Kidnapping an Election

The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere has a booming fast-cash industry: kidnapping. Ralph Charles knows this firsthand. In November he was held for two days in the slum of Cité Soleil, a square mile crammed with 200,000 people and unmanageable crime outside Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince. Charles, the owner of a soccer team, says his kidnappers never bothered with disguise. "I'm a big guy with a bad temper, but I kept my cool. They had guns bigger than me. They have lots of them," he says. The ring has hundreds of collaborators, including teenagers, and they get what they want. Charles shelled out several thousand dollars for freedom, but his was one of many payoffs. On the average day, 10 kidnappings occur; 20 on Christmas weekend alone. Security experts estimate that the criminals net $100,000 a day. One of the country's most charismatic radio DJs was kidnapped last week. The ransom demand: $2 million.

The crime wave coincides with Haiti's preparations for a crucial presidential election. Thirty-four men and one woman are vying for the hot seat, including two former Presidents, three former Prime Ministers, three former military officers, a guerrilla leader, two alleged drug traffickers and a sweatshop industrialist. Each wants to replace Alexandre Boniface, the interim President of Haiti, who assumed office after the forced February 2004 departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the controversial former priest who now lives with his wife and two daughters in South Africa amid allegations of stealing millions from Haiti's treasury and telephone company. (Aristide's lawyers deny the charges.) Aristide had been restored in 1994 after the intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers; his close associate René Préval, a former President who served between the two terms of Aristide, is the front runner in the current race. Washington continues to exert influence, if in a less militant way. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Haiti last fall to nudge elections forward. They have been postponed at least four times, thanks to electoral incompetence, lack of security and the country's systemic chaos. There's no guarantee that the next scheduled vote will take place either.

Nearly 3.5 million people have signed up for the new voter-registration card, but it's unclear if they did so in order to vote or because the card is now required for all state transactions. The majority of the 40,000 pollworkers needed for election day have been recruited but not trained. And even though there are new measures to reduce fraud, including transparent ballot boxes and a new system to count and transmit results, the process may be undermined by inadequate surveillance, logistical trouble and bitter local political rivalries.

Two Haitian police officers are supposed to be stationed at each of some 800 polling stations, but no one is looking to the 6,000-man force to provide security for the elections or anything else. Most consider the police part of the problem. "The nice officers are the ones who torture without leaving blood," says a human-rights specialist who spent months gathering data. "High-ranking police officers' involvement in illegal activities has become institutionalized," says Haitian national police chief Mario Andersol, who admits that he lacks the manpower, weapons and institutional credibility to provide the security his country desperately needs.