y otros legisladores pidieron a Estados Unidos que “rechazara sin ambigüedades” el intento de Moïse, que ya había gobernado por decreto durante un año, de mantenerse en el poder. Instaron al gobierno de Biden a impulsar “un gobierno de transición legítimo” para ayudar a los haitianos a determinar su propio futuro y salir de “un torrente de crisis económica, de salud pública y política”.No obstante, el principal asesor de Biden para América Latina, Juan González, declaró que en ese momento el gobierno no quería dar la impresión de que quería imponer cómo debía resolverse la crisis.El congresista Gregory Meeks durante una audiencia del Comité de Asuntos Exteriores de la Cámara de Representantes después de la comparecencia del secretario de Estado Antony Blinken en marzo.Foto de consorcio por Ken Cedeno“Hacer que la balanza se inclinara de esa manera podría llevar a un país que ya estaba en una situación muy inestable a la crisis”, afirmó González.Las anteriores intervenciones políticas y militares de Estados Unidos en Haití hicieron poco por resolver los problemas del país y en ocasiones los generaron o agravaron. “La solución a los problemas de Haití no está en Washington, sino en Puerto Príncipe”, la capital de Haití, dijo González, por lo que el gobierno de Biden pidió que se celebraran elecciones antes de que Moïse dejara el cargo.“El cálculo que hicimos fue que la mejor decisión era centrarse en las elecciones para tratar de utilizarlas como una forma de impulsar una mayor libertad”, añadió.A decir de los críticos, la realidad es que el gobierno de Biden ya había inclinado la balanza al apoyar de manera pública el argumento de Moïse de que le quedaba un año más en el cargo, lo que le permitiría presidir la redacción de una nueva Constitución que podría aumentar de manera significativa las facultades del presidente.Moïse no es el primer gobernante acusado de ser un autócrata que cuenta con el apoyo de Washington; ni siquiera es el primero en Haití. Dos generaciones de brutales dictadores haitianos de la familia Duvalier forman parte de una larga lista de autócratas de todo el Caribe, América Latina, el Medio Oriente y otros lugares que recibieron el apoyo decidido de Estados Unidos, en particular como aliados contra el comunismo.“Puede que sea un desgraciado, pero ese desgraciado está con nosotros”, se dice que declaró el presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt sobre uno de ellos (aunque las versiones varían sobre si el presidente se refería a los dictadores apoyados por Estados Unidos en Nicaragua o en la República Dominicana).Los partidarios de los exdictadores sostienen fotos de Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier y Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier durante una audiencia judicial en Puerto Príncipe en 2013.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressEl debate sobre cómo presionar a los aliados autócratas para que realicen reformas democráticas ha continuado durante gobiernos demócratas y republicanos. Después de que la amenaza del expansionismo comunista se desvaneció, los gobiernos estadounidenses se preocuparon más por la inestabilidad que creaba crisis para Estados Unidos, como la oleada de migrantes que llegaban a sus costas o el aumento del extremismo violento.Elliott Abrams, funcionario de relaciones exteriores en varios gobiernos republicanos y representante especial en Venezuela durante el gobierno de Trump, argumentó que Washington debe apoyar la democracia cuando sea posible, pero a veces tiene pocas alternativas cuando se trata de autócratas.“En Haití, nadie ha desarrollado una buena fórmula para construir una democracia estable y Estados Unidos lo ha intentado desde que los marines desembarcaron allí hace cien años”, aseveró.Al principio del mandato de Trump, Omarosa Manigault Newman, ex coprotagonista de “El Aprendiz” y luego asesora del presidente, comenzó a presionar a Trump y a sus asesores para que se comprometieran con Haití y apoyaran a Moïse.Funcionarios del gobierno se mostraron cautelosos. Haití apoyó a Venezuela en dos reuniones de la Organización de Estados Americanos en 2017, lo cual convirtió a Moïse en lo que un funcionario calificó de enemigo de Estados Unidos y echó por tierra sus esfuerzos para organizar una visita de Estado a Estados Unidos.“Creía que una visita de Estado entre Trump y Moïse habría sido una muestra contundente del apoyo de Estados Unidos a Haití en un momento de agitación civil”, dijo Newman, quien agregó en otra declaración: “Jovenel era un buen amigo y estaba comprometido a ser un agente del cambio para su amado Haití”.Moïse poco después de tomar posesión como presidente en febrero de 2017.