Anti-U.N. violence spread to Haiti's capital Thursday as protesters blocked roads and attacked foreigners' cars over suspicions that peacekeepers introduced a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 1,100 people.
The unrest followed three days of similar violence in northern Haiti. The protests come a little more than a week before national elections, and the U.N. has characterized them as political. Some demonstrators threw rocks at an office of President Rene Preval's Unity party and tore down campaign posters.
But the protests are fueled by suspicions, shared by some U.S. disease experts, that a contingent of Nepalese soldiers brought cholera with them to Haiti and spread the disease from their rural base into the Artibonite River system, where the initial outbreak was centered.
The disease is new to Haiti and was not expected to strike this year despite rampant bad sanitation and poor access to drinking water.
The 12,000-member U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH, which has been the dominant security force in Haiti for six years, denies responsibility for the epidemic.
