Since a giant anti-occupation march on September 30, the 13th anniversary of the first coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, both uprisings and repression in Haiti have steadily escalated.

During that demonstration, police shot and killed at least two demonstrators, which U.S.-installed de facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue later boasted about. "We fired on them, some of them went down, others were wounded, and others fled," he announced with no words of regret.

The police then skirmished with armed anti-coup partisans from the capital's popular quarters like Bel-air and Martissant in the following days, and there have been dozens of casualties on both sides.

Latortue's government has become increasingly isolated and prone to issuing absurd accusations against Aristide to explain the Haitian peoples' growing insurgency and militancy.

In mid-October, Latortue lashed out against Aristide's host, South African President Thabo Mbeki, as "not respecting international law" by allowing the Haitian president "in his territory to organize violence in another country."

South Africa's Foreign Minister brushed off the attack "with contempt," saying that Latortue was using Mbeki as "a scapegoat for failure by the interim Haitian authorities to bring about peace and stability to Haiti."

Latortue's repression has only stoked the fires of rebellion. Spontaneous demonstrations and burning tire barricades occur every week. In response, the de facto government has illegally arrested and jailed dozens of Lavalas leaders, including constitutional Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, Interior Minister Joclerme Privert, activist Annette "So Ann" Auguste, and refugee rights pioneer Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

The attack on the poor masses is even more brutal. On Oct. 19, masked policemen gunned down a 9-year-old boy in the capital's La Saline slum. A week later, they returned to a house in Fort National where they arrested and then executed 13 unarmed young people, among them three women. Two days later, four youths, two with their hands tied behind their backs, were executed in broad daylight on Rue Péan in the capital's most rebellious slum, Bel Air.

The de facto government has denied that the massacres are carried out by the police, blaming them on either "renegade" police units or "death squads posing as policemen." The masked black-clad policemen carrying out these massacres may in fact be former soldiers from the Haitian Army, which Aristide dissolved in 1995. Two or three hundred of these former soldiers were the core of the so-called "rebels" which invaded Haiti in January 2004 from the Dominican Republic, where they were equipped, trained and harbored with the support of both the US and Dominican governments.

Since providing the media backdrop for the US Marines' kidnapping of Aristide on February 29, the ex-soldiers have been clamoring for resurrection of the Haitian Army as well as 10 years of back pay, claiming the army's dissolution was illegal. After several deadly clashes with the police during September, the former soldiers struck an uneasy truce and unpublicized deal with the de facto authorities. Some were integrated into the police force while others set up bases in provincial cities and perform parallel or joint operations with the police and the occupation forces of the United Nations Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH).

The former soldiers, along with death squad leaders and former Tonton Macoutes (Duvalierist henchmen), have expressed eagerness to put down the growing revolt in the Haitian capital.

Despite the savagery of the massacres, popular neighborhoods are not intimidated and continue to repel police attacks. At least three times during October, armed anti-coup militants in Bel Air expelled incursions by the police backed by occupation troops. On one occasion, UN troops abandoned their vehicle and weapons.

Resistance is not confined to the capital. In a significant development, a well-organized commando group attacked the police station in the northwestern town of Gros Morne just after midnight on October 24, subduing the policemen and reportedly capturing weapons. One policeman was wounded in the leg while fleeing.

The guerillas spray-painted slogans on the police station and neighboring buildings, writing Down with the occupation, Down with the former soldiers, and Down with the Macoutes! Along with a red star, they also left their name: the Dessalinien Army of National Liberation (ADLN). Jean-Jacques Dessalines was the founding father of Haitian independence 200 years ago.

George W. Bush's November 2 electoral victory will also have a dramatic effect on the Haitian struggle in coming weeks. Prior to the election, Aristide's Lavalas Family party (FL) was clearly hoping that Democratic hopeful John Kerry, if elected, could be persuaded to return Aristide to the Haitian presidential chair, just as President Bill Clinton did with an occupation of 20,000 U.S. troops in September 1994. Aristide, from his South African exile, made repeated calls for "dialogue" with the US and France, the very nations which fomented his ouster in the first place.

It is unlikely that the FL leadership can continue to make moral appeals to Washington and Paris. Bush administration hard-liners, emboldened by their electoral victory, are in no mood for compromise and are hungry for new attacks, particularly against neighboring Cuba.

Meanwhile, the National Popular Party (PPN)— a Lavalas movement organization—has insisted, as it did in 1994, that only the Haitian people can return Aristide to power. The PPN calls for struggle against the foreign military occupation, rejects proposed negotiations with the de facto government or their sponsors, and spurns de facto rigged elections.

"We think that because the ruling sectors have put an end to the civil form of struggle, it would be an illusion to think that the normal democratic approach to political power could be practical in the current context," said the PPN's secretary general Ben Dupuy in an interview in the September issue of the San Francisco-based Socialism & Liberation. "So we leave every door open. We think it is the duty of any people to fight illegitimacy, tyranny."

In many ways, the political conjuncture in Haiti today mirrors what existed in 1803 when Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to reestablish slavery, when the colony's ruling groups were feuding among each other for privileges, and when the French empire was fighting wars of expansion on many fronts.

Today, the Haitian masses will not accept the ruling classes' overthrow of the government they overwhelmingly elected in 2000, as imperfect as it was, to crush the modest gains in economic and political rights that the people have won since dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall in 1986. The comprador merchant bourgeoisie and big landowning factions of the Haitian ruling class are also fighting among themselves, as they have historically, over the political power they snatched from the people in the February 29 coup.

Finally, the US empire, just like Napoleon's France, is hugely overextended and finding it necessary to "outsource" its occupations to surrogates: in Haiti's case, the Brazilian, Argentinean, and Chilean troops which make up the bulk of the MINUSTAH. These nations have no stake in enforcing Haiti's continued subjugation other than whatever diplomatic and financial bribes the Bush administration has offered them. As the situation will surely continue to worsen in the months ahead, Brazil and other MINUSTAH collaborators can be expected to look for ways to extricate themselves from the quagmire in which they find themselves sinking. Already Brazil has sent an emissary to South Africa to explore ways to include Aristide in new negotiations with the de facto government and its allies, a move which displeases Washington.

In short, the conditions for revolutionary change in Haiti today are as favorable as they were 200 years ago. Just as the former slaves of St. Domingue rose up and founded a new republic, which sparked the liberation of the South America, once again, the Haitian masses stand positioned to open a new chapter in the hemisphere's history and the liberation of mankind.