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressEl episodio subrayó hasta qué punto algunos altos funcionarios de Trump consideraban a Haití como una pieza más de su estrategia hacia Venezuela. Y a los ojos de algunos legisladores, Trump no iba a sentir empatía por los problemas de Haití.“Todos somos conscientes de su percepción de la nación, cuando hizo referencia a los países de mierda”, comentó la representante republicana de Nueva York Yvette Clarke, quien copreside el caucus de Haití de la Cámara de Representantes.Para 2019, las protestas en todo Haití se volvieron violentas cuando los manifestantes que exigían la destitución de Moïse se enfrentaron a la policía, quemaron automóviles y marcharon hacia el palacio nacional. La actividad de las pandillas se volvió cada vez más descarada y los secuestros se dispararon a un promedio de cuatro a la semana.Trump y sus asesores mostraron escasos signos públicos de preocupación. A principios de 2019, Trump recibió a Moïse en su club Mar-a-Lago en Palm Beach, Florida, como parte de una reunión con los líderes del Caribe que se habían alineado contra el presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.Al año siguiente, las prácticas antidemocráticas de Moïse se agravaron lo suficiente como para llamar la atención del Secretario de Estado Mike Pompeo, quien advirtió en una declaración que Moïse no debía retrasar las elecciones parlamentarias.Un oficial de policía haitiano dirige su arma hacia los manifestantes que pedían la renuncia del presidente Moïse en Puerto Príncipe en 2019.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressSin embargo, salvo algunas declaraciones, el gobierno de Trump hizo poco para impulsar la cuestión, dijeron los funcionarios.“Nadie hizo nada para abordar las debilidades subyacentes, institucionales y democráticas” en los últimos años, afirmó Peter Mulrean, quien se desempeñó como embajador estadounidense en Haití entre 2015 y 2017. “Y, por lo tanto, no deberíamos sorprendernos realmente de que la situación se haya desbordado de nuevo”.Después de que Biden resultó electo, los legisladores y funcionarios en Washington retomaron el tema con nueva urgencia. Moïse, quien llegó al cargo tras una votación empañada por la escasa participación y las acusaciones de fraude, llevaba un año gobernando por decreto debido a que el mandato de casi todos los miembros del Parlamento había expirado y nunca se celebraron elecciones para sustituirlos.Moïse ganó un mandato de cinco años en 2016, pero no tomó posesión sino hasta 2017 en medio de acusaciones de fraude, por lo que argumentó que debía permanecer en el cargo hasta 2022. Los defensores de la democracia en Haití y en el extranjero manifestaron su descontento, pero el 5 de febrero, el gobierno de Biden se pronunció y apoyó el reclamo de Moïse de permanecer un año más en el poder. Y no fue el único: organismos internacionales como la Organización de Estados Americanos adoptaron la misma postura.Puerto Príncipe al atardecer esta semanaFederico Rios para The New York TimesPosteriormente, Blinken criticó que Moïse gobernara por decreto y convocó a que hubiera “elecciones de verdad libres y justas este año”. No obstante, el gobierno de Biden nunca se retractó de su postura pública de apoyar el reclamo de Moïse de permanecer en el cargo, una decisión que según el representante Andy Levin, quien copreside el Caucus de Haití de la Cámara de Representantes, ayudó a que el presidente haitiano mantuviera su control sobre el país y a que continuara su declive antidemocrático.“Es una tragedia que haya podido permanecer allí”, dijo Levin.El gobierno de Biden ha rechazado los llamados de las autoridades haitianas para que envíe al ejército a ayudar a estabilizar el país y así evitar más disturbios. Hace poco, un grupo de funcionarios estadounidenses visitó el país para reunirse con las distintas facciones que se disputan el poder e instarlas a “unirse en un amplio diálogo político”, comentó González.Los estadounidenses habían planeado visitar el puerto para evaluar sus necesidades de seguridad, pero decidieron no hacerlo tras enterarse de que las pandillas se habían apoderado de la zona y bloqueaban la entrega de combustible.“¿Cómo podemos celebrar elecciones en Haití cuando los miembros de las pandillas controlan el 60 por ciento del territorio?”, preguntó Pierre Esperance, director ejecutivo de la Red Nacional de Defensa de los Derechos Humanos de Haití. “Serán las pandillas las que organicen las elecciones”.David Kirkpatrick colaboró con este reportaje. More

