Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
police are often reluctant to penetrate. Most of this crime is
associated with five or six criminal gangs. Although these gangs
are formless and undisciplined, they represent a danger to the
established order by contributing to a sense of chaos and lawlessness
that weakens public confidence in the government's
power to maintain control. Most of the lawless behavior lacks a
political motivation, although the police have been the target
of a number of attacks, some resulting in their deaths. In earlv
1998, the station chief in Mirebalais was lynched by a gang of
young men linked to Aristide's political movement.
Violence has spread from gang-ridden areas to more prosperous
parts of the city and to the countryside, driven by
increasing economic desperation and a limited police presence.
The looting of warehouses, truck hijackings, and holdups
of buses are among the most common forms of armed crime. A
rash of kidnappings and robberies of wealthy and middle-class
Haitians has been a further feature of the crime wave. Vigilante
groups, sometimes organized with government approval, act to
enforce rough "street justice" where the police are unable or
unwilling to act, or where confidence is lacking in the court system.
Angry mobs often kill suspected thieves, murderers, and
rapists. According to police records, some 100 deaths resulted
from such incidents in the first half of 1998. Occasionally,
timely police intervention has prevented lynchings.
Some armed, unemployed ex-FAd'H soldiers have turned to
crime. Other demobilized troops with legitimate grievances
over the loss of their careers and pensions and the lack ofjobs
and army severance pay present a potentially dangerous antigovernment
element. Several hundred ex-soldiers staged a protest
in the capital in 1996, threatening to take up arms if their
demands were not met. Subsequently, the police arrested
twenty members of the extreme right-wing Mobilization for
National Development, most of whose members were ex-soldiers,
on charges of plotting the assassination of public officials.
Two of the group's leaders were later found murdered,
apparently by members of the Presidential Guard. Rene Preval,
who became president in February 1996, came under United
States pressure to purge his bodyguard unit but, apparently
fearful for his own safety, was unwilling to do so until a security
detail from the United States and Canada was assigned to
guard him. The detail was withdrawn a year later.
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