Convulsed by coups and terrorized by thugs for much of its history, Haiti held presidential elections in early 2006 in a tenuous but critical step toward democracy.Underscoring the chaos, balloting was postponed three times last year and has been delayed at least a few weeks from the latest official date of Jan. 8.The vote will be the first since President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> was forced out by armed rebels in February 2004, spawning a political and human rights crisis of such magnitude that <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> peacekeepers, like the U.S. Marines who preceded them, can barely keep order.Starting Sunday, January 1, 2006, Newsday begins a three-day series about the problems facing Haiti, one of the most troubled nations in the Western Hemisphere.SUNDAY: Illegal armed groups pose the single greatest threat to bringing democracy, jobs and hope to Haiti.MONDAY: Rice production, once the backbone of the rural workforce, could be the key to jumpstarting Haiti's ravaged economy.TUESDAY: Deforestation threatens to turn Haiti into a <a href="/topics/Caribbean">Caribbean</a> desert; a quick exit by international donors could doom the country to anarchy.

News

World

ny-haitiedgeofchaos2006-sg

WOSECU01

Haiti a place of fear and havoc

One of the first things <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a> will need after electing a new president is massive aid to help establish law and order. But foreign policy experts fear the international community, and particularly the United States, is preparing a quick exit that could doom this troubled country to another round of chaos. 
Though Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs at the <a href="/topics/US_State_Department">State Department</a>, declared during a recent visit that "the United States is a good friend of <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a>," a U.S. diplomat told Newsday that a <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> peacekeeping force here may be able to leave in "a couple of years." "The capability is there" to build a Haitian police force in that time to replace the nearly 8,900 UN troops and police, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 
In contrast, most foreign policy experts believe Haiti needs a decade to rebuild its tiny and corrupt police force - the only security apparatus apart from the peacekeepers, who have barely kept a lid on violence since populist President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> was ousted by rebels 23 months ago. 
UN Secretary-General <a href="/topics/Kofi_Annan">Kofi Annan</a> also wants a lengthy commitment. "I hope this time the international community will go in for the long haul and not a quick turn-around," Annan said when the peacekeepers were deployed here in 2004. "It may take years." The United States pays more than one-fourth the costs of the peacekeeping mission and holds enormous sway over its size and duration. 
In further warning signals, Washington last summer rebuffed UN requests for a commando unit to help the Brazilian-led peacekeepers rout armed groups. And the <a href="/topics/The_Pentagon">Pentagon</a> has yet to answer an SOS to loan the UN mission 10 helicopters for logistics during the presidential elections. 
The United States has been the key outside player in Haiti since slaves ousted French colonists two centuries ago. Since Aristide's departure, the United States has pledged a half-billion dollars in aid here, a windfall to this impoverished, shattered nation. 
But after three military interventions here in the past century, the <a href="/topics/White_House">White House</a> wants to shift responsibility to a hemispheric coalition. "The reality is that the U.S. cannot be effective in Haiti if we're seen as the only interested power," said the U.S. diplomat. "We've done it before and it hasn't worked." So far, however, the only country that's seriously stepped to the plate is Brazil, which has been criticized for its leadership of the peacekeeping force. 
Many critics believe U.S. policy has failed because it was misguided. "The United States has oscillated between extremes of attention and neglect in Haiti," said James Dobbins, an envoy to Haiti under former President <a href="/topics/Bill_Clinton">Bill Clinton</a>. "The basic problem is that our focus has never been continuous." 
That's partly because Haiti has no vital natural resources or ports to hold U.S. interest. But when it spins out of control, thousands of Haitian refugees board boats bound for U.S. shores. Already, nearly 1 million Haitians live in the United States - more than a third of them in the New York metropolitan area. 
Instability also could increase drug traffickers' use of Haiti to transfer Colombian cocaine to the United States, drug experts warn. 
"The United States can't ignore Haiti," said Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights, a leading Haitian advocacy group. "The two countries are stuck with each other." 
Some Haitians would love to see the Yankees go home. "Why would we want the Americans back? To kick out our next president?" asked Ralph Azor, 29, an unemployed electrician from Bel Air, a neighborhood of <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a> loyal to Aristide, who claims the United States forced him out. Washington denies the allegation. 
But many Haitians believe the world will forget about Haiti if the United States doesn't stay engaged. 
"The main problem with U.S. involvement in Haiti has been paternalism," said Georges Michel, a political commentator on Haiti's Radio Metropole. "Treat us respectfully. Hold our hands and push us in the right direction. But don't impose solutions."

WOELEC03

They can't do it alone

CIT� SOLEIL, Haiti - The car had barely left the <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> checkpoint when five gunmen leapt from an alley, surrounded the vehicle and forced it down a side road. 
"Are they <a href="/topics/Central_Intelligence_Agency">CIA</a>?" 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 <a href="/topics/Sony">Sony</a> 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 <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a>, 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, <a href="/topics/Boston">Boston</a> 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 <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a>, who was ousted during an armed revolt in February 2004; the Latin American revolutionary <a href="/topics/Che_Guevara">Che Guevara</a>, 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 <a href="/topics/Al_Capone">Al Capone</a> 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!"

