After Aristide, Haiti faces organizing rebels [View All]

On patrol in Mirebalais (Newsday photo by Letta Tayler)


By Letta Tayler
Latin America Correspondent

June 1, 2004


MIREBALAIS, Haiti -- In this hardscrabble town in the Haitian hinterlands, armed members of the country's disbanded military serve as mayor, police chief, judge and jury.

Dressed in uniforms from the army of the neighboring Dominican Republic, former Haitian soldiers patrol the streets by foot and on motor scooter. They march in parades. They hold the keys to the jail and sit behind the police chief's desk, taking crime reports.


"We're the ones in charge," declared former Cpl. Jean Hubert Marcelin from the Mirebalais police station, which ex-soldiers commandeered in March. "We're proud to be performing a revolutionary mission to change the country."

Despite the deployment of a U.S.-led coalition of 3,700 international peacekeeping troops in Haiti, thousands of ex-soldiers who ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide three months ago control vast portions of this desperately poor and troubled nation.

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