Revenge of the Tonton Macoute.

I sit on the long front porch of the hillside Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince and hear the shots below. In Haiti's capital it is not unusual to hear shots at night. I know the shots are the work of the zinglando, enforcing the will of the army.

Zinglando is a made-up Creole word. It comes from zinglan, the broken glass that Haitians cement atop their walls to keep out intruders. But the zinglando are the intruders, and they frighten - and sometimes kill - people in this poorest country of the Western Hemisphere.

The century-old Victorian Oloffson is a cachet for the terror that persists in this Caribbean nation of 6.5 million people. The Oloffson was the model for the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's classic novel of Haiti, The Comedians. In the early 1960s, when Greene wrote his novel, the terror was carried out by President Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes.

The zinglando are the Macoutes' successors.

A French-Canadian priest, the Reverend Raymond Desjardins, says there are two kinds of repression in Haiti today. The "more official," he says, is carried out by the 7,000-man army if there's some evidence, such as a photo, of support for exiled priest-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Elected on December 16, 1990, in Haiti's first free and fair election since the nation won its independence in 1804, Aristide was deposed on September 30, 1991, in an army coup led by General Raoul Cedras.)

The tisoldats - little soldiers, meaning the 6,000 enlisted men - have no qualms about beating up someone openly supporting Aristide, who won election with 68 per cent of the vote. That's why Haitian vendors or money-changers on Rue Pavee or Boulevard J.-J. Dessalines in downtown Port-au-Prince put fingers to their lips when asked about Titid, Aristide's nickname.

But the more pervasive, more terrifying repression is carried out by the zinglando, says Desjardins, pastor of St. Gerard Church and a twelve-year Haiti resident.

"They attack a house. take it, kill some occupants, and violate the women," he says. "They are partly Macoutes, partly on drugs. They work for the army, which gives them guns. They aren't as official as the Macoutes but they're a way for the army and the police to keep control."

The priest says the zinglando began about three years ago and grew swiftly after Aristide was exiled and the army took over. He estimates there may be as many as 100,000 zinglando throughout the country, though others say the number is much lower. The priest has encountered zinglando in his own parish, up the hill from the Oloffson. In November 1991, he says, two zinglando attacked five houses three nights in a row, robbing and beating parishioners. One of the zinglando was arrested by an officer from the big, white National Palace on the Champs de Mars and by 10:30 the next morning was out on the street. When the priest asked the city's police chief about this quick turn-around, the police chief told him: "I have a little problem. He works for me."

The zinglando are recruited by some of the tisoldats, who get jobless young men hooked on cocaine over a two-or three-week period, then withdraw the drug. At that point, the young men will do anything to get drugs and are assigned to invade homes and beat or even kill Haitians believed to be covert Aristide supporters. "The repression is so high that people can't go out in the street," says Desjardins, and it's even worse in the countryside where 70 per cent of the Haitians live and "where exactly the old system of |section chiefs' has returned."

He adds: "The coup was to bring back the old system of the Duvaliers" - Papa Doc and son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) ruled this way from 1957 to February 7, 1986, when President-for-Life Baby Doc boarded a U.S. Air Force plane and was flown to France.

I wander the dusty, broken streets of this city of a million people and stop to talk to a college student named Milfort on the steps of the Episcopal cathedral. He is writing poetry and is delighted to give a reading - but he doesn't want to give an opinion of Aristide. An eighteen-year-old in a narrow alley of a slum, Cite Soleil, is quite willing to discuss Sartre's existentialism but fearful of discussing Titid. A woman vendor on Boulevard J.-J. Dessalines says, "I love Aristide," then hurriedly raises a finger to her lips - the discussion is over.

"There's a kind of desperation here now," says Desjardins. "The people chose Aristide to lead them because he was the first in their history" - going back to 1804 - "to take care of them, to elevate their dignity. The minority - the rich, the elite - don't want the majority as fellow citizens. The coup was a rejection of the majority, a humiliation. They are again insecure, at night they don't know if they'll be attacked."

The insecurity helps explain why thousands of Haitians somehow will scrape together $500 or $600 per person to step into a leaky sailboat and try to sail 700 miles to Florida.

"It is despair," says the priest. "They'd rather stay here poor but at least with the hope of change that Aristide brought. But when you take the hope out and know your children will be poor in misery like you, they'd rather die in the sea than stay. If Aristide comes back and his government is working in a democracy, the flow of people by sea will stop."

For the moment, at least, that flow seems to have been curtailed because of the U.S. Coast Guard's blockade of Haiti's shores up to and through the Windward Passage separating Haiti from Cuba. And most Haitians are aware that President Clinton, reversing a campaign pledge, has stuck to the George Bush policy of picking up Haitian refugees at sea and dumping them back on the dock at Port-au-Prince, where they're given $7.50 in Haitian gourdes - now around eighty-two gourdes - and told to go home.

Phil Anderson, a Protestant missionary from Dwight, Illinois, who worked in the Dominican Republic for twelve years and last summer was sent to Ile de la Gonave in the big bay off Port-au-Prince, doesn't think these U.S. policies will work.

He has seen dozens of boats being built and readied for sailing on his island of 95,000 people - "three boats in the last two weeks with a total of 190 people sailed," he says. Most, presumably, are picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard under the agreement reached in 1981 between President Reagan and Baby Doc. But some of the boats, not very seaworthy, capsize and their occupants drown. And a few may still get through to the Bahamas or Florida. In a year, the Coast Guard has picked up around 40,000 Haitians, but Olivier Adam, a Frenchman who works for the United Nations Development Program, says "thousands and thousands are just waiting to go - we need a quick solution."

A sort of deal to restore Aristide to power has been in the works for weeks, even months. But that doesn't necessarily mean the immediate return of Aristide, as the thirty-eight-year-old priest himself conceded in a mid-January interview in Washington.

The Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the United States have hammered out a deal, which General Cedras has agreed to, under which:

[paragraph] The army would recognize Aristide as president for the rest of his five-year term.

[paragraph] A far-reaching "amnesty" would be proclaimed for the military, who are responsible for at least 3,000 deaths since the coup, as well as for Aristide's supporters, implicated in dozens of "necklacings" (thrusting burning tires around a victim's neck).

[paragraph] The United States would "professionalize" the army, separating it from the police and assuring civilian control.

[paragraph] The United Nations would send in 300 "observers" and the Organization of American States would send in about 200 more to join the sixteen OAS "observers" now on the ground in Port-au-Prince.

[paragraph] The United States, France, and Canada would resume their aid programs and gradually "transform the |observer' mission into a technical aid mission," according to Carlos Jara, head of the OAS mission here.

[paragraph] And - absolutely vital - the Organization of American States would end its embargo on imports from and exports to Haiti, an embargo that has failed to stop the flow of goods but has doubled and tripled prices, hurting the poorest of the poor the most.

"We are committed to the OAS resolution for the restoration of democracy and the return of Aristide," says the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat in Haiti, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Alexander, who has run the U.S. Embassy since Ambassador Alvin Adams departed last summer. "Aristide's got to be restored to his functions. That's what democracy is all about."

But he also concedes U.S. wariness of giving Aristide real power. Aristide can be restored as head of state "but not be in it, that's the Haitians' idea," says Alexander. The suggestion is that General Cedras might be permitted to serve out his term as commander-in-chief of the army through the summer of 1994, allowing Aristide to return to Haiti for the last year-and-a-half of his five-year presidential term - and thus making a mockery of U.S. support for reinstating Aristide.

Even some of the 3 to 4 per cent of Haitians who compose the well-to-do mulatto elite agree Aristide must be restored in some manner if Haiti is to achieve stability. The reason, says architect Gerard Fombrun, is that "they're killing us with the embargo." Graffiti scrawled on the deteriorated walls of this city say ABA ENBAGO - Creole for "down with the embargo."

The embargo has brought on inflation and left half the work force jobless with "an average wage of about twenty gourdes for eight hours of work," according to Raymond Lafontant Jr., executive director of the Association of Industries of Haiti. (A gourde today is worth less than a U.S. dime, half what it was five years ago.)

Haitian statistics are suspect, but most here agree the yearly per-capita income is no more than $350. Around 70 per cent of the populace is illiterate.

Infant mortality - deaths in the first year of life - run well over 100 per 1,000 births, double the rate in the neighboring Dominican Republican.

Aristide says, "We don't want vengeance nor violence." He says he's agreeable to choosing a consensus prime minister "not from my own party," but "from a list submitted by different sectors of the opposition."

When a new government is in place, he says, "I will set a specific date for my return."

But Aubelin Jolicoeur, sixty-eight and the model for Petit Pierre in The Comedians, sits on the Oloffson's front porch and says Aristide "doesn't dare to come back, he could be killed."

Shots ring out in the night air below. The zinglando are at work again.

William Steif a,former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, reports frequently from abroad for The Progressive.