WOSUN01

Haiti, no law, no order

The scene couldn't have looked more idyllic. Men, women and teenagers waded slowly through verdant rice paddies, rhythmically plunging handfuls of seedlings into the warm mud. White egrets skimmed the surface of the wet fields. Here and there, a coconut palm swayed in the humid breeze. But rice cultivation, a centuries-old ritual in La Verdue and other hamlets across the fertile Artibonite Valley in central <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a>, is becoming an endangered occupation. 
Every year, more farmers leave their tiny plots of land, unable to cope with soaring production costs, clogged irrigation canals and armed bandits who steal the harvest and day workers' pay. 
Most devastating of all, Haitians increasingly are eating what they call "<a href="/topics/Miami">Miami</a> rice" - heavily subsidized U.S. rice that floods the market at half the price of local grain. 
"It's misery and more misery," said Roland Toussaint, 35, a farmer in bare feet and a straw hat who started working in the paddies as a boy, alongside his father and grandfather. "We can't compete with the American rice. It's killing us." Three decades ago, Haiti was almost self-sufficient in rice production, the mainstay of the rural economy. But since Haiti opened its markets to the United States in 1986 at the behest of lenders including the <a href="/topics/International_Monetary_Fund">International Monetary Fund</a>, rice production has halved, while rice imports, mainly from the United States, have increased 50-fold. Haiti's rice problems are emblematic of the broader economic crisis facing this tiny island nation, which two centuries ago was the pearl of the Antilles, stuffing colonial France's coffers by producing much of the world's sugar, coffee and mahogany. 
Now, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. Three-fourths of Haitians live on less than $2 a day and 70 percent of the workforce is jobless or underemployed. More than half the country's children don't get enough to eat. 
Most development experts believe that the new president whom Haitians will elect in balloting tentatively scheduled for later this month must start any economic turnaround here in the countryside, home to two-thirds of the country's 8 million people. 
While tourism, light industry and handicrafts also can create jobs, "rural development is key to revitalizing Haiti's economy," said Volny Paultre, Haiti program director for the <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> <a href="/topics/Food_and_Agriculture_Organization">Food and Agriculture Organization</a>. "And central to that development is rice." Otherwise, Paultre and other experts predict, peasants will continue leaving for the city in search of manufacturing jobs that no longer exist. Or migrating to neighboring <a href="/topics/Dominican_Republic">Dominican Republic</a>, where they often work under brutal conditions for almost no pay. Or boarding rickety boats bound for the United States, home to an estimated 1 million Haitians, half of them in the metropolitan area. 
Haiti still has the capacity to be almost self-sufficient in rice, many agronomists believe. 
Rice was among a flood of foreign imports that Haiti's then-military government accepted in exchange for international loans in the 1980s. The rice imports sparked such an uproar that the government dispatched armed convoys to escort the first rice shipments through the Artibonite Valley. 
Further protective barriers against U.S. rice were dismantled in 1994 by then-President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> as part of the agreement with Washington to restore him to power after he had been ousted in a military coup three years earlier. 
Haiti's tariffs on rice imports fell from 35 percent to 3 percent, the lowest in the region. In contrast, rice tariffs in the <a href="/topics/Dominican_Republic">Dominican Republic</a>, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, are 40 percent. 
International lenders forbade Haiti from subsidizing its rice farmers; the aim was to cultivate Haitian industries that could survive without props. Yet U.S. rice farmers are massively subsidized by the U.S. government, receiving $1.3 billion last year alone to support a crop that cost $1.8 billion to grow, according to a report issued in April by Oxfam International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to poverty eradication. 
"This is an example of rigged rules and double standards at their baldest," said Phil Bloomer, head of Oxfam International's Make Trade Fair campaign, who called the practice "scandalous." Today, three out of four platefuls of rice eaten here were grown in the United States. Rice has gradually edged out other staples such as cassava, cornmeal and millet. 
U.S. products have hurt other farm sectors as well. Haiti's once-thriving poultry industry is in ruins, thanks to a flood of chicken parts. 
"They keep the breast meat in the United States and sell us the gizzards and necks and claws just before they are about to rot," said Jean Pierre-Louis, a rice farmer in Petite Riviere, a market town near La Verdue. "We've become a U.S. dumping ground." Defenders, including U.S. food exporters, note that the imports have helped consumers by lowering food prices in a nation where half the children are malnourished. They also have provided Haiti's cash-strapped government with revenue through import taxes, though two executives at one U.S. company were convicted last year of bribing Haitian customs officials to illegally reduce those tax payments. 
But the flood of U.S. goods has "proved disastrous in the long term," said Jean-Claude Paulvin, president of the Haiti Economists Association. Like many developing nations that accepted the <a href="/topics/International_Monetary_Fund">International Monetary Fund</a>'s position that free trade would jump-start the economy, he said, "We're left with a country with a destroyed economic base that's dependent on imports." Paulvin said the blame falls not just on international lenders but also on this country's leaders, who traditionally have ignored the peasant class in the countryside and inherited their old colonizers' habit of plundering the country's wealth. 
"Here in Haiti we have a pirate mentality. We've had a series of predatory governments whose mentality is suck out the resources rather than reinvest," Paulvin said. "I only hope the next government is strong enough and has clear enough vision to sit down with the international community and say, 'This is what I want.'" "<a href="/topics/Miami">Miami</a> Rice" is not the only threat to rice farmers. The transitional government - installed after Aristide was ousted from office a second time in February 2004 - has ended fertilizer subsidies despite soaring costs for fuel, a fertilizer component. A 100-pound bag of fertilizer now costs up to $35, double the price a year ago. 
With credit almost nonexistent, many farmers are forced to sell a pig or a cow to buy fertilizer. But farmers have fewer pigs to sell, thanks in part to a U.S.-backed international aid program in 1981 to replace Creole pigs slaughtered during an African Swine Fever epidemic. 
Instead of replacing the Creole swine, which were hardy and easy to feed, the aid agencies sent in <a href="/topics/Iowa">Iowa</a> porkers that required special feed and pens. The imports were too costly for many farmers, who dubbed them "four-footed princes." So, many farmers plant less rice. Others make ends meet by not sending their children to school, contributing to the country's illiteracy rate of 55 percent. 
"What choice do I have?" asked rice farmer Jasnel Charles, 29, of La Verdue, explaining that annual tuition for his young daughter would cost about the same as a bag of fertilizer. 
With fertilizer costs so high, most farmers can't even think about renting or buying a tractor or other machinery to improve production. Most rice is harvested with machetes and threshed by hand: the men whacking the bundles against the ground, the women spreading the grains into dazzling gold carpets that dry in front of tiny, pink-and-turquoise cottages with no running water or electricity that families here call home. 
With Haiti sliding toward anarchy in the past several years, the government has failed to maintain irrigation canals, causing many paddies to dry up. Deforestation in the mountains overlooking the Artibonite has contributed to massive flooding during the rainy season in lower-lying paddies. 
Then there are the armed bandits, some paid by large landowners seeking to squeeze out subsistence farmers, others acting on their own. They whiz through back roads on motor scooters, extracting illegal taxes or bags of rice worth only a few dollars each to "authorize" peasants to work the land. 
"Every day we're more scared to go out and work," said Toussaint, who has been robbed three times in less than two years, as he waded through his paddy under a broiling sun. Like most farmers in the Artibonite, he wishes his three young children could continue to cultivate rice. But if things continue as they are, he wants them to leave, as so many young people already have. 
Some sneak into neighboring <a href="/topics/Caribbean">Caribbean</a> countries or the United States. Others head to burgeoning slums in <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a>, hoping to find work in assembly plants that sprouted in the 1980s. 
But most of the factory jobs have moved to <a href="/topics/China">China</a>, leaving 92 percent of the <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a> workforce with no regular employment. 
Some unemployed join armed gangs. Others scrounge enough to buy a wheelbarrow and sell whatever they can at street markets: used clothes, spaghetti, soap, sugarcane or U.S. rice. 
"Haitian rice tastes better, but it costs too much," explained Natalie Gilmon, a mother of six, as she paid 15 gourdes (37 cents) for a two-cup scoop of U.S. rice from a sack emblazoned with a red, white and blue flag at a Port-au-Prince street market. It was exactly half the cost of Haitian rice. "As it is, we don't get enough to eat."

