Haiti, no law, no order

CIT� SOLEIL, Haiti - The car had barely left the United Nations checkpoint when five gunmen leapt from an alley, surrounded the vehicle and forced it down a side road.

"Are they CIA?" one of the assailants barked at the Haitian driver, as he and his posse jabbed their assault rifles at the two Americans inside.

"Journalists!" the driver yelped back.

Leaning through the driver's window, the gunman scrutinized the Americans and decided they weren't worth kidnapping. Flashing a broad smile, he waved them through.

It was a typical welcome to Cit� Soleil, one of the most destitute and dangerous neighborhoods in the hemisphere - a shooting gallery where loyalties shift by the block.

"No one controls Cit� Soleil," said Sony Saint-Cyr, a shirtless young man in baggy low-rise shorts who lolled on a dusty street lined with bullet-pocked buildings. "It's everyone for himself." As he spoke, youths sauntered by in twos or threes, M16s or Galils slung over their shoulders. A pickup truck packed with more young men screeched past, assault rifles thrust out open windows.

A waterfront warren of tin shacks and open sewage lines in the capital of Port-au-Prince, Cit� Soleil means Sun City. The name is cruelly apt. With virtually no running water, electricity or trees to mitigate the tropical heat, its 300,000 residents live in a virtual furnace.

The heat is nothing compared to the violence and despair.

Bullets fly into classrooms as children study. The empty police station looks as if it were hit by a missile. With rare exceptions, even international relief agencies don't dare enter.

NO EASY PASSAGES At least nine gangs and their subgroups operate in Cit� Soleil's square mile. They bear names such as Soleil 17, Boston or Boisneuf, after the sectors they control. Safe passage must be renegotiated with every change of turf.

Along one desolate stretch of burned-out buildings, gunmen stopped a visitor's car and ordered the driver into a back alley, where they took his money. A boy watching the proceedings amused a friend by firing an imaginary machine gun with the zeal of a teenager playing an extended air-guitar solo. His friend doubled over with laughter.

A few blocks later, the car had to run a gauntlet between a group of gunmen and four armored UN vehicles pointed toward them. Within seconds, one of the groups opened fire.

Only one structure approaches grandeur in Cit� Soleil: a soaring monument to Emanuel "Dread" Wilm�, a gang leader shot dead by UN forces in July.

Thirty feet high and painted red and blue, the colors of the Haitian flag, the memorial is adorned with paintings of three men: the demure, bespectacled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted during an armed revolt in February 2004; the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, complete with his trademark beret; and the dreadlocked Wilm�.

"Hero of the 21st century," a caption above Wilm�'s likeness proclaims.

"Dread and Aristide, they were the only ones who did good things for the people here. Dread got us a road built. He created a market," said Saint-Cyr, 23, a father of three who lost his job as a port inspector when Aristide was overthrown. The interim government fired thousands of slum dwellers from public posts, saying they were no-show jobs to buy Aristide armed support.

Legitimate or not, the work is gone. Now, "it's with guns that people eat," said Saint-Cyr.

A disheveled woman with no gun sat on the dirt a few blocks away. "We're hungry," she said angrily, lifting her shirt and pounding her distended belly. "Feed our children." ENTER, ROBIN HOOD? Amaral Duclona, the chubby, baby-faced gang leader who replaced Wilm�, insisted he's a modern-day Robin Hood trying to do just that. "We're innocent people, looking after a population that the rich want to keep miserable," he declared during an interview with several other gang leaders in a cinderblock schoolhouse.

Wearing tight jeans, a tank top and a thick gold watch, Duclona, 26, looked more like a high-school student than the Al Capone of Haiti as he sat on a school bench. And he spoke as carefully and politely as a teacher's pet.

So did many of the other gang leaders - particularly Boston gang leader Evens Jean, a dapper 20-year-old with a sweet smile who is reputed to have decapitated a rival gang leader a few months back. One UN authority described Jean as a "psychopath." Gang culture has spread to neighboring slums such as Fort Dimanche, where squatters have taken over a former prison compound infamous for torture under dictator Fran�ois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. On a recent day in the prison courtyard, women were stirring bouillon and clay in plastic vats, then patting the mixture into cakes that they bake in the sun and sell as food. One of the women's young daughters stopped jump-roping over a sewage puddle to introduce herself.

"I'm a chim�re!" she giggled, using a French word for a mythological, fire-breathing monster that in Haiti means an armed slum youth. "I'm a chim�re too!" exclaimed a naked boy who couldn't have been older than 5. Soon, a dozen children were gathered round, hopping and clapping. "Chim�re!" they chimed, smiling brightly. "Chim�re! Chim�re! Chim�re!"