Above: outgoing MINUSTAH Chief Mariano Fernandez (UN Photo/Logan Abassi)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Haiti’s delay in holding local and legislative elections is “almost unacceptable,” according to Mariano Fernandez, who completed his term as head of the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Haiti last week.

Speaking to the UN’s radio network, Fernandez said “we have had a delay that we have declared almost unacceptable because the elections should have taken place 14 months ago.”

But employment remained Haiti’s biggest issue, he said.

“They have a work force of 4.2 million people and in formal jobs they have only 200,000,” he said. “So you have around 4 million people living in a subsistence economy, in a survival economy or living from remittances from the Haitians in exile, the Diaspora.”

Despite the delay in elections, Fernandez said the security situation had “improved a lot,” pointing to the fact that Haiti had the fourth-lowest rate of homicides per capita in Central America and the Caribbean.

“The challenges in security are now mainly the gangs in the some shanty towns around Port-au-Prince and the family violence, the abuse against women,” he said. “But political violence doesn’t exist, kidnapping has been reduced and the cases of homicide are concentrated around Port- au-Prince — the rest of the country is very peaceful.”

Fernandez, who was succeeded this weekend by Canada’s Nigel Fisher, said cholera, which many accounts allege was brought to the country by UN peacekeepers from Nepal, had been “radically reduced” as well.

He had served as head of MINUSTAH for 20 months, taking over from Guatemala’s Edmond Mulet.