WOECON02

Rice: Haiti’s once and future cash crop is the key to its economic turnaround

SAUT MATHURINE, <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a> - Two decades ago, Ilson Dorcy considered the mango trees dotting his rugged, mountain farmland so useless that he'd cut them and sell the wood to charcoal makers. Now, he views them as gold. 
Since he began grafting mango trees with a fancy variety of the fruit that is popular in the United States, Dorcy earns more exporting mangoes than he would selling trees for charcoal. 
"At first, my friends thought I was crazy," Dorcy, 60, recalled as he stood proudly in front of his mango grove in this remote hamlet on <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a>'s southwest peninsula. "They said the group telling me to grow more mangoes must be communist." Actually, the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment, a nonprofit group that launched the grafting program, relies on a purely capitalist tenet to combat Haiti's massive deforestation. 
"If you don't offer people an alternative that earns them more than cutting down the trees, you won't succeed," said Mousson Finnigan, the group's co-director. 
For a half-century, nonprofit and government programs have largely failed to stem deforestation, which is driven by Haiti's dependence on charcoal for cooking and on lucrative timber exports. Though 3 million trees are planted each year, an estimated 50 million others are felled. 
The problem, environmentalists say, is that reforestation programs rarely provide jobs to tree-cutters, most of whom are subsistence farmers. So as soon as saplings are planted, farmers cut them down. 
ORE, in contrast, supplies farmers with fruit trees or stalks for top-grafting - a process in which high-quality fruit varieties are grafted to pruned, low-quality fruit trees to produce lucrative strains of mango, avocado and citrus in just two to three years. 
Dorcy top-grafted his mango trees with ORE saplings that produce the exceptionally sweet, fragrant Madame Francique mango. He earns $15 to $45 per tree each year by selling those mangoes to the United States. Sold as wood, each tree might fetch him $50. 
The communist moniker was no joke when Sean Finnigan, a British-born photographer-turned-environmentalist, and his wife, Mousson, a Parisian-trained Haitian doctor, started ORE two decades ago in Camp Perrin, a town an hour's drive south of here. 
Perhaps encouraged by lumber and charcoal barons, peasants were so suspicious of the sapling-bearing Finnigans that they reported them as possible communist recruiters to the military. At the time, Haiti, just 45 miles from <a href="/topics/Cuba">Cuba</a>, was winding down a U.S.-backed campaign to suppress suspected leftists. 
But paranoia became ecstasy when the fruit began to sell. 
"This is my new mother!" exclaimed Maurice Joseph, 55, a barefoot farmer in the nearby hamlet of Navarre, as he pointed to the shiny green fruit on his three avocado trees. 
In eight years, the avocados have financed a concrete floor for his shack, paid tuition for two of his four children, and helped him buy a tiny plot of land, Joseph said. 
ORE has helped plant or graft more than 882,000 trees here that earn an estimated $9.3 million a year. Still, the progress is hard-won. 
Farmers wince as they describe the obstacles in getting produce to market: bandits who demand protection money, bridges washed out along the bumpy dirt road that passes for a highway, and fruit that spoils in transit because producers lack sufficient crates to pack it properly. 
While Haiti could easily double its fruit exports, international donors shun long-term projects like ORE's, preferring 18-month commitments because of Haiti's instability. 
So, above Saut Mathurine, peasants keep cutting trees. Topsoil tumbles down the mountains to Camp Perrin, blocking irrigation canals and filling the local river with so much silt that it frequently overflows, flooding homes and businesses. 
"We haven't won the war," said Mousson Finnigan, "just one battle."

WOSIDE03

Fruit of their labor

Christa Fertilice still has nightmares about the giant wave that poured into Gona�ves, turning the city into a lake and drowning at least 1,900 people in one of the worst natural disasters in <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a>'s calamitous history. 
A torrent of water 10 feet high engulfed Fertilice's shack when Tropical Storm Jeanne struck in September 2004, sweeping her and eight relatives out the windows. 
Fertilice managed to crawl onto a rooftop and huddled there all night, watching the blurry silhouettes of bodies, pigs, cows, chairs, tables, motor scooters, radios, television sets and most of the hope pour out of this desperately poor city. For days afterward, corpses filled the streets and alleyways. Fertilice found those of her daughter and three grandchildren floating in her back yard. She dragged them to the street for rescue workers to collect and bury, but they never came; they couldn't keep up with the piles of dead. After the bodies lay for three days in the broiling sun, Fertilice dragged them out back and buried them herself. 
Asked recently what caused the flood of Gona�ves, Fertilice, 55, lifted her palms to the sky. "It's God's work," she said. 
Across this city of roughly 200,000, which is still reeling from the deluge, almost no one seemed aware of the scientific explanation: deforestation, a phenomenon that is turning tiny Haiti into a <a href="/topics/Caribbean">Caribbean</a> desert and causing increasingly deadly flash floods and mudslides. 
With three-fourths of Haitians dependent on charcoal to cook their food, and most subsistence farmers unable to earn a living without a quick cash crop, tree cutting is one of Haiti's biggest industries. About 50 million trees are felled to make fuel or to sell as lumber each year, according to the Haitian Environmental Association. 
Less than 2 percent of Haiti's once lush forests remain, compared with 20 percent in the <a href="/topics/Dominican_Republic">Dominican Republic</a>, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola. 
Without tree roots, topsoil is loosened and easily washes away. Without topsoil, the ground can't easily absorb water. So when the rains fall, water pours down denuded hills, overflows riverbanks and fills up the plains. 
Criss-crossed with rivers and ringed on three sides by mountains so badly stripped they look from afar like a three-day beard, this western coastal city didn't stand a chance. 
"There are many more Gona�veses in Haiti just waiting to happen," said Jean Andre Victor, Haiti's leading environmentalist. "We're sitting on a time bomb." Sewage canals blocked from years of neglect caused water to build up even faster. But even if they had been cleaned, the toll still would have been catastrophic, environmentalists say. 
Reforestation is one of the biggest challenges facing the new president that Haitians will elect in voting tentatively scheduled for later this month. It also is one of the most daunting, because the tree-cutting is fueled by poverty, soil degradation and energy needs. 
More than four-fifths of Haitians have little or no electricity, ruling out that energy source for heating their beans or boiling their rice. Three-fourths of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, so they can't afford gas or kerosene, which often costs four times the price of charcoal. 
"Gas? Sure, I'd love to cook with it. But who can afford it?" asked Christine Jean, a mother of six, as she bought a small bag of charcoal for 25 gourdes (62 cents), one-fourth of her daily earnings, at the March� Salomon in the capital, <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a>. 
Business is always brisk at March� Salomon, a warren of alleys packed with buckets and mounds of charcoal where everything, from the walls to the footpaths to the already black faces of vendors, is coated in soot. 
With nearly three-fourths of the workforce lacking steady jobs, Haiti's mountains are filled with farmers chopping trees, or tending smoldering mounds of wood that they're slowly burning into charcoal. 
Above Gona�ves, some farmers who continue those practices lost relatives in the flood. 
Farues Lomilis, 43, a father of 10 from the hamlet of Menguelte, watched the waters devour his 11-year-old son, Cholo. The flood also killed his two cows, six goats and three pigs, and destroyed his house, rice crop and banana trees. 
But on a recent day, Lomilis stood barefoot with a friend in a clearing in Passe Reine, about an hour's drive northeast of Gona�ves, hacking at a 60-foot tree with an axe. Asked if he knew that cutting trees contributed to the killer flood, Lomilis shook his head so vigorously it appeared he was trying to chase away the thought. 
"If I don't cut the trees, we don't eat," he said finally. Then he picked up his axe and resumed hacking. 
Like more than half of Haitians, Lomilis can't read or write, and the only work he knows is farming. He estimated he and his friend will earn 2,500 Haitian gourdes (about $62) for the tree, which he'll use to supplement the corn, beans and rice he grows on a tiny plot. 
Every year, Lomilis said, yields on his land are scarcer. In a vicious cycle across Haiti, topsoil erosion caused by deforestation has washed most of the nutrients from farmland, making peasants even more dependent on the cash crop of tree-cutting. 
About 36 million metric tons of Haiti's topsoil is flushed away each year, one of the highest rates in the world, according to the <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> Development Program. Most of it lands as sediment in rivers and canals, causing them to overflow, and in the ocean, where it kills coral reefs and seafood, threatening what little remains of Haiti's tourism and fishing industries. 
Deforestation dates to colonial times, when the French cleared forests to create sugar plantations and sold the country's mahogany for export. Since then, a succession of governments, pressured by powerful charcoal and lumber interests, has lacked the will or the resources to bring the forests back. 
"The environment is totally forgotten by most decision-makers in Haiti, and even the international community is in a state of denial about the severity of the problem," said Lyes Ferroukhi, who coordinates environmental programs in Haiti for the UN Development Program. 
Haiti's Environment Ministry, a shabby building in Port-au-Prince, is stuffed with proposals to solve the deforestation crisis. Possible solutions include converting to solar and wind energy and using sugarcane pulp to run thousands of charcoal-fired bakeries, dry cleaners and mills that make clairin, Haiti's popular moonshine. 
"We'd love to invest in renewable energy," said Serge Pierre-Louis, chief aide to the environment minister, with a weary smile. "But where is the money?" The poorest nation in the hemisphere, Haiti received pledges of $1.3 billion in foreign aid for a two-year transition period when President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> was ousted in an armed uprising in February 2004. Less than 2 percent of that was earmarked for the environment. 
Further compounding the problem, the Environment Ministry has almost no authority, the few environmental laws on the books are outdated, and the country lacks inspectors to enforce them. 
Gona�ves remains in a state of crisis from the 2004 flood. 
Children crowd classrooms missing walls. Scores of businesses remain closed. Low-lying neighborhoods are still flooded with mud or filled with mounds of garbage dumped here by the waters. 
Survivors who returned to flood-prone areas because they had no place else to go are bracing for a repeat of the disaster. 
They include Fertilice, who moved back into her two-room shack after scrubbing out the mud, using rags created when the flood tore curtains from windows, sheets from beds and clothes from people's backs. 
But she had neither savings nor insurance money to rebuild her business - a tiny depot of salt that dissolved in the flood. With no income, she relies on relatives for cornmeal, rice and a bit of fish. 
Fertilice cooks that food out back, not far from where she buried the bodies of her daughter and three grandchildren. 
She uses a charcoal grill. "What choice do I have?" she asked.

