Michel Martelly
Michel Martelly was president of Haiti from May 2011 to February 2016, the compas singer Sweet Micky, who had performed in a nappy and a wig and sung about the Duvaliers' police with affection. He won the run-off of March 2011 with sixty-eight per cent against a law professor. It was an election in which the first round's count had put him third and the Organisation of American States, at Washington's request, had recounted him into second. The five years were the reconstruction that did not happen and the government that did not have a parliament. There was the earthquake money, ten billion dollars pledged, of which the government saw a tenth. There were the tent camps cleared by paying the tenants to leave, and the Caracol industrial park opened in 2012 by the Clintons, whose Korean garment factory employed a fraction of what was promised. There was the Venezuelan PetroCaribe oil money, two billion dollars, that went into projects a later audit could not find. There were the army he tried to refound and the Americans would not pay for, and the free schooling paid for by a tax on phone calls and remittances. There were the elections he did not hold. The parliament's term expired in January 2015 with no successor elected. He ruled by decree for a year. The presidential election of October 2015 produced a first round that his candidate led and that the opposition, the observers and eventually the government's own commission found to have been fraudulent. The run-off was cancelled twice and he left office in February 2016 with no elected successor, to a provisional president chosen by a parliament that had itself just been elected in the same disputed vote. The manner was the point. He insulted a woman heckler in Creole terms the country repeated for a week. He told the diaspora that the country was his and they could go. He governed with the Duvalierists, whom he rehabilitated and whose returned dictator Jean-Claude he received. He was born in Port-au-Prince, the son of an oil company employee, was expelled from the military academy, and played the clubs of Pétion-Ville and Miami from 1988. He had a house in Florida through the presidency. His protégé Moïse succeeded him in 2017. After Moïse's murder the Americans and the Canadians sanctioned him, in 2022 and 2024, for financing the gangs and trafficking cocaine, which he denies from Florida. Sweet Micky plays the carnival still.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Haitian
- Roles: president, musician, politician
