The country has stumbled backward into a vacuum, virtually without a functioning government. President Pr val dissolved an intractable Parliament in January at the end of its constitutional term. Lavalas, the loose grass-roots coalition that brought Mr. Aristide to power in 1990, has broken up into several groups warring over every issue imaginable. Wealth was not redistributed during the chaotic early months of the invasion, but weapons were. Street crime is commonplace.
Cocaine flows into the United States through the island's covert pipelines.
The Haitian national police are better known for corruption, civil rights violations and trigger-happy tactics than preserving law and order. The justice system is as defunct now as it was in the days of the tyrants. The destruction of Haiti's ecology has only gotten worse, its mountains eroded to bedrock, its coral reefs suffocated with topsoil, its aquifer on the verge of drying up. Its economy is moribund, an endless line of old women on the side of the road hawking identical pyramids of oranges to customers who never come. Setting aside for the moment the culpability of the Haitian leadership, Washington's policymakers might acknowledge that in vitro democratization is a risky procedure.