The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) scheduled candidate registration for November 20 legislative and presidential elections from September 1st to the 15th. In that two weeks, 54 candidates lined up for the presidential chair.

The last applicant arrived just 10 minutes before midnight on September 15. Ex-senator Louis Gérald Gilles, registered himself in the name, he claimed, of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family party (FL).

The day before, however, Marc Louis Bazin, the leader of the Movement for the Installation of Democracy in Haiti (MIDH), also filed as the FL’s presidential candidate, the product of an "alliance." He was accompanied by two of Gilles’s former confederates, ex-senator Yvon Feuillé and former deputy Rudy Hériveaux (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 23, No. 22, 8/10/2005).

Well over half of Haiti’s 4.5 million eligible voters have not registered, however, so the CEP, for the third time, extended this week the cut-off for voter registration, from Sep. 20 to Sep. 25.

At a Sep. 20 press conference, the National Popular Party (PPN), the most vocal opponent of occupation “selections,” renewed its call to boycott even obtaining a voter registration card.

“The PPN calls on everybody to stay home,” said the PPN’s Georges Honorat. “Don’t participate in this election-selection-exclusion which the occupiers are preparing for us and which can only result in a ferocious dictatorship because they have no legitimacy... Bravo for the popular base which has not fallen for this trap and which stand behind the popular demands of liberation of all political prisoners, the return of all political exiles including President Aristide, an end to Haiti’s occupation, the arrest and judgement before an International Tribunal of former and new assassins of the people, and for MINUSTAH [U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti] to stop doing the dirty work of the U.S., France and Canada.”

There will undoubtedly be high drama and surprise developments in the days ahead as the CEP weeds out some candidates from this giant field, after reviewing their often suspect documents.

In the meantime, let’s start profiling some of this fauna of candidates “for sale.”

Evans Paul: He represents the Democratic Alliance (Alyans), made up of his own party, the KID, the PPRH of former-Maoist-turned-reactionary Claude Roumain, and the PLD of Christophe Charles.

Paul was elected mayor of Port-with-Prince on December 16, 1990 for the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD), the same banner under which Aristide won the presidency for the first time. However, he lost miserably in his 1995 re-election bid and was later accused of corruption when his successor, singer Emmanuel “Manno” Charlemagne, did not find even a typewriter left in the City Hall.

Paul was among the “All Saints' Day prisoners,” who include former unionist Jean Auguste Mesyeux, and political activists Patrick Lochard and Marineau Etienne. They were arrested, tortured and then paraded on National Television in November 1989 by the neo-Duvalierist President/General Prosper Avril.

During the 2001-2004 destabilization campaign against Aristide, the KID was a central actor in the opposition Democratic Convergence and the Democratic Platform, both subsidized by the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Republican arm of Washington’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He also helped assemble so-called "civil society" organizations in the IRI-concocted “Group of 184" front.

Paul proposes reinstituting the Haitian Army, which Aristide dissolved in 1995, and boosting the police force to 50,000 members. His economic and social programs remain rather nebulous.

Gérard Gourgue: A lawyer by profession and also head of a prominent private high school, Gourgue is coming out of retirement to run for a coalition made up of the PADEMH of Claire Lydie Parent, the CATH of Jean Auguste Mesyeux, and the CREED of the ex-General/President Prosper Avril, under the name of Patriotic Union Movement (MUP). This alliance encompasses a torturer (Avril) and his victim (Mesyeux). Gerard Gourgue was a human rights defender during the dictatorship of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. After Duvalier’s fall in February 1986, Gourgue was briefly appointed to the neo-Duvalierist National Council of Government (CNG) directed by the Generals Henry Namphy and Williams Régala. But he resigned his post and became the bourgeoisie’s leading presidential candidate in the ill-fated elections of November 29, 1987, which ended in a bloodbath.

Gourgue returned to the national stage, albeit as a bit player, in 2001 when the Democratic Convergence drafted him to fill the ridiculous role of “parallel president.” On February 7, 2001, as President Aristide was inaugurated before giant crowds at the National Palace, Gourgue was inaugurated before a handful of opposition politicians at the headquarters of the Struggling Peoples Organization (OPL), a pathetic exercise which amused the entire nation. Following the February 2004 coup, the de facto government named Gourgue their ambassador to UNESCO in Paris.

