Up by the Roots
Chamberlain, Greg
The National Government Council's (CNG) task is to ensure a transition to democracy. That is the only reason it exists, the only reason for its actions . . . We want an open, constructive...
...There are more urgent problems here than having elections," says Father Jacques M6sidor, influential head of the militant local Salesian order...
...Willy Rom6lus, Bishop of J6r6mie The constitution is made of paper, but bayonets are made of iron...
...But like the cacos and the earlier piquets, the force included some black landowners and even, in the last years of the dictatorship, some mulattos...
...But assembly members-many of them young technicians, lawyers or returnees with few political ties-surprised Haitians in four months of often tumultuous public sessions by producing a daringly liberal constitution promising rights most Haitians have never known...
...The Church hierarchy, despite its insistence that it was "non-political," flew to the defense of the CNG to denounce the "communist" danger-in effect its own radical priests...
...By 1980 most major towns had been linked by modern highways, giving farmers easier access to the markets of Port-au-Prince...
...diplomat insisted: "Haitians' pride is hurt when they see how dependent they are on us...
...The U.S.-approved junta which took over, the CNG, contained key figures of the old regime, who arranged the exile or protection of many former colleagues...
...New York Times, November 16, 1986...
...Other political figures were slow to return from exile and when they did found themselves relatively unknown...
...Author's interview, March 31, 1986...
...The new military rulers' reluctance to attack the deep roots of the old regime, their natural authoritarian instincts and the sheer enormity of problems facing Latin America's poorest country have, 18 months later, produced a bloody national deadlock...
...Their chances seem slim...
...Papa Doc made communism a capital crime in April 1969 and his police a few weeks later murdered 16 of the party's 21-strong central committee and five of its six-member politbureau...
...It was that or an American invasion," Rosny Desroches, the new government's education minister told reporters...
...The Church hierarchy has no interest in real change," says trade union leader Yves Richard...
...Such men have expressed irritation at the present democratic free-forall...
...Prospects for national unity improved and with it the chance of successful resistance...
...Port-au-Prince had been calm, with only a few minor incidents, right to the end...
...Namphy's public geniality, personal modesty and official use of Creole-a significant factor in the relative calm of post-Duvalierism--no longer cut any ice...
...Author's interview, July 26, 1986...
...The current two-year interregnum, presided over by Gen...
...The Duvalierists and Army leaders took fright at the new constitution's removal of the military's traditional supervision over elections...
...HE ORIGINS OF THESE POST-DUVALIER mass movements are to be found in the mid1970s-in the expansion of communications, a certain liberalization of the dictatorship after Papa Doc's death and in the awakening of a divided and corrupted Roman Catholic Church...
...8 After serious flooding in Les Cayes in June 1986, peasants refused food relief, demanding instead jobs, land, tools and housing...
...6 UT THE OLD ORDER WAS BREAKING UP...
...The Church now has to share with the new grassroots organizations the space it once monopolized...
...3 When U.S...
...We have to avoid false democrats, those who pretend they are friends of the people," he said...
...WHEN THE CNG ORGANIZED THE ELECtion last October of a constituent assembly to start a transition to formal democracy, less than 5% of the electorate turned out...
...We've also done the work the political parties should have done...
...But the seeds of revolt had been planted.'o Despite the dictatorship, the enormous town-country gap began to narrow...
...9. New York Times, May 15, 1986...
...Neither Th6odore nor the country's other major leftist leader, social democrat Serge Gilles, of the Haitian Revolutionary Progressive Nationalist Party (PANPRA), are running for president...
...The 1,000 participants spanned a wide political spectrum and included the Catholic progressives...
...Author's interview, February 10, 1987...
...Allan Ebert, "Haiti and the AIFLD," The National Reporter (Washington, D.C...
...plant owners consider any hint of unionism as grounds for instant dismissal...
...music is tremendously influential in Cuba, yet Cuba remains a socialist society.'' 2 The immense economic weight of the United States is, however, an obstacle to building meaningful democracy in Haiti...
...Half a dozen major candidates, all centrist or rightwing, are hoping to contest a presidential poll on November 29...
...Author's interview, February 14, 1987...
