The Vote as a Screen

Haiti doesn't need an election. It needs a state.

While families sleep under tarps in Kenscoff, while armed groups draw the real map of power, while children trade notebooks for survival bags  the official line never changes: vote, and things will improve. As if a ballot could stop a bullet. As if an urn were a shield.

They say the country is "ready" to welcome those expelled from the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. Ready where? In what homes, what schools, what hospitals the ones that no longer exist for the people who never left?

They call on the diaspora for legitimacy, but skip the security, transparency, and accountability the diaspora actually asked for.

And the corruption files UCREF, ULCC, international sanctions quietly buried under an election calendar, as if voting erases the evidence.

A country that votes in fear isn't choosing its leaders. It's performing a play.

History won't remember the date of the vote. It will remember the question these leaders ran from: what did you do to save the people  before asking them to vote?

History won't remember the date of the vote. It will remember the silence of men who had power and chose ceremony over rescue.

Because a country that buries its dead without justice, and calls its survivors to the polls without safety  is not building a democracy. It's staging a funeral, and asking the mourners to applaud.

Culture509

By Pierre Raymond