Haiti on the brink.

By eight o'clock it has grown dark in the Bas Pau de Chose neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. Kerosene lamps flicker in the small, sweltering, tin-roofed houses. An occasional car, carrying a commando team in search of a potential victim or a young elite couple out for a spin, breaks the monotonous drone of crickets, the crack of sporadic gunfire, the noise of barking dogs, and the murmur of voices.

Behind these sounds the buzz of transistor radios is audible as people try to pick up the latest news.

The army has announced that anyone collaborating with the enemy will be sentenced to a lifetime of forced labor.... Two thousand Marines carried out exercises in the Bahamas today.... Three heads were found today in a sewage canal....

In one house, a mother stops stirring her rice to bend closer to the radio. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in exile since he was forced from office by a bloody coup three years ago, is talking.

"He's working for me," she tells her daughter, a radio journalist who has been arrested, pistol-whipped, and twice forced into hiding.

Mother and daughter are adamantly committed to Aristide and the return of democracy to their country, but like many other Haitians, like much of the Haiti solidarity movement and the Left in the United States, they are confused and divided about the question of U.S. military intervention.

They agree that Aristide must return. During his seven months in office, the Haitian economy was beginning to turn around. Literacy programs were starting up. The radio was alive with news, denunciations, popular opinion, and the flowering of the "roots" music movement that gave value to the African rhythms and songs Haitians have known since their ancestors were brought to the Caribbean as slaves. When Aristide was in office, hardly anyone bothered to take to the sea in a desperate search for freedom or opportunity; people were sure they would find freedom and opportunity in their own country.

But the daughter and mother disagree on how to get the deposed president back. The mother, who sells small homemade candies on the street for a few pennies, is tired of the constant tension and the U.S. embargo. Prices have risen and the value of her money has dropped. And she is frightened: There is shooting in the streets every night, and sometimes bodies in the streets in the morning. She believes American politicians mean it when they hint the U.S. Marines will come to Haiti to "restore democracy."

The daughter knows better. A military intervention, she believes, will target the organized "democratic and popular movement"--the hundreds of neighborhood groups, peasant associations, development and human-rights bodies, students and mass organizations, and the Catholic priests, nuns, and congregations adhering to liberation theology who have fought and died for democracy in Haiti.

The daughter also understands that the United States did not start pondering the question of "intervention" in Haiti in 1994. As she heard another journalist say on one of those sweltering nights, "It's not a question of when the United States will intervene. The intervention is already here."

Almost three years ago, after a long and awkward silence, President George Bush finally announced that the United States disapproved of the military coup d'etat against Aristide and would work to return him to office. It soon joined the hemisphere-wide embargo, organized (and sometimes directed) negotiations with the coup leaders, and criticized the illegal regime. On occasion, the White House even invited Aristide to pose at stiff photo opportunities. The U.S. officials' discomfort is painfully evident in the pictures. Their negotiations with Aristide always fell apart, no matter how many concessions the Haitian president made, and the series of trade embargoes announced by Washington was never designed to hurt the elite and the military, the U.S. Government's traditional allies, who organized and supported the coup.

Gasoline, arms, luxury goods, and even raw materials for U.S.-owned factories flooded the country for almost three years. Even today, fuel, French butter and wine, Venezuelan pasta and jam, American breakfast cereals, and hundreds of other products flow across the Dominican border and into Haitian ports. (Two months ago, the United States promised equipment to "help" oversee the border, but so far Washington has not delivered.)

Members of the Haitian democratic and popular movement know why Bush, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and their Democratic successors seem so uncomfortable in those photographs: The U.S. Government, whether represented by the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Agency for International Development (AID), or the White House itself, has never been comfortable with Aristide. On many occasions, while he was a candidate, president, or in exile, it has worked actively to undermine him and the movement that brought him to office.