Guy Philippe: Philippe is running under the banner of the party he helped found, the Front for National Reconstruction (FRN), previously the Resistance Front of the North, composed of the terrorist ex-“rebels” who took up arms against the constitutional government. Trained at Haiti’s military academy and later by U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador in the early 1990s, Philippe was integrated into the Haitian National Police (PNH) in 1995 , first as the police chief of Pétionville, and then the Northern Department’s police director under President René Préval. Implicated in a coup attempt against Préval, he fled in November 2000 to the Dominican Republic. Accused there of drug running, he fled to Ecuador, where he had been trained, but was sent back to the Dominican Republic, where he was twice arrested by Dominican authorities.

Nonetheless, Philippe had powerful friends and used Dominican territory to plan several murderous forays into Haiti. On July 28, 2001, his commandos attacked the Police Academy, killing five policemen and wounding 14 and on December 17, 2001, they briefly took over the National Palace, killing five people. He then led the Dominican-based “rebels” into Haiti in January 2004, alongside death-squad leader Louis Jodel Chamblain. An admirer of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Philippe’s program includes the resurrection of the Haitian Army.

Dumarsais Mécène Siméus: In a last minute alliance, Siméus concretized his long-rumored candidacy under the banner of the Heads Together party (Tèt Ansanm) of former Lavalassian Gérard Blot. Born and raised in the Artibonite Valley town of Pont Sondé, Siméus has lived for over 40 years in the U.S., where he directs the Texas a food multinational, Siméus Foods International, with operations in more than 27 countries. A personal friend of U.S. president George W Bush and large Republican Party donor, Siméus is considered Washington’s preferred candidate in Haiti. When declaring his candidacy last month in his hometown, this Haitian-American promised, if he wins, to transform the capital’s bedraggled Carrefour neighborhood into Las Vegas and Pont Sondé into Los Angeles. Other Haitian cities await their "twinning" with U.S. metropolises. In the meantime, the reverse has occurred, with New Orleans being transformed into Gonaïves by Hurricane Katrina.

Samir Mourra: Businessman Samir Mourra heads the Mobilization for Haiti’s Progress party (MPH). In recent years, he has lived in the United States. But during the final months of the 1991 - 1994 coup d’état, he headed the paramilitary group called "the Ninjas," composed of masked bourgeois, who often accompanied the coup’s leader, General Raoul Cédras.

Franck Romain: Running under the banner of the Patriotic Camp and the Haitian Alliance (PACAPALAH), Romain is a former Haitian Army colonel and a hard-line Duvalierist, who earned a reputation as an inveterate and merciless torturer. Just prior to Baby Doc’s departure in 1986, he was the mayor of Port-with-Prince.

Romain was the principal instigator of the Sep. 11, 1988 massacre at Saint-Jean-Bosco church, where his Tonton Macoutes, with red arm-bands, killed and wounded dozens of worshipers with guns and machetes at a mass being celebrated by then Father Aristide. After that massacre, a popular uprising occurred. He fled the country to take refuge in the Dominican Republic and later in Honduras, alongside 1991 coup strongman Michel François.

Following the February 2004 coup, he returned from the Dominican Republic where he had been for some time.

Marc Louis Bazin: He is the candidate of an alliance between the MIDH and a clique purporting to represent Aristide’s FL, arranged by former parliamentarians Rudy Hériveaux and Yvon Feuillé. Bazin has long been the unofficial candidate and spokesman for international financial organizations in Haiti, having been a World Bank official for years before acting briefly as Baby Doc’s Finance Minister. During that time, he was dubbed, sarcastically by most Haitians, "Mister Clean", for his zeal in championing Washington’s proposed neoliberal reforms for Haiti.

In the December 1990 elections, Bazin was the presidential candidate of the ANDP (National Alliance for Democracy and Progress), assembling the MIDH with the parties of Serge Gilles (PANPRA) and Déjean Bélizaire (MNP28). After the September 30, 1991 coup d'etat against Aristide, the military command appointed Bazin their de facto Prime Minister in 1992. Almost a decade later, re-elected President Aristide appointed Bazin as Planning and External Cooperation minister in 2001, and then in 2003, as Minister without portfolio in charge of Negotiations.

As one can see, this list is far from complete, and we hope to present in the coming weeks further profiles of this parade of lackeys and opportunists, of these "candidates for sale,” who have no qualms to run for office while the country is gripped by a military occupation and a wave of massacres by foreign and local henchmen.