WOTREE03

No place left to grow

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Enraged by long lines and severe disorganization, voters stormed polling centers and scuffled with <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> peacekeepers yesterday in Haiti's first presidential election since an armed revolt two years ago pushed the country to the brink of collapse. 
At least one person was asphyxiated and several others injured in stampedes in the capital, <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a>, where voters braved tear gas to rip down metal gates and pour into gigantic, dramatically understaffed polling stations, many of which opened several hours late. At a polling center in the northern town of Gros Morne, a Haitian policeman was reportedly killed by a mob after shooting dead a man waiting to vote. 
Nevertheless, Haitian and international officials hailed the vote as a critical step in replanting democracy in the hemisphere's poorest and one of its most troubled nations. They noted that turnout was heavy, order slowly prevailed and balloting was free of the organized violence that has ravaged many elections here. 
"The electoral process today was truly admirable," said <a href="/topics/Juan_Gabriel">Juan Gabriel</a> Valdes, chief of the United Nations mission here. "Clearly there were difficulties... but this vote showed Haitian history is in the process of changing." A 9,300-strong UN peacekeeping force has struggled to contain political violence and kidnapping in this <a href="/topics/Maryland">Maryland</a>-size nation of 8 million since the armed ouster of firebrand President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> in February 2004. 
Ren� Pr�val, 63, a onetime Aristide protege and president from 1996 to 2001, was widely expected to lead by a wide margin in the 33-way presidential race. But with the UN short on helicopters and many ballots being hauled down nearly impassable mountain paths by hundreds of mules, horses and donkeys, partial returns weren't expected until at least today. Though much of the countryside was calm yesterday, mayhem bubbled even at polling centers in wealthy neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The chaos was greatest outside Cit� Soleil, a gang-ruled slum so volatile that election officials refused to place polling centers there, directing voters to instead cast ballots in industrial buildings on the periphery. Hundreds of angry Cit� Soleil residents marched through streets jammed with UN tanks and littered with burning mounds of garbage, waving their voting cards and pounding on empty ballot boxes to protest voting snafus. 
"The bourgeoisie is trying to stage an electoral coup so the poor people can't vote their choice," screamed demonstrator Paul Ery, 45, who is jobless, as are most Cit� Soleil residents. 
Ery warned that protesters "will take to the streets" in droves if the winner isn't Pr�val, a favored candidate of Haiti's impoverished majority. 
Fanning the discontent, some Cit� Soleil gang members and community leaders roamed the neighborhood, erroneously telling residents and media that police had opened fire on voters. 
Haitian authorities extended voting by several hours. In a desperate attempt to beef up several polling centers where ballots arrived hours late or workers had simply failed to show, officials began pulling volunteers from voting lines and giving them crash courses in helping to run polling booths. 
Once doors opened, frantic voters pushed their way around tanks or under the legs of heavily armed UN soldiers in a rush to enter. Some then waited an hour or more in one line, only to be redirected to another line and then another - or to be told their names didn't appear on voting rolls. 
"It's a sham," fumed Lithiane Miliace, 51, as she was turned away from a heavily guarded warehouse in Cit� Soleil that had opened three hours late with five election workers for 15,500 voters. Nearby, a frail 60-year-old woman sat with a dazed expression on a filthy cement floor, waiting in vain for someone to show her where she should vote. 
An observer from the Alliance ticket, which is backing presidential candidate Evans Paul, a former Port-au-Prince mayor, grabbed a pregnant woman's pencil and tried to fill out her ballot. "I can't believe the chaos," said Jean Guito Duverneau, an exhausted observer for Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council. 
Some international observers said yesterday's disarray proved the UN should have had more control in organizing the election. Haitian officials said they could have had more and smaller voting centers had the UN supplied more troops to guard them. Other top presidential contenders were Charles Henri Baker, 50, an assembly line factory owner, and Leslie Manigat, 75, who was elected in a rigged vote in 1988 and ousted by the army five months later. 
If no candidate wins a majority, a second round of balloting will be held between the top two vote-getters March 19. Voters also are casting ballots for Haiti's 129-seat legislature.

