Word: port
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Suddenly came the White House announcement hardly anyone expected: Carter, Powell and Nunn were going to Port-au-Prince to make one last try at persuading the three top Haitian leaders to take the money and run. Literally take the money and run. The delegation was authorized to discuss just one thing with the Cedras crowd: how they would pack up to leave. U.S. officials denied they were offering any extra cash to the clique, but the three could in effect collect their own money -- the substantial wealth they are believed to have stashed abroad. And Washington would be happy...
Cedras' backers are widely thought to have drawn up a hit list of opposition members who would be gunned down as U.S. troops were about to land, peacefully or as an invasion force. At the head of the list, supposedly, is Port-au- Prince Mayor Evans Paul. Some Aristide supporters were said to have asked the U.S. to give them two or three days' warning of an invasion so they could go into hiding...
...strangers. A profile in the New York Times described him as "wan, distracted . . . gentle-mannered to the point of caricature." Haitians who know Aristide are confounded by such descriptions. "There must be some kind of a cultural misunderstanding," says Guylene Viaud, who worked with Aristide's youth groups in Port-au-Prince. "To us he seems very open. He loves to joke and to make people laugh." Says a close friend: "When he feels secure, he opens up. When he's besieged, he shuts people...
...graver problem. They fear that Aristide's supporters, if not Aristide himself, will seek revenge for abuses and killings committed during the three years since the coup. There is a long tradition of vengeance when power shifts. When Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier fell in 1986, crowds surged through Port-au-Prince seeking out members of the Tontons Macoutes and beating them to death. But Aristide's followers are just as afraid that weapons left in the hands of the military and its gangs of thugs will continue to be trained on them...
...seeks to close is largely the result of his own dithering. Indeed, more than anything else, the current crisis can be traced to the President's capitulation to an unarmed rent-a-mob protesting the arrival of a U.S. warship last October. When the Harlan County turned away from Port-au-Prince, the junta was emboldened to break its promise to depart voluntarily...