http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/us/politics/hillary-clinton-haiti.html?_r=0 Men carrying horns, handwritten signs and bottles of gasoline to set tires on fire, a group of men marched into one of the many protests that have paralyzed parts of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, this year.
They were angry with their president, who let Parliament collapse and failed to hold scheduled elections. They were angry with the United Nations for not ensuring a fair vote for his successor. And they were angry with the former American secretary of state who had helped put him in power.
“You see all these people here?” said one of the Haitian-flag-draped protesters, Jean Renold Cenatus, 32, who said he was unemployed. “It’s because of what Mrs. Clinton did five years ago that we are facing this situation.”
In their post-2000 lives as global citizens, Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton have been tied to no country more closely than Haiti. As a United Nations special envoy, Mr. Clinton helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the country after its devastating 2010 earthquake. Mrs. Clinton traveled there four times as secretary of state and shepherded billions of dollars in American aid.
They often speak fondly of Haiti, one of the first places they visited as newlyweds in 1975.
“We came here for the first time together, just after we were married, and fell in love with Haiti,” Mrs. Clinton said in 2012, standing near her husband at the opening of a Haitian industrial park she helped to finance. “We have had a deep connection to and with Haiti ever since.”
But as she seeks the world’s most powerful job and Haiti plunges into another political abyss, a loud segment of Haitians and Haitian-Americans is speaking of the Clintons with the same contempt they reserve for some of their past leaders.
Graphic: 2016 Delegate Count and Primary Results
In widely read blogs, in protests in Port-au-Prince and outside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, and on popular call-in radio shows in Florida, where primaries will be held on Tuesday, the Clintons have become prime targets of blame for the country’s woes.
Among the litany of complaints being laid at their feet: Fewer than half the jobs promised at the industrial park, built after 366 farmers were evicted from their lands, have materialized. Many millions of dollars earmarked for relief efforts have yet to be spent. Mrs. Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham has turned up in business ventures on the island, setting off speculation about insider deals.
“A vote for Hillary Clinton means further corruption, further death and destruction for our people,” said Dahoud Andre, a radio show host in New York who has helped organize protests against the Clintons. “It means more Haitians leaving Haiti and not being able to live in our country.”
And now, Michel Martelly, a president whom Mrs. Clinton helped get elected, has turned out to be another in a long line of troubling leaders.
Tony Jeanthenor, 55, a member of the Miami-based Haitian human rights group Veye-Yo as well as Lavalas Family, a Haitian political party, said he was voting for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont because of the senator’s distaste for involvement in other countries’ affairs.
“Nothing good for Haiti can come out of Hillary because of her past behavior,” Mr. Jeanthenor said.
The dismay over Mrs. Clinton in South Florida’s Haitian community is not likely to affect her fortunes on Tuesday, as she holds a comfortable lead over Mr. Sanders in state polls. Whether it could damage her in a general election is unclear. An estimated 150,000 Haitian-American voters live in Florida, the state where 537 votes decided the 2000 election. But they have also overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, according to Fernand R. Amandi, a principal partner of Bendixen & Amandi International, a public opinion research firm in Miami that has polled Haitian-Americans extensively.