...We can't afford irresponsible sorties...
...5. Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp...
...Namphy appealed to employers last April not to "close your minds" to the "legitimate demands" of workers...
...The long-planned campaign, launched with fanfare and government blessing a month after the Duvaliers left, aimed to eradicate illiteracy in five years...
...3. Nicholls, Caribbean Context, pp...
...A mob of thousands rushed the six miles from the capital to the airport when a counter clerk tipped off a radio station about D6syr's imminent departure...
...The capital's theaters were packed for months before the regime realized the danger and cracked down...
...Th6odore, a math and physics teacher, has found himself publicly defending Voodoo as a part of the national culture...
...T HE COUNTRY NOW EXPECTED OR HOPED for revolution...
...People ignored the double-edge of its support for the CNG-aid would be cut if there was any "radical change" in the junta's composition but also if the CNG "perverted" the election timetable...
...The Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Frangois Wolf Ligond6, named to the post by Duvalier in MAY/JUNE 1987 17Haiti 1966 as the first black Haitian-born bishop, was politely ignored by the rest of the hierarchy and by an increasingly radical rank and file...
...As the opposition closed ranks, the Army, along with presumed Duvalierist civilian gunmen, began shooting...
...Catholic activists, led by men like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the charismatic parish priest of the La Saline slum in Port-au-Prince, and others estranged from the hierarchy, encouraged neighborhood committees of all kinds...
...occupation...
...8 Scores were killed...
...Old fears have returned and many Haitians no longer believe the free elections scheduled later this year will take place...
...175-182...
...But his party, the anti-communist and noiriste (black nationalist) Worker and Peasant Movement (MOP), was swept away as the system once more closed in...
...T HE EFFICIENCY OF THE DUVALIERS' REpression, and the country's high population density, gave dissidents little cover, blocking any classic mass movement for a quarter of a century...
...The U.S...
...They arrive in the provinces in a fine car, with a suit and their Port-auPrince airs, but the peasants don't care about that...
...Despite the bishops' calls for land reform and "deep-rooted change," the hope of some that the Church might sponsor "a party of the masses" faded...
...Communist parties don't make revolution in the Third World," he says...
...Msgr...
...Carlo A. Desinor, Daniel (Port-au-Prince, 1986), pp...
...They're easier to talk about...
...But the opposition succeeded in forcing the withdrawal of the repressive decrees, and the CNG survived by default...
...Armed also with a liberal new constitution which curbs the power of the new president, devolves authority to the provinces and bans leading ex-Duvalierists from public life, Haitians are working against time to recuperate the power long denied them by a traditionally authoritarian system and its rulers...
...CATH leader Richard dismisses the PUCH, however...
...After the fall of President Elie Lescot in 1946, a brief opening (compared by many to the present period) saw the first trade union and left-wing organization in Haitian history and full expression of the nationalist intellectual movement the occupation had spawned...
...It was unworkable, he said, voicing the fears of not a few, including one foreign diplomat who speculated that "people like it because it embodies the spirit of the revolution...
...government, with its familiar interest in dividing the labor movement, gives strong financial backing to the conservative Federation of Unionized Workers (FOS), through the National Endowment for Democracy and the reportedly CIA-linked American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), known for its destabilizing work over the past quarter-century in Guyana, El Salvador and Grenada...
...He was tried and sentenced to death...
...It's a useful healing document...
...The caco leader, Charlemagne P6ralte, was shot dead in his camp in October 1919 by a Marine disguised as a black who had been led there by a Haitian mercenary.' The North Americans lashed his halfnaked body to a door...
...February 1986 was just the tip of the iceberg," says Georges Werleigh, a government economist...
...Creole has become the political language," says dismissed liberal Justice Minister Frangois Latortue with approval...
...20 But the feeling of most Haitians was that it was far better than nothing and something worth fighting for...
...power in the region into account...
...Greg Chamberlain, "Haitian Media Contribute to Duvalier's Fall," Media Development (London), 1986, No...
...Despite intelligence, energy and often goodwill on both sides, bad political habits, inexperience, the ruthless pressure of poverty and the perpetual shadow of a selfish neighbor to the north work against solution of the acute national crisis...