With more than 160 dead across the region, the receding waters revealed extensive damage as well as deep political divides around how far and fast Germans should go to stem carbon use.BERLIN — With the death toll surpassing 160 and rescue efforts intensifying, the once-in-a-millennium floods that ravaged Germany and much of Western Europe this week had by Saturday thrust the issue of climate change to the center of Germany’s politics and its campaign for pivotal elections this fall that will replace Chancellor Angela Merkel after 16 years in power.The receding floodwaters revealed not only extensive damage — homes wiped away, businesses lost, electricity and sewer systems knocked out and hundreds of vehicles destroyed — but also bitter political divides on climate policy in a week when the European Union rolled out the globe’s most ambitious proposals to cut carbon emissions in the next decade.Though German authorities said it was still too early to place a figure on the damage, its sheer scale shifted the debate from calls not to politicize the catastrophe to the realization that the policies behind it must now play a central role in deciding who will take over leadership after the election on Sept. 26.“The Weather is Political,” Germany’s ARD public television said in its lead editorial on the Friday evening news.“For a long time, chatting about the weather was synonymous with triviality. That’s over now,” it said. “The weather is highly political; there is hardly any nonpolitical weather anymore, especially not during an election campaign.”Residents were clearing mud and unusable furniture from houses on Saturday in Bad Neuenahr, Germany.Thomas Frey/dpa, via Getty ImagesThe death toll in Germany climbed to at least 143 on Saturday, while the toll across the border in Belgium stood at 24, the authorities there said.On Saturday, rescue workers were still sifting through ruin across the region. The German news media was filled with images of homes still submerged in muddy brown water up to the second floor and of bridges reduced to crumbled heaps of stone or tangled metal pylons.Tales of tragedy emerged, as well, perhaps none more poignant than in Sinzig, where neighbors recalled hearing the screams from disabled residents trapped in the waters that gushed into the lower floors of the residential home where a lone night watchman was powerless to save them. The event vividly raised tough questions about whether the authorities had been prepared and why flood warnings were not acted on more aggressively by local officials.More than 90 of those who died in Germany had lived in towns and villages in the valley of the Ahr River in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the police said. Local authorities set up a hotline for citizens in the hard-hit area needing support, whether material or psychological, and issued a call for equipment to help provide basic infrastructure and even clean drinking water.The village of Sinzig, Germany, on Friday.Adam Berry/Getty ImagesMs. Merkel, who turned 67 on Saturday and has said she will leave politics after the election, was expected to visit the district on Sunday to survey the scope of the destruction, her office said. She spoke with the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate by video link on Friday, hours after touching down in Berlin from her trip to Washington.While in the United States, the chancellor and President Biden signed a pact that included a commitment to “taking urgent action to address the climate crisis,” which is to include stronger collaboration “on the policies and energy technologies needed to accelerate the global net-zero transition.”The European Union’s ambitious blueprint, announced Wednesday, is part of plans to make the 27-country bloc carbon-neutral by 2050, and will arguably affect no European country more than Germany, the continent’s largest economy and its industrial powerhouse.Coming a day later, the extensive flooding, which affected Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, in addition to Germany, immediately drew parallels between the calamity and the effects of climate change from environmental activists and wide range of politicians.Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Biden this week at the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesArmin Laschet, 60, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is looking to succeed Ms. Merkel, has lauded his regional government for passing legislation on climate change, but critics point to the open-pit soft coal mines in the state that are still threatening local villages and his repeated emphasis on the importance of Germany remaining an industrial powerhouse.When pressed on Thursday during an interview on WDR local public television over whether the floods would be a catalyst for him to take a stance toward climate change, Mr. Laschet snapped at the moderator.