WOHAIT08

A chaotic vote in Haiti

The island of Hispaniola was one of the first parts of the new world settled by Europeans. While the <a href="/topics/Dominican_Republic">Dominican Republic</a> has enjoyed some measure of prosperity, <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a> has remained politically and economically troubled. 
1492: <a href="/topics/Christopher_Columbus">Christopher Columbus</a> lands and claims the island of Hispaniola. Forced labor and disease virtually annihilate indigenous Taino-Arawak population within a quarter-century. 
1697: France claims the western third of Hispaniola, naming it St. Domingue. 
Spain renames the eastern two-thirds Santo Domingo, now the <a href="/topics/Dominican_Republic">Dominican Republic</a>. 
Spain renames the eastern two-thirds Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. 
1804: Slaves oust the French and create the world's first independent, black-ruled republic, naming in Hayti, the Taino-Arwak word for "mountainous." 1806: Fearing the slave revolt will spread to the American South, the U.S. 
<a href="/topics/U.S._Congress">Congress</a> slaps a trade embargo on <a href="/topics/Haiti">Haiti</a> that lasts until the Civil War. 
1838: France demands reparations of 150 million gold francs to former slave owners in exchange for recognizing Haiti's independence. France later reduces the sum to 90 million francs, equal to $21 billion today. Haiti finishes payments in 1947. 
1862: United States formally recognizes Haiti and names abolitionist <a href="/topics/Frederick_Douglass">Frederick Douglass</a> as its consular minister. 
1915: President Woodrow Wilson sends the U.S. Marines to Haiti. The bloody occupation lasts 19 years. 
1937: Thousands of Haitians living near the border of the Dominican Republic are massacred by Dominican soldiers under the orders of President Gen. Rafael Trujillo. 
1957: Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier is elected president in military-controlled voting. 
1964: Duvalier declares himself president for life and forms the infamous, paramilitary tontons macoutes. 
1971: Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. 
1972: The first "boat people" fleeing Haiti land in <a href="/topics/Florida">Florida</a>. 
1983: <a href="/topics/Pope_John_Paul_II">Pope John Paul II</a> visits Haiti and declares publicly that, "Things must change here." 1990: <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a>, a populist, former slum priest, is elected president with 67.5 percent of the vote in Haiti's first democratic election. 
1991: Aristide is overthrown in a bloody military coup and takes refuge in the United States. 
1994: President <a href="/topics/Bill_Clinton">Bill Clinton</a> returns Aristide to power with 20,000 Marines. 
2000: Aristide is re-elected after one term out of office. 
2004: Aristide flees in February amid protests and an armed revolt by members of the disbanded military. He accuses U.S. of forcing him out, which Washington denies. President <a href="/topics/George_W._Bush">George W. Bush</a> dispatches 3,000 Marines to keep order, later replace by a Brazilian-led, <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> peacekeeping force now numbering nearly 8,900. International community taps <a href="/topics/Gerard_Latortue">Gerard Latortue</a>, a Haitian businessman then living in South <a href="/topics/Florida">Florida</a>, as interim prime minister. 
2006: René Praval wins the presidential election with 51% of the vote. 
2010:&nbsp;A 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocks the <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a> area. 
&nbsp; 
SOURCES: <a href="/topics/Central_Intelligence_Agency">CIA</a> FACTBOOK, HAITIAN EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES, WIRE REPORTS

WOINTR01

HAITI:  A tortured history

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Shoving and screaming, a 
frustrated mob of about 200 Haitians practically stormed a government building 
here after waiting hours under a broiling sun for voting cards.
 "Stop pushing!" a guard yelled as he forced back the crowd. United Nations 
peacekeepers trained their submachine guns on the would-be voters from a 
rooftop crowned with concertina wire.
 Once inside, many in line laughed and clapped as election workers handed 
them their laminated cards. But others were turned away empty-handed after 
being told their cards still weren't ready.
 "The elite are keeping our cards so they can manipulate the vote," shouted 
Fan-Fan Pierre, 31, a high school teacher who on a recent day was making his 
tenth fruitless trip to fetch his card.
 A volatile mix of excitement, suspicion, chaos and fear pervades Haiti as 
it prepares for tomorrow's elections to replace leftist President Jean-Bertrand
 Aristide, whose ouster by armed rebels two years ago has pushed this troubled 
Caribbean nation to the brink of chaos.
 Authorities have postponed the vote four times since October because of 
security and logistical problems. Though four-fifths of the electorate has 
registered, nearly one in 10 still lack voting cards. And concern remains 
widespread that armed groups of various political ilk could disrupt balloting 
in this country known for electoral violence.
 "It's not impossible to hold free and fair elections, but it's going to be 
very dicey," said Mark Schneider, a Haiti expert with the Brussels-based 
International Crisis Group.
 More than 1,500 people have been killed in political clashes since the 
firebrand Aristide's departure from Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest and least 
developed nation.
 
 Problems in Cit� Soleil
 The biggest security problem remains Cit� Soleil, a fetid seaside slum and 
Aristide stronghold on the edge of this chaotic capital. A 9,000-member, 
Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force dispatched to Haiti after Aristide's fall 
has failed to quash gangs who rule the slum and allegedly rape, murder and 
kidnap in collusion with rogue police.
 Cit� Soleil is such a shooting gallery that the interim government won't 
put voting booths there, incensing many Cit� Soleil residents who will have to 
walk up to 1� miles to vote. In recent days, pro-Aristide gang members have led
 chanting, chest-beating protesters through the slum to denounce the absence of
 voting booths as a plot by a tiny but powerful elite.
 "It's social exclusion. The bourgeoisie don't want the poor people to 
vote," said Baptiste William, 24, a reputed gang leader with cornrows and 
cafe-au-lait skin who is known as Ti Blanc (Haitian Creole for "Little White 
Man"). William said he would personally guarantee safety if the government 
allowed balloting in his Cit� Soleil neighborhood of cinderblock and tin shacks
 pocked with bullet holes. Authorities say it would be unconscionable to accept
 the offer.
 With security forces stretched thin, the interim government is providing 
only 800 polling centers nationwide. That's at least one-third fewer than many 
international election observers recommend for this mountainous, Maryland-sized
 nation of 8 million, where many people will travel miles by foot or mule to 
vote.
 Despite the worries, Haiti assumed a carnival air over the weekend as 
campaigning ended for the 33 presidential candidates and hundreds contending 
for the 130-seat national legislature. In towns and cities across the nation, 
Haitians shimmied along pot-holed streets, chanting campaign slogans and waving
 candidates' flags to raucous racine music.
 