...That just isn't possible...
...Author's interview, May 2, 1986...
...Liberation (Paris), February 14, 1986...
...An efficient telephone system was established at the same time...
...Haitians are poorer now than under the Duvaliers,"- says Konakom leader Benoit...
...3 ' The U.S...
...2' And it was boycotted by Yves Richard, head of the largest, most left-wing of the country's three main labor federations, the Independent Haitian Workers' Organization (CATH...
...The regime, offering a new official ideology of "JeanClaudism" -which it defined as "Duvalierism reconsidered, corrected and broadened"-set up the first official radio (1977) and government television (1979...
...Washington Post, May 17, 1986...
...Radio Soleil softened its broadcasts.' 4 Some recalled the frequent visits by the papal nuncio to the U.S...
...The new black bourgeoisie had advanced under the occupation, ensuring the election of the populist black Dumarsais Estim6 as president...
...The Army, still united despite an opposition call to the ranks for a revolt against corrupt senior officers "with bank accounts and villas abroad," was reorganized in mid-July to enable special tactical units to be based in the provinces and to increase the total number of generals from two to nine...
...Author's interview, February 14, 1987...
...But we have to take U.S...
...Lacking sufficiently strong or united leadership, the opposition had difficulty sustaining a general strike.29 Namphy fulminated against "extremists," "agitators" and "anarchists," and his colleagues claimed to see Cuba's hand...
...Up by the Roots 1. David Nicholls, Haiti in Caribbean Context (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp...
...In a supreme irony-with the media silenced by a state of siege in the week before Duvalier's departure-most Haitians got their news of the final crisis by tuning into PUCH broadcasts beamed from nearby Havana...
...Gilles is a leading figure in the Committee of 57...
...Five months later he was dead...
...Especially since the trigger-happy troops had supposedly just been trained by a U.S...
...A movement to beautify the capital (which later spread to provincial towns) saw volunteers sweeping streets and decorating walls and even road surfaces with colorful religious, nationalistic and political illustrations...
...Many of the meeting's demands found their way into the new constitution...
...Conservative ex-Finance Minister Marc Bazin cautions that if a democratic foundation is not laid now, the extremes of communism or Duvalierism will take over...
...We have to prepare the structures and not act in a hurry...
...New York Times, April 7, 1986...
...Williams Regala or other hardliners...
...When Duvalier reopened it against the advice of his senior ministers in late December, the Reagan Administration began seriously planning for post-Duvalierism.Demonstrations continued almost daily through January, but government warnings, for U.S...
...Yet disputes were mostly petty, personal or based on color, and produced merely defiance rather than revolution.' Most people retreated onto tiny plots of land in remote valleys and mornes (mountains), their Voodoo religion semi-insulating them against poverty and injustice...
...After all, the Church is the second biggest landowner in the country.'15 The way seemed clear for the grassroots to confront the regime directly...
...A half dozen people were killed...
...Neither recent developments nor history augur well for success, despite the nation's hopeful beginnings...
...flags have been burned and walls daubed with slogans...
...The Conference of Catholic Bishops, despite its sharp criticism that the regime's early promise had been betrayed and that the situation "continued to deteriorate economically, politically and socially," kept at arm's length the "liberationists' '-better represented in the more vocal Conference of Priests...
...S CHOOLTEACHER VICTOR BENOIT, THE leading figure in Konakom, does not rule out a left-wing presidential candidate, but says participation will depend on whether the independent electoral coun20REPORT ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20Radio Soleil: a voice of the powerless cil is allowed real control of the scheduled local, legislative and presidential polls...
...Instead, in July 1958 the Duvaliers founded their own mass movement, the Tontons Macoutes, from 1962 officially dubbed, more grandly, the National Security Volunteers (VSN...
...Marxists hold that religion is a protest against intolerable living conditions," he adds...
...Author's interview, February 12, 1987...
...When liberalization ended abruptly in November 1980 with mass arrests, deportation of 23 leading dissidents and the silencing of the media, the Church was the only institution left with any built-in immunity to state power and became a natural umbrella for all dissent...
