In February 2004, in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest-turned-politician, faced a violent rebellion and eventual overthrow by urban gangs and former members of the police and army. Over the course of a humid Caribbean month open warfare raged through Haiti’s slums, the dead bodies of traitors and informants lay festering in the sun and flaming blockades of rubbish ground movement to a halt. From the northern city of Gonaives, a rebel stronghold and birth site of every other political insurrection in Haiti’s dark past, a powerful movement took hold that eventually chased Aristide from Haiti and plunged the country into a state of anarchy.
