#3038: What does insecurity mean to haitians? Laleau comments

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From:NLaleau@aol.com

Dear Michelle,

I also had experience with the burning barricades... once in a car in the 
morning between Les Cayes and Aquin, and once by foot, in Les Cayes at night. 
The morning crowd was definitely more rambunctious -- the leaders were sort 
of drunk and definitely wouldn't let cars through. They let me walk through 
the barricades on foot and talk with the crowd, the organizers, etc., which 
informed me of the issues -- legitimate ones, it seemed. The night barricade 
of burning tires in Les Cayes occurred after the Fall 1995 assassination of 
one deputy and attempted assassination of a second one... people were 
horribly upset, legitimately so, and thought that perhaps the old regime was 
vying for power again. But none of it was personal or aimed at blans. I 
walked through the crowd for about an hour with a Haitian friend and felt the 
crowd's legitimate outrage. In the succeeding several days, opportunistic 
looting began to occur throughout the town, which had a very different tone 
to it than the outrage of the first day and night, but you would have had to 
be there to sense the difference. 

Nancy Laleau