Haiti

Haiti’s embattled president broke a weeks-long silence Tuesday, telling his protesting nation that while he hears their cries in the streets, he has no intentions of stepping down.

“It would be irresponsible on my part for me to stand here today, to sign and submit a letter of resignation and say ‘I am leaving’ and leave the country like this and the system regenerates itself,” President Jovenel Moïse said during an impromptu press conference on the grounds of the National Palace.

When the United Nations deployed 6,200 blue-helmet soldiers and 1,200 police officers in 2004 to restore order in an unruly Haiti, ruthless armed gangs freely roamed the streets, corruption ran rampant in the judiciary and the country’s volatile politics were in a free fall.

Meanwhile, the Haiti National Police, awash in drug-trafficking and corruption allegations, numbered no more than 2,500 out of the 6,300 the U.N. had trained years earlier and two-thirds of its 182 police stations had been vandalized and burned.

Violent protests continued to grip Haiti on Monday, as the international community urged opponents of Jovenel Moïse to enter into a dialogue with the president, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since Wednesday.

COMMENTARY

Right now the western hemisphere – believe it or not, America – is dealing with behavior by federal politicians that's more outrageous than President Trump’s alleged Ukrainian shenanigans. This week the dubious prize goes to Haitian Senator Ralph Fethiere – who repeatedly fired a gun outside the legislature in Port-au-Prince on Monday, wounding two people, including an AP photographer.

Travelers bound for Port-au-Prince from Miami will soon face fewer options.

Starting on Aug. 20, American Airlines is once again reducing its direct flights from Miami to Port-au-Prince, cutting the number of daily flights from two to one.

The change is due to American Airlines’ cancellations of about 115 daily flights because of the ongoing grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jets, said American Airlines spokeswoman Martha Pantin.

Two weeks after tapping a politically unknown government bureaucrat to run Haiti’s day-to-day affairs, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse is appealing to Parliament to ratify the new prime minister and 18-member cabinet.

Thousands of angry Haitians marched in protest in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, decrying corruption and stepping up calls for the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, who has been implicated in two government audits on the misuse of billions of dollars in Venezuelan aid meant to help the country’s poor.

Months prior to Haiti’s deeply flawed October 2016 presidential vote, the man who would become president, Jovenel Moïse, received millions of dollars for questionable road rehabilitation projects that a panel of Haitian government auditors say were part of embezzlement schemes that defrauded the country’s poor out of billions of dollars in Venezuelan aid meant to improve their lives.