In 1991, AID allotted $26 million to elite business groups that worked openly against Aristide's economic reforms. The CIA set up and funded a secret-police unit, the Service d'Intelligence National, which oversaw brutal repression from 1986 until at least 1991. For years, the CIA has had many high-ranking Haitian army officers, including the coup leader, Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, on its payroll, and there is no reason to think that practice has ceased. U.S.-funded organizations worked tirelessly to help Aristide's main opponent, Marc L. Bazin, in the 1990 presidential campaign. After the coup, the CIA carried out vicious smear campaigns against Aristide on Capitol Hill and in the mainstream media. The U.S. military trained and supported the brutal Haitian army, even after the coup.

Now, three years later, the United States is engaged in the kind of saberrattling that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and thousands in Panama. Through most of American history, the U.S. military machine has rushed to the defense of U.S. geopolitical interests around the world. Are we to believe that it will be used for the exact opposite purpose in Haiti?

Since the mid-1980s, U.S.-backed institutions have been doing "civic education" in Haiti, creating parties and political coalitions, funding the kind of "development" projects favored by AID technocrats and U.S. international businessmen.

In his seminal 1988 book, AIDing Migration: The Impact of International Development Assistance on Haiti, Josh DeWind, who now heads the Caribbean and Latin American Studies program at Hunter College, explained how the U.S. Government and American businessmen--like Stanley Urban, head of the Haitian-American Chamber of Commerce, remembered for saying, "Dictatorship is the best form of government for these people"--actually created the refugee exodus from Haiti in the 1980s.

"Even though the promotion of exportoriented agricultural and industrial enterprises may create some new employment opportunities," DeWind wrote, "international competition is likely to keep employment levels and incomes at too low a level to reduce poverty in Haiti. The imbalance between Haitians' incomes and their need or expectation of consuming imported goods is likely to grow.... Rather than reduce the economic desperation which motivates Haitians to migrate, export-led development will maintain the impoverishment of Haiti's agricultural and industrial workers."

A new "nongovernmental" organization in Port-au-Prince, actually founded and funded by AID, has a budget of up to $15 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars for six years of "democracy enhancement," and has, for the past year, conducted seminars and paid for ad campaingns promoting "nonviolence" and the importance of "playing by the rules of the democratic game." Its mandate calls for "assistance" to Haitian senators, deputies, municipal leaders, human-rights groups, and media to promote "democratic values, encourage pluralism, and facilitate broad-based participation."

In June, the reputable development organization Oxfam America asked the House Appropriations Committee to cut off all such non-humanitarian AID projects because "USAID projects have been knowingly or unknowingly ... politically and financially manipulated by the military regime and its civilian supporters," adding, "The effect has been to squelch the popular movement."

The Oxfam America letter went on to note that "all meetings, civic education projects, training workshops, and other 'democracy' programs can only be carried out with the permission of the military and FRAPH [the army's paramilitary front group, Front Revolutionnaire Arme pour 1'Avancement et le Progres Haitien].... Thus, any projects funded by USAID must be at least tacitly supportive of the military. Far from supporting such activities, Haitians see U.S. financing for these organizations as a sign of support for the military's position."

Behind the scenes in Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Ambassador, State Department consultants, and visiting politicians meet constantly with business groups and government officials, attempting to smooth over disagreements, pushing "reconciliation" and amnesty, and trying to influence leaders and create political coalitions. In the coming weeks, a "democratic center"--born and baptized at a series of meetings at the Ambassador's residence, the "democracy-enhancement" office, and homes of such ardent coup supporters as the U.S.-favored candidate, Bazin--is expected to emerge in preparation for legislative elections scheduled for the fall and early next year and, looking ahead, for the presidential elections to be held in December 1995.

"This plan has no other objective than to impose a kind of top-down democracy ... that has already been installed in a number of Latin American countries," observes Senator Turneb Delpe, a supporter of Aristide.

Many Haitians believe the United States has also been working steadily to dismantle the democratic and popular movement through the "asylumprocessing program" in which victims of repression--that is, leaders of organizations fighting for democracy--are invited to apply for political asylum.

