The Power of American Magic

By Kevin Fedarko

It was nearly dusk on a recent evening when a U.S. Special Forces team walked into a village northeast of Port-au-Prince and encountered a problem for which their training manuals had not prepared them. Several mothers were convinced that a pair of werewolves, in the form of two local women, had placed a curse on the village children and were now preparing to consume their babies' souls. As he listened, the team's warrant officer tucked his hand into his pocket, snapped open a chemical light stick that soldiers use as markers at night and announced in Creole that he would break the curse. Mumbling incantations, the officer anointed each child's forehead with a smear of the glowing green liquid. After declaring "the spell has been lifted," he turned to the stunned werewolves and promised that if they ever pulled such a stunt again, he would put a spell on them: his magic was much more powerful than theirs.

The 9,000 American soldiers still stationed in Haiti have come to occupy two radically different worlds. The first is the world of Port-au-Prince, which belongs to conventional soldiers who patrol the streets, keep the peace and bide their time until they are scheduled to return home. The second world belongs to the 1,200 men of the Special Forces who, since the occupation began, have overseen rural Haiti. Taking on the roles of sheriff, prosecutor, judge, plumber, mayor and ghostbuster, these commandos are often the only glue holding together the 5 million Haitians who live outside the capital.

From their headquarters in a former brassiere factory in Port-au-Prince, the Green Berets have fanned out to more than 500 villages. Upon arriving, they have often been forced to refashion local government after the soldiers and strongmen who terrorized the area faded away like zombies in the night, leaving behind a brutalized population. In Mirebalais, the prodemocracy deputy mayor was beheaded and his body thrown into a nearby river. At the prison in Les Cayes, inmates were treated so abominably that one man's spine was visible through the lesions on his back.

During their two months on the ground, the commandos' evenhanded approach has often opened them to the charge of collaborating with the henchmen of the old regime. Yet they have also displayed a rare talent for getting things done, from powering up old electric plants and water pumps to installing mayors, protecting judges and delivering babies. Often nine men will control a town of 20,000 people. "We're not nation builders," said a Green Beret, "but we're trying to be helpful, and the people really seem to appreciate whatever we do."

Their tactics, often devised on the spot, have been unusual, to say the least. To clear the streets of thugs, Green Berets on patrol took to inverting their night-vision goggles so that they glowed in the dark. In Les Cayes, the Special Forces jailed a judge overnight to teach him how inhumane prison conditions were. They have also moved aggressively to arrest anyone they thought might be a bad guy. "We detained them. We cuffed them," acknowledges the commanding officer, Colonel Mark Boyatt. "We did this without a whole lot of proof. But it was a very visible symbol of our presence. It convinced the people we were there to help them." For Haitians traumatized by generations of dictatorship, the Americans' unconventional tactics carry a most welcome and powerful magic.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Thiote and Douglas Waller/Washington