...old resentments toward the capital resurfaced...
...It was clear however, that the longer the revolt went on, radical influences and anti-U.S...
...If people are given the same old pill, it won't work...
...banking fortune through family ties...
...Radio Soleil's reporting of protests helped the movement to spread...
...Let's remember, for example, that U.S...
...Whether the young and diverse mass movement can force a change, remains to be seen...
...Richard, a self-educated man of humble origins, denounced the congress as "just a seminar manipulated by a small group of intellectuals from the bourgeoisie-people from Port-au-Prince who said they represented the peasantry...
...Author's interview, February 14, 1987...
...The state here is domesticated by the U.S...
...But they were not yet strong enough to break the power of the mulattos, whom the North Americans had promoted...
...Washington had to act, organizing a night escape of the Duvaliers into exile in France on February 7, 1986...
...26 Creole is a subversion which Haiti's elite cannot easily combat...
...Their champion, sharp-tongued Interior and Defense Minister Roger Lafontant, was ousted just five months before the end, after three years as the country's de facto ruler...
...Yves Richardwho tells how his mechanic father was murdered after trying to unionize one of the country's main coffee trading houses-is optimistic, however, and says CATH has some 176,000 members in 172 unions, 126 of them among the peasantry...
...4. The U.S...
...The establishment has been more successful in fighting the Moscow-aligned Unified Party of Haitian Communists (PUCH), the oldest of the country's major political parties...
...183-186...
...Remaining confidence in the CNG evaporated...
...But the masses have "a kind of virginity which makes it easier to educate them for democracy" than the ruling class, he says...
...The Catholic Church-powerful despite competition from Voodoo and from hundreds of foreign Protestant missionaries, mostly conservative Americans-was also stirring...
...Zantray head H6rard Simon was once a Tonton Macoute leader in Gonaives...
...attitude of the time was expressed by Assistant Secretary of State Alvey A. Adee in 1888 when he called Haiti "a public nuisance at our doors...
...consumption, that communists were involved drew no public reaction from Washington...
...Bishop Frangois Gayot of Cap Haitien has complained to the Bishop of Quimper, France, that one of his priests is involved in a French project--"Books for Haiti"-which has shipped to Haiti several hundred thousand donated secondhand books on all subjects for general distribution...
...The sight of the Army's new U.S.-supplied riot gear and tear gas was enough to revive the powerful anti-American sentiments in Haitian society...
...The project, headed by PUCH's deputy leader, Max Bourjolly, was communist-controlled, he benefits of such growth from trickling down to the poor...
...Author's interview with Bourjolly, February 12, 1987...
...22 Agreeing with him was Claude Ren6, the young coordinator of the capital's neighborhood committees, which have organized bookmobiles, a cinema and a literacy program of their own...
...After only 19 days as provisional president in 1957, the man who terrified the mulattos when he walked before the famous rouleau compresseur (steamroller)-comprising his followers as they ground their way through the streets destroying everything in their path-was on a plane to New York and exile...
...By early 1985, In May 1984, the first major street protests in nearly 25 years erupted REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18 Catholic activists were sponsoring demonstrations against hunger and in favor of "social justice" and democracy...
...The Macoutes came to despise the young Duvalier as a traitor, and their brooding hostility exacerbated existing divisions which contributed to the dictatorship's collapse...
...4. 11...
...ON ONE HAND WAS THE CHURCH'S RADIO Soleil, founded in May 1978 and managed by U.S...
...CNG president Gen...
...The hierarchy has lost a lot of credibility with young people," she admits...
...There's been a lot of curiosity about us and a lot of respectful debate," he says...
...It may not be a useful operating document...
...Some observers doubt that interest can be sustained in elections if the CNG stays, even with cosmetic changes in its membership...
...Last January however, they engineered the firing of the government's four most liberal ministers...
...Among Congress participants was a new organization--Children of the Haitian Tradition (Zantray), which helped successfully petition the constituent assembly to abolish a 1935 anti-Voodoo law...
...urging-proved to be the catalyst for the decisive move against the Duvaliers...
...They claimed to have rallied more than 300 organizations, mostly peasant, making it the largest gathering of its kind in Haitian history...
