No police were in sight. Vehicles rolled through the city’s nearly empty streets, packed with men known to frightened Haitians as chimeres– “ghosts”–vigilantes loyal to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only freely elected president in Haiti’s 200-year history. The men wore face paint and bandannas and carried old rifles, pistols and machetes. “We are ready to fight,” said Luckenson St. Clair, 26 and unemployed. “We are prepared to die to defend our president.” Sporadic gunfire rattled in the distance, and helicopters droned overhead, lifting foreign nationals out to safer places.

Although the insurgents’ estimated strength was only 200 or so fighters, police fled their posts in city after city. As rebel forces gathered for a final assault on the capital, Aristide and his remaining followers seemed ill equipped to stop them. He had disbanded Haiti’s notoriously brutal and coup-prone Army back in 1995. “The majority of [Haiti’s] people are more or less on the sidelines right now,” says Michele Montas, owner of a silenced independent Port-au-Prince radio station. “They’re afraid of pro-Aristide thugs and all those rebels in the north. Everyone is in survival mode.” The Haitian president vowed to serve out the final two years of his term, but his appeals for outside intervention did him little good. France openly urged him to resign even as it called for creation of an international force to restore order. The Bush administration, hinting heavily that Aristide should go, prepared to send down three warships and 2,200 Marines, although no one liked the idea of getting mixed up in Haiti, even as part of a peacekeeping team after a political settlement.

The rebels emerged virtually overnight. “The real mystery is where these guys are coming from,” says Thayer Scott of the International Republican Institute, a group funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to foster democracy in Haiti. “They are organized; they have uniforms; they have better weapons than the old Haitian Army had the last time the U.S. intervened. And here they are, out of the blue.” Their leaders include a previous coup plotter and a paramilitary leader convicted in connection with the 1994 massacre of at least 26 people in the city of Gonaives. Such a fighting force must have gotten money from somewhere–and these days Haiti is a cocaine-smuggling hub. Sources in Washington theorize that traffickers may have decided they wanted Aristide out of the way. The rebels, in turn, accuse Aristide of being a drug dealer himself–a charge his government angrily denies.

The rebels could never have gone so far, so fast, if Aristide hadn’t squandered his own popular support. He won the presidency in a landslide in late 1990, but the Haitian Army overthrew him a few months later. When the U.S. military restored him to power in 1994, he began ruling like a dictator. Constitutionally barred from running for re-election, he hand-picked his successor and remained the power behind the throne. Street gangs–the chimeres–silenced anyone who dared criticize him. Despite his supporters’ vehement denials, his radical reputation lent plausibility to reports that he had publicly praised “necklacing,” the grisly form of execution using a gasoline-soaked tire. In 2000 he allegedly rigged parliamentary elections, prompting the opposition to boycott the presidential race that returned him to office later that year.

Even now, no one is sure how the Haitian leader might be replaced. Aside from a visceral hatred of Aristide, there is little apparent common ground between the armed rebels and the civilian opposition. Port-au-Prince businessman Andre Apaid and other prominent anti-Aristide activists deny having any ties to the rebels, but the insurgents’ top leader, Guy Philippe, told reporters last week he had made “informal” contact with unnamed opposition members. A former Army officer and police chief who was implicated in two unsuccessful coup plots in 2000 and 2001, Philippe wants to revive the Haitian military. But any successor to Aristide who puts Philippe and other rebel commanders back in uniform will be severely tainted by their unsavory human-rights records. Aristide may have been a deeply flawed leader. But Haitians are likely to have a long search before they find a fit successor.