Gleaming gas stations sprout in a country where one in 70 people owns a car.
Majestic mansions rise, turrets looming eerily over sad slums.
With feeble local enforcement and a central location, Haiti is an ideal crossroads. It is just eight hours by speedboat from Colombia, the main cocaine producer, and an eight-hour journey from the United States. Drugs flow through other Caribbean points as well, especially the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. But with the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy in charge of policing that island's shores, and with better organized and equipped authorities in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica trying hard to seal off their territory, international attention increasingly is focusing on Haiti. That's a 24 percent increase over 1998 and at least double the annual amount under the 1991-1994 military dictatorship that monopolized the local drug trade and first opened Haiti's sea and airports to Colombian traffickers.