Word: portes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Down in the cesspool of Port-au-Prince, it does not feel that way. A brutal dictatorship, a repressive army and organized political violence have been banished, but crime and mob rule are filling the vacuum of authority. Five thousand ill-trained, ill-equipped and immature policemen must control a desperate population of 7 million, propped up by a rapidly dwindling U.N. force. The country has acquired the image but not the substance of democracy: it has a duly elected President and parliament but a completely dysfunctional government. The economy is still at ground zero: no jobs, no investment...
...ABOLISHED the army, but life is still perilous on Haiti's mean streets, where the poor are growing impatient and predatory. Near the National Palace, a woman who cadges $1 secretes it for safekeeping in her underpants. A gang of thugs dubbed the Red Army ravages Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that police are afraid to enter: the last time they did, a shoot-out claimed the lives of several innocent bystanders. In La Saline members of a local vigilante patrol discover the dead body of their leader. They swiftly select four suspected "robbers" and beat them...
...lays out other tough priorities: increasing food production, cutting the bureaucracy, modernizing tax collection. "We have to face the situation as it is," he says. "I know the task seems impossible. But I am not afraid, because in my head my vision is very clear." Preval, says a Port-au-Prince political commentator, "will be lucky if he gets three months" to enact that vision before people revolt. Strikes, protests, barricaded roads could easily degenerate into violence and upheaval--a "crisis of ungovernability," as former President Leslie Manigat puts it--and that could trigger another boat exodus...
...engagement" that American politics today will not tolerate, he argues, and so Clinton's achievements in Haiti can only be judged "provisional, fragile and reversible." The intervention may have been better than nothing, but Washington's claims of success and predictions of a bright future are not shared in Port-au-Prince. The country's moment of international attention is just about over, and Haitians expect to sink back into darkness...
...Candy Man, but Cibo Matto puckishly turns it into an eerie, atmospheric dirge. Like the Fugees, Cibo Matto provides a twist on rap, a genre in which groups seem to have the shelf life of yogurt. No need to try to identify the taste--from Tokyo or Trenton or Port-au-Prince. As Hatori sings on Cibo Matto's Birthday Cake: "Shut...