In the space of six months, Jean Dominique, the country's most respected journalist, was gunned down outside his radio station, an opposition campaign director was macheted to death inside his home and the campaign offices of opposition party Espace de Concertation were burned to the ground by a mob chanting pro-Lavalas slogans and calling for the death of Espace's leader, former mayor of Port-au-Prince Evans Paul. Recently, the president of Haiti's electoral council fled to the United States, fearing for his life after he refused to sign off on the election results.

Members of various opposition groups were jailed in advance of last week's announcement of the electoral results. The Lavalas government has given explanations for these "detainments" ranging from the accusation that those arrested were accumulating firearms in preparation for a strike against the government, to saying that the detained were being threatened and that they were taken into protective custody for their own good as a "preventative measure." Meanwhile, the disputed count has Lavalas taking 16 of the 17 available Senate seats and likely to control both houses of Parliament.

While a second round of voting has been indefinitely postponed, the elections so far have been marred by allegations of fraud. The opposition has declared the results invalid, vowing to sit out the runoff elections. People murmur that the Organization of American States (OAS) electoral monitors are trying to shove a sham election down the country's throat just so all the international types can go home feeling that their money was well spent on "democratic" development programs, since some form of democracy was restored in 1994. Although the OAS recently released a statement calling the methodology of the vote tally "incorrect," there are many who think that it is too little, too late.

This situation is all the more troubling because Fanmi Lavalas ("lavalas" means "the flood" in Creole) is a political party whose dominant figure, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, has been the country's most outspoken, fearless champion of democratic rights. He fought for those rights during days when championing such a cause meant death.

Aristide is the preeminent political figure in the country. It was Aristide who spoke out against the Tonton Macoutes and human rights abuses of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier's regimes. Aristide, who continued the democratic struggle under the military regimes of Henri Namphy and Prosper Avril, men who found it politically expedient to massacre voters in 1987 on Ruelle Vaillant at Port-au-Prince, and then again in 1988 at the Cathedral St. Jean-Bosco while Aristide, then a practicing Catholic priest, was celebrating Mass.

It was Aristide and Lavalas, also, who were chased out of the country by a military coup in 1991 (after Aristide had become Haiti's first democratically elected president) and then returned to power by the U.S. Marines in 1994. Barred from serving consecutive terms as president, Aristide reluctantly handed over power to his protégé, Rene Preval, and is said to be waiting until he can again run for (and almost certainly win) the presidency of Haiti in 2001.

Haitians, meanwhile, are left wondering whether they will have a heroic, visionary Nelson Mandela or an authoritarian, scapegoating Robert Mugabe (two other third-world leaders who came to power on a tide of popular movements) on their hands come that time.

Sadly, as I found out, the hard facts of Haiti don't make it easy to stay a hero for long.

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