 Overtones of drugs, violence
 But UN tanks and truckloads of Haitian riot police guarded most rallies. 
Presidential front-runner Ren� Pr�val, a former president and Aristide protege,
 canceled his final campaign appearance Saturday in Port-au-Prince, saying he 
had received word of a planned attack.
 The U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Tim Carney, hailed the elections as a 
critical step toward democracy but cautioned that he was "very concerned" that 
drug money was being funneled to some campaigns.
 "Some of the presidential candidates have told me people with suitcases of 
money have shown up at the doorsteps of candidates for parliament," Carney told
 Newsday. None of the presidential front-runners is believed to have drug ties,
 Carney said.
 Recent polls show Pr�val, 63, winning more than one-third of the vote. If 
no candidate captures more than 50 percent of the ballots, the top two will 
hold a runoff March 19.
 An agronomist, Pr�val became Haiti's only democratically elected president 
to complete a five-year term when he left office in 2001. He has distanced 
himself from Aristide even as he echoes his former mentor's pledge to help the 
70 percent of Haitians who live in poverty. He also has vowed to heal class 
divisions that have festered since slaves ousted French colonists two centuries
 ago.
 "The people of Cit� Soleil are living in a ghetto and the bourgeoisie are 
living in another ghetto, barricaded in their houses with electric fences and 
afraid to walk the streets," Pr�val told Newsday. "It's time for a new 
beginning."
 Pr�val's closest rival is Charles Henri Baker, 50, an assembly-line factory
 owner and former U.S. resident who led anti-Aristide protests. With a slogan 
of "Order-Discipline-Work," he has promised to end chronic instability and 
chaos. 
 Baker denies he is an elitist, although as a white man he is a rarity in 
predominantly black Haiti. "If I'm prejudiced, it's against robbers and 
chim�res [gang members], but I embrace everyone else," Baker declared Saturday 
during his closing rally in Port-au-Prince.
 Jaded from centuries of despots and dazed by the plethora of presidential 
candidates, many Haitians say they won't vote. But others can't wait.
 "I have to hope it'll make a difference," said Port-au-Prince housewife 
Vesta Bellizaire, 25. "Because it's amazing we're holding this election at all."
Presidential play
The 33 candidates vying for Haiti's presidency range from a former coup leader 
to an armed rebel to a follower of playboy-dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc'' 
Duvalier. If no candidate wins more than half the vote, the two top 
vote-getters will face a runoff.
CANDIDATES INCLUDE:
o REN� PR�VAL
Front-runner and a former ally of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide who 
served as president from 1995 to 2000
o CHARLES HENRI BAKER
Prominent businessman who supported Aristide's ouster
o LESLIE MANIGAT
Former president, septuagenarian businessman who was ousted by the military in 
1988 after five months in
power
o GUY PHILIPPE
Former army officer who helped lead the 2004 revolt against Aristide 
o MARC BAZIN
Former World Bank official who was prime minister under the military regime 
that ousted Aristide in 1991 but
served in Aristide's cabinet after the latter was restored to power
o EVANS PAUL
Former Port-au-Prince mayor who was tortured under former dictatorships
o HUBERT DERONCERAY
Cabinet minister under Jean-Claude Duvalier
o HIMLER REBUS
Former army colonel who led a failed coup in the 1990s

WOHAIT06

Haiti's on edge on election eve

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - In results that critics slammed
 as fraudulent, Ren� Pr�val, a former president and champion of the poor who is
 the front-runner in key presidential elections here, appeared last night to 
have lost the majority he needs to avoid a runoff with his closest rival.
 Thousands of enraged, slum-dwelling Pr�val supporters took to the streets 
of this capital city to blow horns and bang drums in protest as they shouted, 
"Pr�val on the first round!" Two members of the provisional electoral council 
overseeing the count from Tuesday's vote said they believed the results were 
being manipulated.
 "From the beginning, Jacques Bernard was not interested in a first-round 
victory," renegade council member Patrick Fequi�re told Haitian television, 
referring to the council's director general. Earlier yesterday, Fequi�re said 
he believed Pr�val had received more than 50 percent of the vote.
 Pierre Richard Duchemin, another electoral council member, told reporters 
he thought some other council members had "manipulated" the tally and called 
for an independent investigation.
 A few days ago Pr�val, 63, was leading with nearly two-thirds of ballots in
 early returns, raising expectations of a first-round victory. The voting had 
been hailed as a landmark step toward planting democracy in the hemisphere's 
poorest and most troubled nation.
 The electoral council abruptly postponed a news conference at a posh hotel 
to announce a final tally last night after protesters amassed outside. Rumors 
swirled that Bernard would say Pr�val had 49 percent of the vote, the same lead
 he'd shown with three-fourths of ballots counted yesterday morning.
 Speaking to reporters yesterday outside his remote mountain hometown 
Marmelade, Pr�val said of that result, "It's magouy," using a Haitian-Creole 
word for "dirty tricks." A scientific sampling of ballots by a Haitian 
observation group overseen by the National Endowment for Democracy, a 
U.S.-funded agency, had shown Pr�val winning outright in the first round with 
54 percent, according to international election sources.
 With United Nations peacekeepers standing by, some protesters threatened 
violence unless there was an immediate recount.
 "If they push us too hard, we'll go back to 1804," vowed James Charles, 22,
 an unemployed resident of Bel Aire, a Pr�val stronghold. He was referring to a
 bloody revolt in which slaves ousted French colonists to the battle cry of 
"Burn down their houses and cut off their heads!"
 Pr�val, a former bakery owner, was president from 1996 to 2001. His closest
 rival, according to yesterday morning's results, was Leslie Manigat, who 
briefly served as president in 1988 after being elected in a vote rigged by the
 military. That tally showed Manigat with 11.7 percent of the vote.
 The two candidates will face off March 19 unless there is a recount or the 
country dissolves into violence, a serious risk in a nation that has been 
convulsed by 35 coups since independence.
 "We've got many days between now and March 19 when we might expect activity
 among spoilers" from either side, said UN Commissioner R. Graham Muir, who 
heads the civilian police component of a 9,300-strong UN peacekeeping force 
that is struggling to keep order since armed rebels forced out leftist 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide two years ago.
 Aristide was once Pr�val's mentor, but Pr�val has in recent years distanced
 himself from Aristide, who became mired in corruption scandals. 
 UN mission spokesman David Wimhurt said the mission had seen "evidence of 
incompetence but not tampering." 
 However, Wimhurst confirmed that a few days ago UN workers removed the 
doors from the central vote-tallying center here so that electoral council 
lawyers could not "go and hide behind closed doors with stacks of ballots."
 Wimhurst emphasized that "there is no indication the lawyers were tinkering
 with anything."

