When Mayhem Is The Rule

By Tim Padgett and Kathie Klarreich/Port-Au-Prince

Guy Philippe hardly seemed like a man about to order a bloodbath. Lounging poolside last week with his rifle-toting soldiers at a hotel above Cap Haitien, Haiti's second largest city, the rebel army leader predicted an easy time overwhelming the capital, Port-au-Prince, which he threatened to attack unless President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned. "We'll take it within days if not hours," he told TIME. Aristide's fall, he insisted, would justify even the carnage his army's offensive would cause the hemisphere's poorest country. "Haiti has to pay something to bring back democracy," he warned, "and this is the price."

As it turned out, Aristide ended up paying the price: early Sunday morning, he boarded a plane and left the country. His departure came after a week of steadily increasing signals from Washington that Aristide must go, after a month-long crisis that claimed more than 80 lives. Aristide, 50, the former priest once revered as the hope of Haiti's poor but now widely reviled as a corrupt and incompetent autocrat, vowed he would serve out his five-year term, which ends in 2006. But the Bush Administration added to Aristide's woes late last week, recommending that he step down. The U.S. also urged Philippe to delay his attack on the capital. The media-savvy guerrilla agreed to comply "for a day or two."

Before Aristide departed, hundreds of Aristide's own heavily armed thugs, the chimeres (Creole for mythical monsters), had terrorized the city in anticipation of a rebel assault--looting warehouses, hijacking and smashing cars at barricades of burning tires, even killing people, sometimes execution-style, for reasons as slight as not flashing five fingers to signal the five full years of Aristide's current presidency. One ski-masked crew, blaring a police siren from a pickup, accosted TIME journalists at gunpoint, shouting "Not even the rats move here without our permission!" Because Haiti's police force is a threadbare farce--and because Aristide dismantled Haiti's brutal military during his first presidency a decade ago--the chimeres are the nation's de facto security force. Mostly poor, seething young men, they are prone to chants like "We will turn their skulls into inkwells."

Aristide got the chimeres to back off over the weekend. But the hellish anarchy swallowing the capital is a vivid sign that whatever government follows Aristide's isn't likely to be any more democratic. When Philippe, 36, served as Cap Haitien's police chief in the late 1990s, Colombian cocaine shipments flowed virtually unobstructed through its port, according to Haitian and U.S. officials--one reason that Haiti is now the largest narcotics transshipment center in the Caribbean. Philippe's ragtag militia, motivated by a hatred for Aristide, numbers only a few hundred men wielding old automatic rifles. But they stormed virtually unopposed into Cap Haitien last week after gobbling up numerous other Haitian towns like so many pieces of fried conch. "The only people Haitians have left to trust are street-gang members, assassins and drug traffickers," says a former high-ranking Haitian government official, adding that even if Aristide falls, "we still have a very, very violent period ahead of us."

If Philippe is the muscle behind the movement, Dany Toussaint is the kind of shadowy power broker who could emerge as the country's next leader. Toussaint, who is patiently waiting out the civil war inside his mansion overlooking Port-au-Prince, next to a commercial shooting range he owns, is a former Aristide bodyguard who once headed Haiti's police force. He adroitly made a clean break with the President and his Lavalas Party last year when it seemed Aristide's popularity was plummeting. Toussaint, 46, is no stranger to controversy; he has been investigated by Haitian and U.S. officials for crimes ranging from the assassinations of Aristide foes to narcotics trafficking. In a conversation with TIME at his home, Toussaint dismisses the various charges as "lacking any proof." As for his ambitions, Toussaint says, "Yes, I would run for President," claiming that he has the street muscle to "perhaps put all the pieces of broken glass back together."

Aristide's slide marks the end of another disappointing chapter in Haitian politics. This one began in 1994, when the U.S. intervened to restore Aristide to power after a military coup aborted his first presidency in 1991. With 20,000 troops on the ground, Washington embarked on an effort many Haitians now characterize as a half-baked nation-building program that yielded little more than ill-trained, corruption-prone institutions, like the police force Philippe led in Cap Haitien. The U.S., Philippe says, "is partly responsible for what is happening now."

When the unrest began last month, the Bush Administration proceeded cautiously. The U.S. and Aristide have held a mutual grudge since his re-election in 2000: Aristide blames Haiti's misery on the fact that Washington has withheld $500 million in desperately needed aid. But the White House points to Aristide's despotic bent, including his failure to hold new parliamentary elections after several Lavalas members won fraud-tainted races in 2000.

Still, the Americans aren't eager to see a democratically elected President deposed by force. Several U.S. efforts to resolve the conflict have gone nowhere. The rebels and opposition politicians rejected peace proposals put forward by Secretary of State Colin Powell because they didn't include Aristide's departure. That prompted some of them to refer to Powell as Pa we-l, Creole for "he doesn't get it."

The international community has also seemed hesitant. While the U.S. sent a small contingent of Marines last week to protect the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince, there was no immediate agreement on sending international troops, either as peacekeepers or to help Aristide out of the country. Over the weekend, some 2,200 additional Marines prepared to board naval vessels, poised to cruise just off Haiti's coast this week. Meanwhile, more than 500 Haitians fleeing to the U.S. on boats were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, which sent them home without even granting interviews to determine if they merited asylum.

Philippe, who seems certain to emerge as a Haitian power broker if his uprising succeeds, insists that things will get better. He claims he wants to revive democratic institutions that he says Aristide has smothered--including the military that Aristide dismantled in 1995. "I'm not fighting for personal political power," says Philippe. "Democracy is not a five-year term, it's a set of principles." But Philippe, who fled Haiti in 2000 under suspicion of ties to drug trafficking and returned only last month to lead the uprising, has his own issues. According to classified Haitian documents seen by TIME, he is under investigation by Haitian and U.S. officials for allegedly heading a cocaine-trafficking ring in the 1990s for which he purportedly recruited other top Haitian cops. Philippe denies any narco ties, and no formal charges have been brought against him.

Philippe has welcomed into his army troublesome figures like Louis-Jodel Chamblain. A former army officer, Chamblain was convicted in absentia in 1995 by a Haitian court for crimes that include participating in a 1994 massacre of at least 15 people while he helped head a paramilitary death squad that terrorized Aristide supporters after the 1991 coup. "Who hasn't made mistakes?" Philippe says with a shrug. "Now he is fighting for a good cause." Good or bad, it is already a cause soaked in blood. --With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington