When Mayhem Is The Rule

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Guy Philippe hardly seemed like a man about to order a bloodbath. Lounging poolside last week with his rifle-toting soldiers at a hotel above Cap Haitien, Haiti's second largest city, the rebel army leader predicted an easy time overwhelming the capital, Port-au-Prince, which he threatened to attack unless President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned. "We'll take it within days if not hours," he told TIME. Aristide's fall, he insisted, would justify even the carnage his army's offensive would cause the hemisphere's poorest country. "Haiti has to pay something to bring back democracy," he warned, "and this is the price."

As it turned out, Aristide ended up paying the price: early Sunday morning, he boarded a plane and left the country. His departure came after a week of steadily increasing signals from Washington that Aristide must go, after a month-long crisis that claimed more than 80 lives. Aristide, 50, the former priest once revered as the hope of Haiti's poor but now widely reviled as a corrupt and incompetent autocrat, vowed he would serve out his five-year term, which ends in 2006. But the Bush Administration added to Aristide's woes late last week, recommending that he step down. The U.S. also urged Philippe to delay his attack on the capital. The media-savvy guerrilla agreed to comply "for a day or two."

Before Aristide departed, hundreds of Aristide's own heavily armed thugs, the chimeres (Creole for mythical monsters), had terrorized the city in anticipation of a rebel assault--looting warehouses, hijacking and smashing cars at barricades of burning tires, even killing people, sometimes execution-style, for reasons as slight as not flashing five fingers to signal the five full years of Aristide's current presidency. One ski-masked crew, blaring a police siren from a pickup, accosted TIME journalists at gunpoint, shouting "Not even the rats move here without our permission!" Because Haiti's police force is a threadbare farce--and because Aristide dismantled Haiti's brutal military during his first presidency a decade ago--the chimeres are the nation's de facto security force. Mostly poor, seething young men, they are prone to chants like "We will turn their skulls into inkwells."

Aristide got the chimeres to back off over the weekend. But the hellish anarchy swallowing the capital is a vivid sign that whatever government follows Aristide's isn't likely to be any more democratic. When Philippe, 36, served as Cap Haitien's police chief in the late 1990s, Colombian cocaine shipments flowed virtually unobstructed through its port, according to Haitian and U.S. officials--one reason that Haiti is now the largest narcotics transshipment center in the Caribbean. Philippe's ragtag militia, motivated by a hatred for Aristide, numbers only a few hundred men wielding old automatic rifles. But they stormed virtually unopposed into Cap Haitien last week after gobbling up numerous other Haitian towns like so many pieces of fried conch. "The only people Haitians have left to trust are street-gang members, assassins and drug traffickers," says a former high-ranking Haitian government official, adding that even if Aristide falls, "we still have a very, very violent period ahead of us."