"We believe the United States has set this program up to demolish the popular organizations, targeting the leadership and pushing them to apply for asylum and leave the country, to put them on the side where they won't bother anyone," says Harry Numa, spokesperson for the Assemblee Populaire Nationale (APN), a mass organization.

While many have refused to apply, opting instead to go into deep hiding, the program has snared at least 3,000 peasant and popular leaders, journalists, and low-level government officials. Just as potentially detrimental to the democratic movement is the fact that more than 60,000 have applied and been turned down. In order to get a shot at asylum, activists must give details on their families, their activities, and their organizations. The resulting database--a map of the democratic and popular movement--could be used to target people for repression.

Leaders of Haiti's hundreds of organizations, including many who have applied for asylum and have been turned down or even accepted by the program, have been tracked down and eliminated. In other countries, the CIA, AID, and other U.S. agencies have readily cooperated with local military or secret police to help track down "subversives," making this last potential form of "intervention" the most cynical and fatal.

Despite the coalition-building, asylum-processing, and reconciliation-preaching, the coup leaders and their supporters in the Haitian military, the business elite, and the U.S. Government have been unable to stabilize the situation. Thousands have died. Tens of thousands have fled. Hundreds of thosands are in hiding.

The force traditionally charged with maintaining order in Latin American countries--the indigenous army--can no longer be counted on by the local elites and their U.S. backers because of its inefficiency and its indulgence in gross excess. Many politicians and institutions have been totally discredited for openly siding with the murderous regime, and lack the moral or political force to pull off new elections or legitimize a "reconciliation" or "coalition" government.

Aristide still has the support of an over-whelming Haitian majority. Now the pressures generated by the exodus of refugees and the possibility that a frustrated population might decide to take matters into its own hands mean that the international community may finally help him return.

Only one option remains for those with a stake in preserving the status quo: A military intervention and occupation to ensure that a returned Aristide remains weak and powerless as he finishes out his term (which ends in eighteen months) and to prevent the popular movement from gaining back the ground it won in 1991. U.S. officials know this, and so, it appears, do the Haitian forces that carried out and backed the coup.

With each day's threatening "communiques" and speeches, Haiti's military rulers move closer to paving the way for an armed occupation. Their latest move was the mid-June expulsion of 100 members of the Organization of American States/United Nations International Civilian Mission. Though the mainstream media in the United States portrayed this as yet another defiant act by the vicious military regime, leaders of human-rights and other organizations in Haiti have a different analysis.

"The decision of the military putschists to make their de-facto puppets expel the International Civilian Mission ... does nothing more than reinforce Washington's maneuvers to legitimize, through the United Nations, a military intervention entirely under their control," states a document recently signed by a number of organizations in the democratic movement.

"This is a repetition of the Harlan County," said a priest who works with one of the human-rights groups. He was referring to the incident last October when the United States, without notifying the Aristde government, the United Nations, or the Organization of American States, withdrew the USS Harlan County, carrying U.S. and Canadian soldiers, after two dozen thugs demonstrated against the Navy vessel on the wharf.

The priest and others in the humanrights community say that some U.N. officials in New York had been urging the observers to pull out since last June because they wanted no official international witnesses to the "collateral damage" of civilian deaths in the event of an invasion. When the observers refused to yield to the pressure, human-rights activists speculate, the regime was persuaded to lend a hand by expelling them.

"Imagine if the mission had been in Panama when the United States invaded!" said a former member of the observer team.

With the observers out of the way, every effort is being made to mobilize public opinion, not only in the United States, but also in France and Canada, where officials have been reluctant to back a military intervention and occupation. By mid-July, more than 200 foreign journalists had arrived in Port-au-Prince, packing the few luxury hotels and chasing corpses and rape victims to make the evening newscasts. The massive exodus of refugees helped justify the military "option" by simultaneously highlighting the Haitian plight and terrifying Florida residents and other Americans who oppose all immigration, but especially when the immigrants are black.