...aimed at putting the people to sleep...
...We have neither a progressive military nor an armed people...
...It also pioneered the extensive use in the media of Creole...
...Anchor Compare Filo, later to be exiled by the Duvaliers, became one of the country's most popular figures...
...French courts boosted their morale by refusing to expel the exiled Duvaliers or help the Haitian government's bid to recover part of the family's estimated $500 million illgotten fortune...
...Communist historian Roger Gaillard was named head of the university...
...2 8 But threats have restricted his campaigning...
...Liberation August 14, 1987...
...Summer 1986...
...Le Monde, August 9, 1987...
...The government shut the radio down but, open or closed, it provoked demonstrations...
...Father M6sidor accuses the United States of conniving to discourage the poor from winning power...
...We've waited two centuries for true democracy...
...But the CNG's double violation of the constitution in late June only a few weeks after it took effect--overriding the independent electoral council (CEP) and dissolving CATH-only succeeded in producing the most impressive general strike since the Duvaliers fled...
...The remarkable success of this "new politics"-despite its largely middle-class leadership, fragile unity and failure to bring down the CNG-has alarmed the traditional political class and its military allies as well as the United States...
...The Macoutes' new national headquarters was turned into a school...
...Most spectacular was the "people's arrest" of the dictatorship's most hated secret police chief, Luc Ddsyr, three weeks after the Duvaliers left...
...But I wouldn't favor a one-party state anyway...
...Ben Dupuy and the maximalists want to immediately install a revolutionary people's democracy...
...The country's urgent social and economic pressures are likely to find a new president asking for extra powers to keep "order" soon after taking office next February 7. Those at the top of Haiti's exceptionally stratified society persistently obstruct attempts to close the poverty gap...
...officials said were "humane ways to control civil disorders...
...Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1986...
...The "legalization" of Creole has given confidence and thus power to ordinary Haitians...
...8. Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1986...
...Sensing that union demands, which have already led to strikes, might become a major threat to the economy and public order, Gen...
...On the other hand was the Ti Legliz (Little Church) movement of village groups for discussion, prayer and self-help...
...2 7 Until the latest crisis, Th6odore, 47, backed the MA/UE 182 MAY/JUNE 1987 21ReoHaiti Aeca Haiti CNG as the best hope for the moment, opposed general strike calls as foolish or premature and urged approval of the new constitution-all positions with which Washington would concur...
...An indecisive election result or weak president would almost certainly produce a military coup, led by tough and ambitious pro-U.S...
...Author's interview, February 19, 1987...
...IN THIS ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE, A GROUP of center-left intellectuals organized a five-day National Congress of Haitian Democratic Movements in the capital last January to try to coordinate the broad will for meaningful change and break with the "old politics...
...officers such as Gen...
...AID will not solve Haiti's crushing poverty...
...Fignol6-who became education minister at the Voodoo followers: kev actors in rural life REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16age of 33 during the promising first months of Estim6's rule in 1946-founded trade unions and the first modem political party which escaped control of the capital's aristocracy and touched ordinary Haitians...
...Our first task is to expand democracy's territory here," he says...
...They want to know about water, their land, when there'll be a doctor coming, what's going to be done about the rats which destroy a sixth of the crops in the Artibonite...
...Embassy as the Duvalier regime crumbled...
...Thousands of peasants joined a tax boycott, protesting the lack of government services, and governmentappointed local officials (chefs de section) were rejected in many places...
...some cabinet ministers handed back their salaries...
...Some of the VSN's grassroots links were revealed after the Duvaliers fled, when the murderous rage directed at the Macoutes also touched hundreds of Voodoo priests, or houngans, who often doubled as VSN chieftains...
...The elite-both mulatto and black-snobbishly clung to a written media in French, ignoring dissidence in the form of Creole political satire...
...Three days later, troops and police massacred hundreds of demonstrators in the capital's solidly Fignolist slums in a bid to root out the populist cancer...
...Author's interview, February 23, 1987...
...The Duvaliers had been driven out, after all, by a provincial revolt...