“I am a governor, not an activist,” he said. “Just because we have had a day like this does not mean we change our politics.”But in 2011, Ms. Merkel did just that.After seeing the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Japan, melt down after a tsunami hit, the chancellor backtracked on her government’s decision to extend the country’s dependence on nuclear power until 2033. The disaster led her to reset the target shutdown date to 2022, while increasing the amount of energy powered by renewable sources.Floods have a history of influencing political campaigns in Germany. In 2002, pictures of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder wading in rubber boots through streets awash in the muddy waters of the swollen Elbe, while his conservative rival remained on vacation, are credited with helping him win the election that year.Armin Laschet, right, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, second right, visiting the Erftstadt fire department on Saturday.Pool photo by Marius BeckerPerhaps wary of that lesson, Annalena Baerbock, 40, who is the Greens party candidate for chancellor and Mr. Laschet’s strongest rival, cut short her vacation to visit stricken areas in Rhineland-Palatinate on Friday.She called for immediate assistance for those affected, but also issued an appeal to better protect “residential areas and infrastructure” from extreme weather events, which she linked to the changing climate.“Climate protection is now: In all areas of climate protection, we need to step up our game and take effective climate protection measures with an immediate climate protection program,” Ms. Baerbock said.Whether the flooding will be enough to lift support for the Greens remains to be seen. After enjoying an initial surge of excitement surrounding the announcement of Ms. Baerbock’s campaign — she is the only woman running to replace the country’s first female chancellor — support for the Greens has now dipped to around 20 percent in polls.That puts the party in second place behind Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, who have been climbing to around 30 percent support, the latest surveys show.“In the next two months, there will always be extreme weather events somewhere in the world,” said Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin. “The focus is set after the catastrophe in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. The topic will determine the election campaign.”Olaf Scholz, 63, Ms. Merkel’s finance minister who is running for the chance to replace her and return his Social Democratic Party to the chancellery, also headed on Friday to flooded regions in Rhineland-Palatinate, where he pledged swift help from the government and linked the disaster to climate change.Workers clearing debris from the streets on Saturday after flooding caused major damage in the village of Schuld.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I am firmly convinced that our task is stopping human-made climate change,” Mr. Scholz told ZDF public television. He praised his party’s role in passing some of Germany’s first climate laws when the Social Democrats governed with the Greens from 1998 to 2005, but called for a stronger effort to move toward a carbon-neutral economy.“What we still have to do now is get all those who have resisted right up to the end that we raise the expansion targets for renewable energies in such a way that it also works out with a CO2-neutral industry to give up this resistance,” he said.While the focus at the moment is on the role that environmental issues will play in the election campaign, questions are also being raised over whether the chancellor, who was a champion for combating climate change going back to 1995, when she presided over the United Nations’ first Climate Conference in Berlin, actually pushed her own country hard enough.Once she came into power, it proved harder to persuade her country’s powerful industrial and automobile lobbies — key supporters of her conservative party — to do their part.The result was legislation that Germany’s highest court ruled in April was not aggressive enough in its attempts to bring down emissions. It ordered the government to strengthen the law to ensure that future generations would be protected.“In recent years, we have not implemented many things in Germany that would have been necessary,” said Malu Dryer, the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate state, said in an interview with the Funke media consortium.She urged German consumers to support climate-neutral products and the country to “show more speed,” adding that climate change is no longer an abstraction. “We are experiencing it firsthand and painfully,” Ms. Dryer said.The city of Bad Münstereifel, Germany, on Friday.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMelissa Eddy More