The crime wave coincides with Haiti's preparations for a crucial presidential election. Thirty-four men and one woman are vying for the hot seat, including two former Presidents, three former Prime Ministers, three former military officers, a guerrilla leader, two alleged drug traffickers and a sweatshop industrialist. Each wants to replace Alexandre Boniface, the interim President of Haiti, who assumed office after the forced February 2004 departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the controversial former priest who now lives with his wife and two daughters in South Africa amid allegations of stealing millions from Haiti's treasury and telephone company. (Aristide's lawyers deny the charges.) Aristide had been restored in 1994 after the intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers; his close associate René Préval, a former President who served between the two terms of Aristide, is the front runner in the current race. Washington continues to exert influence, if in a less militant way. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Haiti last fall to nudge elections forward. They have been postponed at least four times, thanks to electoral incompetence, lack of security and the country's systemic chaos. There's no guarantee that the next scheduled vote will take place either.
 

Nearly 3.5 million people have signed up for the new voter-registration card, but it's unclear if they did so in order to vote or because the card is now required for all state transactions. The majority of the 40,000 pollworkers needed for election day have been recruited but not trained. And even though there are new measures to reduce fraud, including transparent ballot boxes and a new system to count and transmit results, the process may be undermined by inadequate surveillance, logistical trouble and bitter local political rivalries.

Two Haitian police officers are supposed to be stationed at each of some 800 polling stations, but no one is looking to the 6,000-man force to provide security for the elections or anything else. Most consider the police part of the problem. "The nice officers are the ones who torture without leaving blood," says a human-rights specialist who spent months gathering data. "High-ranking police officers' involvement in illegal activities has become institutionalized," says Haitian national police chief Mario Andersol, who admits that he lacks the manpower, weapons and institutional credibility to provide the security his country desperately needs.

Everyone looks to the well-equipped 9,006-member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, led by Brazilian troops, as the guarantor of security. But the U.N. force, which was deployed in June 2004, is assigned to defend Haiti's constitution, not to take up arms against criminals. "When they leave, I will leave too," says Jean-Buteau Sévère, 34, who returned to his dicey Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel Air only after the Brazilians set up an outpost there. The gangs and private armies are likely to collude in controlling the streets--and thus the votes--in the walkup to the election. And unless that situation is eliminated, few experts believe any kind of humanitarian aid can be effectively dispensed, dooming the incoming government, regardless of who leads it.

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