‘You have a job to do’: U.S. envoy pushes elections in visit with Haiti’s leaders

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The United States’ top envoy to the United Nations visited a crisis-wrecked Haiti this week during which she announced tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian and security aid, but also issued a warning about the need for elections to the country’s new leadership.

“My message to them: ‘You have a job. And your job is to make sure that we get the Haitian people to elections, get that electoral commission established, get them to work,’ ” Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the Miami Herald. “We’re willing to fund them, we’re willing to provide support and advice, but we need to get it done.”

Haiti hasn’t had an elected president since Jovenel Moïse was gunned down inside his bedroom three years ago, and no Parliament since he dismissed most lawmakers in a tweet in 2020 and began ruling by decree.

Thomas-Greenfield’s visit was her first to Haiti since gunshots during Moïse’s funeral forced her and the rest of a visiting U.S. presidential delegation to cut their visit short on July 23, 2021. Since then, the U.S. diplomat has led the charge at the U.N. Security Council to get global U.N. sanctions imposed on gang members spreading violence and hunger, and those financing political instability, and getting an armed international force deployed to help the Haitian police root out gangs. She and her counterpart from Ecuador spearheaded the Security Council resolution authorizing last month’s long-awaited deployment of the first contingent of Kenyan police officers nine months after it was approved.