Haiti on the brink.

• Author: Regan, Jane
• Position: Cover Story

By eight o'clock it has grown dark in the Bas Pau de Chose neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. Kerosene lamps flicker in the small, sweltering, tin-roofed houses. An occasional car, carrying a commando team in search of a potential victim or a young elite couple out for a spin, breaks the monotonous drone of crickets, the crack of sporadic gunfire, the noise of barking dogs, and the murmur of voices.

Behind these sounds the buzz of transistor radios is audible as people try to pick up the latest news.

The army has announced that anyone collaborating with the enemy will be sentenced to a lifetime of forced labor.... Two thousand Marines carried out exercises in the Bahamas today.... Three heads were found today in a sewage canal....

In one house, a mother stops stirring her rice to bend closer to the radio. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in exile since he was forced from office by a bloody coup three years ago, is talking.

"He's working for me," she tells her daughter, a radio journalist who has been arrested, pistol-whipped, and twice forced into hiding.

Mother and daughter are adamantly committed to Aristide and the return of democracy to their country, but like many other Haitians, like much of the Haiti solidarity movement and the Left in the United States, they are confused and divided about the question of U.S. military intervention.

They agree that Aristide must return. During his seven months in office, the Haitian economy was beginning to turn around. Literacy programs were starting up. The radio was alive with news, denunciations, popular opinion, and the flowering of the "roots" music movement that gave value to the African rhythms and songs Haitians have known since their ancestors were brought to the Caribbean as slaves. When Aristide was in office, hardly anyone bothered to take to the sea in a desperate search for freedom or opportunity; people were sure they would find freedom and opportunity in their own country.

But the daughter and mother disagree on how to get the deposed president back. The mother, who sells small homemade candies on the street for a few pennies, is tired of the constant tension and the U.S. embargo. Prices have risen and the value of her money has dropped. And she is frightened: There is shooting in the streets every night, and sometimes bodies in the streets in the morning. She believes American politicians mean it when they hint the U.S. Marines will come to Haiti to "restore democracy."

The daughter knows better. A military intervention, she believes, will target the organized "democratic and popular movement"--the hundreds of neighborhood groups, peasant associations, development and human-rights bodies, students and mass organizations, and the Catholic priests, nuns, and congregations adhering to liberation theology who have fought and died for democracy in Haiti.

The daughter also understands that the United States did not start pondering the question of "intervention" in Haiti in 1994. As she heard another journalist say on one of those sweltering nights, "It's not a question of when the United States will intervene. The intervention is already here."

Almost three years ago, after a long and awkward silence, President George Bush finally announced that the United States disapproved of the military coup d'etat against Aristide and would work to return him to office. It soon joined the hemisphere-wide embargo, organized (and sometimes directed) negotiations with the coup leaders, and criticized the illegal regime. On occasion, the White House even invited Aristide to pose at stiff photo opportunities. The U.S. officials' discomfort is painfully evident in the pictures. Their negotiations with Aristide always fell apart, no matter how many concessions the Haitian president made, and the series of trade embargoes announced by Washington was never designed to hurt the elite and the military, the U.S. Government's traditional allies, who organized and supported the coup.

Gasoline, arms, luxury goods, and even raw materials for U.S.-owned factories flooded the country for almost three years. Even today, fuel, French butter and wine, Venezuelan pasta and jam, American breakfast cereals, and hundreds of other products flow across the Dominican border and into Haitian ports. (Two months ago, the United States promised equipment to "help"...