On July 15, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali moved the world organization one step closer to official approval of a military occupation of Haiti. He proposed radically altering the mandate of the army-training force agreed to at Governor's Island last year by Cedras and Aristide. Instead of maintaining a force of 1,300 trainers and engineers under U.N. auspices, Boutros-Ghali proposed a force of 15,000 troops, some heavily armed, under U.S. command.

On occasion, Aristide's pronouncements have been less than clear on the intervention issue. His U.S. allies--the Congressional Black Caucus, refugee groups, and human-rights organizations--have sometimes called for invasion, strategic bombing, or "peace-keeping." But the organizations in Haiti's democratic and popular movement began to reject the intervention "option" the day the president signed the Governor's Island accord, and today that rejection is more emphatic and more widespread than ever.

On July 19, five prestigious organizations in the democratic and popular movement--one representing 1,400 priests and nuns linked to liberation theologybased congregations throughout Haiti--signed a ten-page document denouncing any form of intervention or occupation.

"What do we observe, after these thirty-three months of the coup d'etat?" the statement asked. "An unbridled propaganda, diffused throughout the world by the news agencies and U.S. media, striving to multiply the false problems to better impose false solutions for the 'Haitian crisis.' False embargo. False freezing of assets. False sanctions. False apprehensions about popular vengeance. False evaluation of the autonomy and real power of the military putschists. All that to prevent from reaching daylight the true causes and true complicities that allow those soldiers to flout with impunity the decisions solemnly proclaimed at the highest level of the international community....

"Don't be fooled. This intervention will be made against the Haitian people, because it follows from the same logic as the coup d'etat, simply put, to legitimize its principal gain under an international cover: the total erasure of the Haitian people from the political scene of their country....

"Despite the terror, despite the deaths, despite the wounded, despite the victims that accumulate, the executors of the imperial aims will not cease running up against a popular resistance that they have not had the power to break."

The position paper, now circulating in the country's nine departments, was also designed in part to inspire the American Left and the Haiti solidarity movement to work against a U.S. military invasion. "We are counting on them to make the truth known," the paper declares, "about what has happened on Haitian soil for almost three years."

Taht same week, thirteen organizations in the popular sector signed a separate eleven-page document also rejecting all forms of intervention.

"Two hundred years of domination by the pillaging upper class, nineteen years of direct U.S. occupation, and thirty-seven years of Macoute dictatorship prove to us that it is only the force of the people that will establish democracy in this country and permit it to enter into modenity without destroying ourselves and our environment," the paper concluded.

The Haitian army numbers only 7,000, but with its traditional paramilitary auxiliaries, the former Tonton Macoutes of the Duvalier era and the thugs in FRAPH, their forces may amount to at least 200,000. They watch the neighborhoods, towns, and villages. Sometimes they catch those working for democracy and strike them down--murdering them in the streets, "disappearing" them, or beating and robbing them. But the movement persists, and opposition to a military intervention is beginning to pick up steam. Peasant and popular organizations in the capital and across the country are taking risks to attend meetings or pass out leaflets. People are carrying newspapers or audio cassettes from town to town. It is, as Aristide has said, a lavalas, a flood.

"Continue to march, continue to mobilize, continue to resist, continue to fly the flag of resistance higher, because no matter what anyone wants, no matter which way, we have to bring democracy back here! Alone, we are weak. Together we are strong. Together, together we are the lavalas!" implores Radio Soley Leve, a militant station hidden somewhere in the capital.

A mountainous zone in the North has already been subject to a military intervention. Since April, the Haitian army has burned homes and crops, killed animals, and beaten, raped, and exploited the farmers there because of their determination to fight for justice. Last month, a peasant leader long active in the struggle against oppression walked an entire day on back roads to bypass the army checkpoints and deliver his message to the capital.

"A lot of bourgeois people and imperialists are talking about democracy these days, but that democracy is a sham," he said. "It's us, the little people, who have to create real democracy. That other democracy is democracy at the top. It doesn't trickle down to those on the bottom. It only brings mourning, tears, beatings, and suffering for people like us."