One individual was arrested last week at the Haitian-Dominican border with ballot boxes in his possession that were full of ballots already marked for a candidate of the former opposition to Aristide.  

People gathered at mid-day along the Champs-de-Mars not far from the National Palace chanting "the vote in favor of the favorite will be so massive there will be no room for shenanigans".  

A short time later, young professionals who were having drinks at a bar in Pétion-Ville were voicing their opinions.  

" We are counting heavily on the Americans not to let someone loyal to Aristide be elected just two years after his ouster" said one of the bar patrons.

Another point that bears making is that the undisciplined, fractious nature of the opposition to Lavalas – similar to the opposition to Chavez in Venezuela – cannot credibly be considered self-organizing to the extent that it could pull off a coup alone.  Granted, the coup regime has helped consolidate support behind Préval by jailing other contenders (Father Jean-Juste, belatedly diagnosed with Leukemia, has finally been released for medical care in Miami), but the fact remains that despite a campaign of violence and intimidation against Lavalas leaders and areas of strong support, most people expect Préval to win even in unfair conditions and with some amount of fraud by the opposition.  Indeed, support for the former President is so undeniable that his loss would prove fraud, an incredible accomplishment under the circumstances.

So how did this anti-democratic but politically inept opposition get rid of the popular Aristide?  How did this group, which now appear to be unable to work together on much of anything, unite so completely to create the polarization, as our media like to call it, that gave fraudulent legitimacy to international freezing of aid and loans, that made the coup d'etat even as possible as it was (carried out by U.S. forces following the invasion by a Haitian 'rebel army' organized in the Dominican Republic)?

The New York Times, three years too late, reported recently the crucial effect the Bush administration – in particular people reporting to Roger Noriega and Otto Reich – and the government-funded International Republican Institute had in galvanizing and consolidating the opposition to Aristide by telling all the many parts not to compromise with Lavalas, not to accept any partnership or easing of tension with the clear majority party, because Aristide would be gone soon.  The article called this "mixed-messages" because this went against official State Department policy.

The International Republican Institute (IRI) responded with a devastating press release criticizing the Times for reliance on just one senior U.S. diplomat and people affiliated with Lavalas in Haiti (which would, incidentally, be pretty much anyone actually elected to office).  The well-spun press release made me wish the New York Times did better reporting even when they were on the path to truth (a path belatedly enabled, incidentally, because this particular brutal punishing of Haiti was not entirely a bipartisan affair-- the U.S. elite represented by many such Democrats as found in the Clinton administration apparently would not have dealt with Haiti this way).

Until one realizes that the IRI's claim is that official policy was the isolation (and logically removal) of the elected administration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  Their spin doctors don't say "we weren't trying to undermine democracy."  They say "we were implementing U.S. policy"– literally saying to the Times to ask Noriega and Reich, and others notorious for a long history of evil acts against popular movements of the left, indisputably in charge of our governments policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.