WOHAIT13

Results in Haiti point to a likely runoff

Seeking to stem a political crisis that threatened to dissolve into violence, Haiti's interim government last night ordered a review of Feb. 7 presidential election results, which the front-runner said were marred by "gross errors and probably gigantic fraud." The announcement from Interior Minister <a href="/topics/Paul_Magloire">Paul Magloire</a> came as boxes of what appeared to be partly burned ballots marked for front-runner Ren� Pr�val were discovered in a dump on the outskirts of this capital city. 
Though it was not clear if the ballots were valid, thousands of Pr�val supporters took to the streets shouting, "Pr�val for president! Stop burning the votes!" A day earlier, supporters had paralyzed the country with flaming roadblocks and stormed a posh hotel to accuse the government of vote tampering. 
In a news conference here earlier yesterday, Pr�val, 63, warned that he would contest the final results if he didn't win more than the 50 percent plus one vote, the amount needed to avert a runoff with his closest rival. He said followers would continue to demonstrate but urged them to remain peaceful. 
Pr�val, considered a champion of the poor, could not be reached for comment last night. 
The crisis threatened to melt down a country that has been teetering on the brink of chaos since armed rebels ousted firebrand leftist President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> two years ago. Pr�val is a former Aristide protege. 
With more than 90 percent of ballots counted, Pr�val's showing has slipped to 48.7 percent, from an early high of nearly two-thirds of the votes. His closest rival, intellectual Leslie Manigat, got 11.8 percent in the 33-way race. 
Though he would almost certainly win, Pr�val is rejecting a runoff. But Manigat, 75, who, like Pr�val, is a former president, won't concede defeat. 
Officials from a <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> mission that is overseeing the vote and propping up Haiti with 9,300 peacekeepers cite disorganization but no evidence of fraud. 
However, Pr�val's camp is suspicious because up to 15 percent of ballots cast are either missing, have been declared invalid because they were improperly marked or may have been mislabeled or misfiled. Also, the electoral council has included blank ballots representing 4.6 percent of votes in the count, narrowing Pr�val's lead by at least two points. 
Many political analysts said a runoff would be healthy for the democratic process in Haiti, a country historically convulsed by political violence. 
"Pr�val could emerge from a second round with even greater legitimacy," said Dan Erikson, a <a href="/topics/Caribbean">Caribbean</a> expert at the Inter-American Dialogue think thank in Washington, D.C. "But if Pr�val is seen as being unfairly pushed into a second round, Haiti could explode." Visiting former South African Anglican Archbishop <a href="/topics/Desmond_Tutu">Desmond Tutu</a>, a Nobel laureate, told Newsday he thought Manigat should concede defeat to "avoid a Pyrrhic victory." 
The ballot review will be conducted by the president's office, the electoral council and Pr�val's party. Some election experts suggested international monitors may also need to review the balloting. Otherwise, said one international electoral observer here who spoke on condition of anonymity, "the election may be decided through the threat of force from people on the street." At Pr�val's urging, protesters removed flaming barricades yesterday that had prevented vote-tabulation workers and others from getting to work. No further tallies will be released pending the review. 
Several international electoral observers told Newsday that the 4.6 percent of votes listed as blank appeared unusually high. In addition, even factoring in Haiti's 50 percent illiteracy rate, some observers wondered how 7.4 percent of ballots were voided, given that even an X across a candidate's face was to have been accepted as a vote.

WOHAIT15

 Review of Haiti votes ordered

René Préval, a former president and bakery owner who is considered a champion of the poor, was expected to be declared the winner of tumultuous Feb. 7 presidential elections in an agreement brokered by foreign diplomats and this country's interim government, international election monitors and Pr�val aides said last night. 
The announcement expected late last night or today could end days of turmoil over the election results that had threatened to throw this already volatile country into widespread violence. 
"It's over," an aide to Pr�val told Newsday. 
A flurry of negotiations on the vote came a day after thousands of charred, crumpled ballots were found Tuesday in a garbage dump on the edge of this capital city, adding weight to charges by Pr�val that the voting had been marred by fraud. 
Many ballots at the dump were blank or were marked for Pr�val, who in the latest returns was just shy of the majority he would need to avoid a runoff. However, international election monitors said some may have been unused ballots that were fraudulently marked. 
"This is sabotage on the part of provocateurs," said G�rard Le Chevalier, who heads a <a href="/topics/United_Nations">United Nations</a> electoral team overseeing the vote. "But as to which side they are from, I don't know." Several international observers said the ballots might have been deliberately dumped where they would be found to incite violence among Pr�val supporters and thwart a transfer of power. Some observers didn't rule out the possibility that hard-core Pr�val supporters had planted the ballots to support their claims of fraud. 
The stolen ballots - which were discovered Tuesday night and lay unguarded until mid-morning yesterday - spurred thousands of Pr�val supporters to paralyze <a href="/topics/Port-au-Prince">Port-au-Prince</a> for a third straight day of demonstrations. "Thieves and cheaters! Give us our president!" the protesters shouted, but they remained peaceful. A 9,300-member UN peacekeeping force has been struggling to maintain order in Haiti since armed rebels ousted leftist firebrand President <a href="/topics/Jean-Bertrand_Aristide">Jean-Bertrand Aristide</a> two years ago. 
Pr�val, a former president and Aristide protege, initially was leading by nearly two-thirds of the vote in the 33-way race. He accused Haiti's electoral council of fraud, prompting a government pledge to investigate the vote count, after his lead slipped to 48.7 percent with 90 percent of votes counted. Leslie Manigat, another former president, was in second place with 11.8 percent.

