It was a no-show at the polls on Sunday as Haitians mounted a successful boycott of elections of candidates to the country's senate. The boycott was called for in response to the disqualification of all candidates from the Fanmi Lavalas party, the most popular party in the country, by Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (CEP). The CEP refused to discuss participation rates, but the Agence Haitienne de Presse said that senator Jean Hector Anacacis estimated participation to be between 1 and 3%, and the Associated Press reported that “armed U.N. soldiers, observers and journalists far outnumbered a trickle of voters in Haiti's capital.”
Last month, a Haitian court decided that the election must include the disqualified Fanmi Lavalas candidates, but the CEP ignored the decision. The disqualification is widely believed to be politically motivated. Many other potential candidates, such as Ronald Dauphin, have been held as political prisoners for years without trial.
Candidates who came out of the Lavalas political movement have decisively won every presidential election since free and fair elections were first held in 1990. Haitian elites and the international community have responded to these governments, chosen by the country's poor majority to defend its interests, with economic embargoes and political coup d'états.
Since 2000 Canada has contributed significantly to these attempts. They announced this week they're continuing the embargo, after telling the UN earlier this month that there is “no alternative” to continuing with existing policy, even after the RCMP admitted that its training mission of the Haitian National Police, the most lauded facet of the Canadian mission, has failed.