Instead, Haiti was forced to accept an IMF regimen that required slashing tariffs, laying off state employees and selling the most profitable state-run industries to foreign corporations as the price for Aristide's return and $1.8 billion in loans and grants. Prices for basic commodities like food and fuel have soared, localized famines have occurred and the country's debt has ballooned more than 60 percent since 1994. On a human level, one in two preschool children goes hungry and one in eight dies.

"In the name of fiscal discipline, what is being sacrificed is the ability of the country to function," argues an economist with a leading multilateral bank. "How are you going to transport the mangoes to Port-au-Prince for export if there are no roads? How are you going to increase the level of education so there are more options than the maquilas?" Equally alarming is that, with the virtual abolition of tariffs, tiny Haiti has become one of the most open markets in the hemisphere, ranking among those countries that have generated the largest trade surpluses for the United States.

Like the US occupation earlier in this century, the most enduring institutional legacy of this fin de siècle occupation is the security apparatus. And as with all other key aspects of Haitian political life, Washington has retained an extraordinary degree of control. A multiagency US group selected each recruit and determined the design, training and financing of the 6,500-strong HNP. More than 50 percent of the top police commissioners are recycled Haitian Army personnel, according to US and Haitian officials. United States trainers placed soldiers they considered reliable in a number of key units and systematically purged a group of reformist army officers who had refused to support the 1991 coup and joined President Aristide in exile.

The results have been disastrous. "Members of this US-trained force have committed serious abuses, including torture and summary executions," said a 1997 report by Human Rights Watch and the National Coalition for Haitian Rights. Since the HNP was first deployed in 1995, the total number of people it has killed runs into the hundreds. In 1996 twelve young political activists were massacred in a UN-backed attack on their neighborhood. Victims of police violence report torture, including the use of electric shocks, as well as routine beatings with fists, clubs, pistols and boots.

Despite the HNP's putative role as a civilian force, its officers have received training from the CIA and US Special Forces, and from an array of international military forces. The United States has also built heavily armed paramilitary units. Outfitted in all-black battle-dress uniforms, body armor and masks, they routinely conduct "anticrime" patrols. One of their first deployments was to protect Haiti's flour mill after it was privatized in a deal with a consortium including US giants Continental Grain and the Seaboard Corporation for $9 million, a token sum according to opponents. The paramilitaries have also targeted popular organizations; the Milot Peasants Movement and the Port-au-Prince women's clinic, Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen, for example, had their offices trashed and valuable equipment destroyed by the new police.

Through all of this, political opposition has continued, but the liberation movement was seriously weakened by repression during the coup period, coupled with the flight of many key leaders to Canada and the United States, where most have remained. After Aristide's return, many local and regional popular leaders took government posts and, in the name of reconciliation, moved to institutionalize--and end--the political struggle of the post-Duvalier period. Still, many groups remain organized and active, whether under the banner of Ti Legliz, the "little church" of the Haitian liberation theology movement, or as women's clinics or peasant associations like Tet Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Together Little Haitian Peasants). Such is the power of these individuals and organizations that they've been able to launch general strikes and inhibit the full application of the neoliberal model in Haiti.

Early in the occupation, Col. Mark Boyatt, commander of US Special Forces, held two-way radio "fireside chats" with his A-teams deployed in rural Haiti. "This is your kingdom," he told them. "Mold it."

Boyatt was not exaggerating. Every strategic area of Haitian life has been monopolized and indelibly shaped by US and UN military and economic power, and almost always with the same arrogance. The result is a profound degradation of Haitian society. The new security apparatus has proved itself incapable of dealing with crime and insecurity, but brutal against popular protests. The scorched-earth economic program has pried open Haiti to international capital and enriched a small class of gran manjè, or big eaters, while destroying Haiti's ability to alleviate, even marginally, the most extreme poverty in the Americas. The impunity enjoyed by the former death squad leaders and army officers, many of whom committed violence that legal scholars classify as "crimes against humanity," has made a mockery of accountability and the rule of law. And hanging over everything, like a sword of Damocles, are the demons of the past--the return to Macoutism and dictatorship. Although in January some parliamentarians warned of a possible Préval dictatorship, the fact is that the only players in Haiti with such a potential are those decidedly undemocratic elements under the sway of the United States.

Pèpè, a Creole word, reportedly derives from paix, French for "peace." More than a decade ago priests and other aid donors would shout, "Paix, paix" to the maddened crowds that fought for handouts in church courtyards or village squares. The rejected rags, some originally made in Port-au-Prince's assembly zones, would temporarily clothe the naked and muffle the cries of the poor. What Washington policy-makers fail to understand today, as they did in 1991, is that a demokrasi pèpè or ekonomi pèpè will not solve the crisis in Haiti. "We cannot live like this," notes trade unionist Yannick Etienne. "We need an authentic democracy, constructed by the people, reflecting the demands of the people.

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