WOHAIT16

Préval expected to be named winner of Haiti election

MICHES, Dominican Republic - Three years ago, Epifania de 
los Santos nearly drowned trying to flee this desperately poor town by a boat 
that she hoped would carry her to a better life in Puerto Rico and, ultimately,
 New York City.
 One of three survivors when her boat capsized in turbulent seas, the mother
 of four swore she'd never again set foot in a vessel, much less one that would
 carry her to another country.
 But in the past year, the price of rice has nearly tripled. The peso has 
lost half its value. De los Santos' husband, a butcher, has almost no customers
 - few can afford beef.
 So once again, de los Santos wants to make the perilous voyage, even though
 she still has nightmares about her previous attempt. "Life is so hard here 
that if I could just get a captain I trusted, I'd do it," she said recently.
 With the Dominican Republic reeling from its worst economic crisis in 
decades, the number of Dominicans attempting the often deadly journey to Puerto
 Rico aboard shallow, open-deck vessels has more than doubled in the past year 
and could reach a record level, according to U.S. and Dominican authorities.
 "Dominicans want to reach the United States the way flies want to enter a 
sweet shop," said Capt. Jos� Alejandro Liriano, a spokesman for the Dominican 
Navy. "As long as people without food or money think they'll find a better life
 there, they'll keep trying to leave."
 Since Oct. 1, U.S. and foreign authorities have intercepted 6,430 
Dominicans trying to leave their Caribbean island nation by sea, according to 
U.S. Coast Guard officials.
 That number is more than double the 2,823 Dominicans turned back from the 
previous October through May, the Coast Guard says. It's also nearly twice the 
number of Haitians fleeing by boat during those same eight months, even though 
Haiti, which has an equivalent population, lost its government in February in a
 bloody uprising and was teetering on civil war.
 The vast majority of Dominicans travel from Miches and other eastern ports 
through the 80-mile Mona Passage to Puerto Rico. From there, the primary 
destinations are New York and Miami.
 It is relatively easy to use false documents to board planes to the U.S. 
mainland from Puerto Rico because, as a U.S. commonwealth, its border 
procedures are less stringent than at international departure points.
 U.S. authorities estimate hundreds of Dominicans have died in recent years 
trying to reach Puerto Rico on small, wooden motor boats known as yolas. 
However, they doubt the numbers are as high as those cited by the Dominican 
branch of the International Migration Office, a nongovernmental group that 
claims that of every 10 Dominicans fleeing by boat, one dies, three are caught 
and six reach land. That would mean 2,143 passengers have died so far this 
fiscal year.
 "What is certain is that the crossing is extremely dangerous and often 
deadly," said Victor Col�n, assistant chief patrol agent of the U.S. Border 
Patrol in Puerto Rico. "The boats are grossly overloaded, there is no safety 
equipment and the vessels aren't made to withstand the 15-foot swells."
 Higher crossing cost
 As the number of departing Dominicans rises, so have interceptions by U.S. 
authorities. Rather than deter would-be migrants, the crackdowns merely have 
hiked the price for the one- to three-day voyage to Puerto Rico.
 "Ten years ago, it was so cheap to cross that some captains would accept a 
pig as payment," said Richard Contreras, who has been captured 11 times since 
1996 trying to leave by yola to join his father in Brooklyn. Contreras, 29, 
hopes he can eventually raise the crossing fee, which is now 25,000 pesos ($555
 U.S.) - about half his yearly salary as a lobsterman here.
 A wretchedly poor town of 35,000 at the foot of lush mountains that touch 
the clouds, Miches is the busiest illegal departure point in this nation of 8.8
 million. When seas are calm, residents say, one yola a day leaves from nearby 
bays.
 With little work apart from fishing or subsistence farming, most residents 
here live off human smuggling, locals say. A captain can earn nearly $850 - the
 only income around here that even approaches what an undocumented Dominican 
could earn in New York.
 For lesser fees, scouts scour the nation for passengers. Then drivers bring
 them to safehouses. Carpenters work in the mountains to build yolas that they 
sneak down on wheels or on their shoulders.
 To evade authorities' monitoring of gasoline sales, drivers of scooters 
that serve as taxis siphon off a bit of their fuel when they fill up and sell 
it to the human smugglers.
 Even members of the Dominican Navy, who are deployed here to stop the 
smugglers, assist in return for payoffs, according to current and past captains.
 Liriano, the Navy spokesman, said collusion was uncommon. Anyone involved 
in such illegal activity is immediately investigated and, if found guilty, 
punished, he said.
 Yola captains contend they are performing a valuable service. "The 
passengers need the ride. If I didn't take them, someone else would," reasoned 
Maltire Torres, 28, who recently served 5 years in U.S. prisons for ferrying 
Dominicans to Puerto Rico.
 'Nothing to save us'
 Still, profit is more important than safety. "We'd never be allowed to use 
life vests; they're too expensive," Torres said.
 De los Santos, 33, didn't think twice about the risk when she boarded a 
30-foot boat crammed with 56 passengers in January 2001. Instead, she was 
thinking of the $100 weekly she hoped to earn as a maid in Puerto Rico. "I 
couldn't dream of that money here," she said from her dilapidated cottage in 
Miches, which was mostly bare since she had sold her belongings to pay her 
passage three years ago.
 De los Santos hoped to get working papers in Puerto Rico and head to 
Washington Heights or the Bronx, home to large Dominican communities. But two 
hours into her voyage, waves as high as rooftops appeared from nowhere and 
crashed into her yola, sucking the passengers underwater.
 "People were screaming. They couldn't swim. There was nothing to save us," 
de los Santos recalled.
 Waves miraculously carried a gasping de los Santos to the remains of the 
yola. For three scorching days, she lay on the wreckage without food or water, 
watching others slip into the sea. "All I could do was pray to God to save me,"
 she said.
 Finally, a passing fisherman rescued her.
 De los Santos forbids her children, who range in age from 6 to 17, to talk 
about leaving on yolas.
 But she thinks she has no choice but to take that risk again herself. 
"Otherwise," she asked, "how will my children eat?"

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An apparent Israeli drone attack on Iran saw troops fire air defenses at a major air base and a nuclear site near the central city of Isfahan.

Iran fires at apparent Israeli attack drones 

On Wednesday, the Biden administration finalized strict limits on certain so-called "forever chemicals" in drinking water that will require utilities to reduce them. NewsdayTV's Macy Egeland reports.

New standards for 'forever chemicals'

Rescuers were searching for survivors Tuesday after a container ship rammed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing its collapse.

Rescuers on scene at Baltimore bridge collapse

Disgraced former congressman George Santos announced Thursday he plans to challenge Rep. Nick LaLota for New York's 1st Congressional District seat, Newsday Columnist Joye Brown reports.

George Santos jumps back into politics

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The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died earlier this month in a remote Arctic penal colony, will take place on Friday in Moscow after several locations declined to host the service, his spokesperson says.

The funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will be on Friday, spokesperson says

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Read Newsday's complete coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Complete coverage: Israel-Hamas war

Hamas released two elderly Israeli women held hostage in Gaza, as the U.S. expressed increasing concern that the escalating Israel-Hamas war will spark a wider conflict in the region, including attacks on American troops.

Hamas frees 2 Israeli women held hostage in Gaza

What to know about the Mideast conflict that already has left thousands dead.

Israel-Hamas war: Answers to questions, and what could come next

Two of the most influential foreign policy voices on Capitol Hill were targeted, as were Asia experts at Washington think tanks and journalists from CNN, including Jim Sciutto.

Vietnam tried to hack U.S. officials, CNN with posts on X, probe finds

Long Island supporters of Israel — those who live here, those who have moved there, and those who were visiting — are still in shock.

'People are really scared': LIers with ties to Israel react to Hamas attacks

The Ukrainian president denounced the attack in the village of Hroza as a "demonstrably brutal Russian crime" and "a completely deliberate act of terrorism."

Russian strike on village kills 51, Ukrainian officials say, as Zelenskyy seeks more Western support

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Among the guests expected to attend tonight's speech are the mother and brother of Plainview native Omer Neutra, who serves in the Israeli army and is believed to have been kidnapped by Hamas during the early hours of the Israel-Hamas war.

LI family of suspected hostage to attend State of the Union

Spc. Kennedy Sanders' mother speaks about her daughter, who was killed along with two other U.S. Army Reserve soldiers from Georgia, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, in a drone strike Sunday.

Families mourn loss of 3 U.S. soldiers from Georgia in Jordan drone strike

"Our hearts may be broken but our resolve is clear," said Biden, who compared the brutality of the Hamas militants to that of the Islamic State terrorist group. He added: "Let there be no doubt. The United States has Israel's bac

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Israel-Hamas war

A submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded, the Coast Guard said on Thursday. The pilot and four passengers were all killed. 

Passengers on submersible to Titanic died from implosion 

Newsday's Laura Figueroa Hernandez and Joye Brown discuss President Joe Biden's decision to run for reelection in 2024.

Biden's running: What you need to know

Newsday White House correspondent Laura Figueroa talks about the political fallout of Donald Trump's indictment.

 Political fallout for Trump after indictment 

Former President Donald Trump was indicted by grand jury in Manhattan, marking the first time in history a ex-president was charged with crime, NewsdayTV's Cecilia Dowd got reaction from Long Islanders.

Long Islanders react to Donald Trump being indicted by grand jury

Newsday's Joye Brown breaks down the indictment of former president Donald Trump and what it means for him and his political future.

What's next for Donald Trump?

President Biden delivers his State of the Union address, touching on the topics of unemployment, taxing the wealthy, and China.

'To my Republican friends, if we could work together last Congress, there is no reason we can't work together'

U.S. military shoots down Chinese balloon

WARNING: Video contains graphic language and violence some viewers may find distrurbing. Video shows five Memphis officers beating Tyre Nichols following a traffic stop.

Video of Tyre Nichols traffic stop in Memphis released

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT: Video shows the husband of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fighting for control of a hammer with his assailant during an attack in the couple's San Francisco home last yea

Video shows attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband

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