Posted on Fri, Sep. 26, 2003

HAITI
Riot police patrol the streets in third day of protests
Demonstrators demand the president quit over the death of the leader of the ''The Cannibal Army'' -- a pro-Aristide gang.

Special to The Herald

A third day of violence paralyzed this port town on Thursday as demonstrators set up burning barricades to protest the killing of a local strongman.

They blame President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for the death of Amiot Métayer, an Aristide supporter whose body was found along a road on Monday. Protesters have demanded that Aristide resign.

Groups of black-clad and hooded riot police patrolled the streets, assault rifles at the ready, stopping occasionally to dismantle the barricades of car frames, junked TVs, trash and boulders.

Métayer's body was found late Monday about a hour from Gonaves. He was the victim of what his supporters are calling a political assassination, because he was last seen leaving his home in the company of a former government employee and frequent visitor to Aristide's presidential palace.

''Aristide had him killed because he had too much power,'' said Jean-Marie Frantz, 29, as he stood in front of an Aristide poster in his home. He suddenly grabbed the poster and shredded it to bits. ``Look, I used to believe in Aristide. Not anymore. I've had it. He has to leave!''

A HERO TO SOME

To Frantz and most of the impoverished residents of Gonaves, where the jobless rate is 60 percent, Métayer was a hero who doled out jobs and handed out money when someone needed to pay a child's school fees.

But the burly 39-year-old was also the leader of a pro-Aristide gang known as ''The Cannibal Army'' and ''Haiti's Most Wanted'' since his gang busted him out of prison by driving a bulldozer through a jail wall last year.

The Organization of American States, international human rights groups, Aristide's opposition and the United States all demanded his rearrest for his alleged involvement in the lynching of an opposition party member in 2001.

RESISTED RULE

Métayer rose to prominence during the 1991-94 military government that followed a coup against Aristide, when he and his Popular Democratic Organization of Raboteau resisted army rule. After Aristide's return to power, however, resistance turned into repression against the president's opponents.

Since the jail break, Métayer's followers have rolled out of the slums whenever opposition forces demonstrated against Aristide, and sometimes run his neighborhood, and even the city, like a fiefdom.

Métayer ordered -- and got -- changes in the local public administration and succeeded in having arson charges against him dropped after both a judge and a prosecutor working on the case fled the country earlier this year, saying they feared for their lives.

Human rights activist and outspoken government critic Jean-Claude Bajeux, head of the Ecumenical Human Rights Center in Port-au-Prince, said the armed gangs are ''a private militia used to control the slums,'' much like the Duvalier family dictatorship's dreaded Tonton Macoutes.

''Now the OAS has asked for their arrest. Aristide needs to get rid of them. He's in a tough spot,'' he said.

Government and Lavalas Family spokesmen reject the accusations as ridiculious, and says Metayer's killing might be the work of the opposition, looking to discredit Aristide and the organizations that back him.

''The opposition's real goal is to destroy those organizations because they don't want poor people to organize,'' said Mario Dupuy, Secretary of State for Communication.





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