Word: haitiens
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...power may have been cut in Cap Haitien, but the air in Haiti's second largest city on the evening of June 24 crackled with electricity. Within 12 hours, nearly every elective position in the country would be up for grabs as more than 10,000 candidates vied for 2,195 local offices and 101 seats in the legislature. That accounted for the scene outside the town's election center, where thousands of empty ballots were in trucks, waiting to be delivered to the polls. The ballots, however, weren't going anywhere because workers had already made their feelings plain...
...could scarcely blame them. When Haiti tried something like this in 1987, marauding army-backed death squads attacked voters with guns and machetes. The Cap Haitien workers knew, of course, that much had changed since then. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned last October by the U.S. military after spending three years in exile. The military officers who ousted him had been driven into an exile of their own. And now a new civil society was taking root, nurtured by 6,000 U.N. peacekeepers, a host of relief groups and $1.2 billion in foreign...
Still the officials in Cap Haitien wouldn't budge, so international observers were forced to unload the ballots and wait until morning. At 5 a.m. a convoy of trucks careered through the streets in a last-minute distribution dash. The display was typical of the chaos that beset voting stations across the country. Ballot boxes turned up in the oddest places: stacked on street corners, stashed beneath poll workers' beds, tossed into ravines. But such irregularities are one thing; the gunshots, screams and sirens that have traditionally attended mass action in Haiti are another, and they were notably absent from...
...Reported by Hannah Bloch/Washington, Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince and Tammerlin Drummond/ Cap Haitien...
...little violence that did arise was targeted not at the minions of the military junta, but its symbols. At the main army barracks in Cap Haitien, crowds stripped police and army buildings as if they were exorcising an evil spirit. For most of the week, bonfires fed by old arrest records and prison sentencing memos left a dull blue haze over the town's courtyards. Outside the home of the region's despised military commander, his band's tubas, trombones and horns were piled up to form a barrier in the middle of the street, then littered with thousands...