...The rural revolt drew tacit encouragement from workers in the Church's ambitious national literacy campaign, Misyon Alfa, although some literacy workers were attacked as "communists" by villagers...
...Dupuy and his supporters rejected the congress as "a club of opportunists and pseudo-democrats...
...Author's interview, February 10, 1987...
...But his following had dwindled to polite respect for a revered old man of 73, who had once dared to make speeches in Creole, the national language, instead of the official French understood by only 10% of Haitians...
...Those who hunted them down were sometimes led by youthful zealots egged on by Christians, mainly Protestant pastors but some Catholics, many of them white and foreign.' However, Voodoo followers, as key actors of everyday rural life, have since been working with the young Left-led popular movements planning a new Haiti...
...Konakom press conference, Port-au-Prince, July 10, 1987...
...Our policy is to reduce this dependence...
...Several presidential candidates now claim his spiritual mantle...
...It's not all black and white...
...The leftist Democratic Unity Confederation (KID), urging abstention, called it "a pretty flower with no fragrance, fine-sounding promises...
...Geo (Paris), December 1986...
...Twenty-nine years later, six weeks after the Duvaliers fled, a dying Fignol6 returned to Port-au-Prince to reclaim his political domain...
...2 5 Unionization is likely to make these firms leave for countries where labor is even cheaper than Haiti's $3.20 official daily minimum wage...
...UT IF TRADE UNIONS CAN BE CONtained by overwhelming economic and political forces, other factors are less easily tamed...
...The far Left-grouped in the small Popular Assembly coalition around the controversial New York-based Ben Dupuy and his smartly produced and widely read weekly Haiti-Progrds--opposed the constitution as a ruling-class trick...
...The resultant Christ-like image has been a powerful symbol of national identity and resistance ever since...
...Created a few days after a serious attempt to oust Duvalier and also with the aim of neutralizing the Army, the VSN was recruited overwhelmingly from the poor, black and illiterate, a calculated exploitation of poverty...
...The murdered Charlemagne P6ralte, whose face now appears on coins, has become a public hero for the first time since the U.S...
...We have to concentrate on building up a body of laws," he says...
...Yet in the latest and most serious postDuvalier political crisis, in June and July, when troops and armed civilians gunned down more than 30 people, the candidates were pushed to the sidelines...
...In September, the dismissal of Minister Lafontant-at U.S...
...Marines arrived in July 1915 to begin a 19-year occupation-officially to "restore order" after President Guillaume Vilbrun Sam was lynched-Haitians again rose up to defend the rights whose initial proclamation had made their country a beacon of liberty to Spain's Latin American empire.' At least 3,000 Haitians died fighting the occupiers between 1918 and 1920...
...Henri Namphy Many people don't know where their rights stop...
...In the town of Hinche, enraged roadworkers lynched a government engineer who shot at them when they demanded to be paid...
...He praised the rural councils (CASEC) the government set up last year as "the most important action for democracy" since the Duvaliers' fall...
...a slum named for Duvalier's mother was renamed after the Church's Radio Soleil...
...We are people who think Haiti," declared one prominent congress figure...
...Only rarely did a major class-based mass movement appear, such as the one which formed around Jean-Jacques Acaau in Grande Anse (18431845) or around President Sylvain Salnave (18671869) before an alliance of the ruling mulatto minority and black cacos (rebels) pushed him out...
...According to Claudette Werleigh, the activist secretary-general of the Catholic welfare agency Caritas, conservative Protestant pastors were also redoubling their efforts in the mornes...
...He denies Richard's charge of intellectual vanguardism...
...2 Churches were also the only places political gatherings could be held with impunity...
...Other than accelerating the crisis in agriculture, the government has shown no sign that it intends to undertake any coherent development plan, much less one that would buck foreign economic interests...
...7 The Army which overthrew him arranged the election in September 1957 of Franqois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, an apparently retiring former Fignolist involved in the nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s...
...The dictatorship had left a broad distrust of all civilian politicians and of "the Republic of Port-au-Prince...
...In 1977, the bishop of Gonaives, Emmanuel Constant, produced-in Creole-the country's first handbook of human rights...
...The former Duvalierists and ex-Tontons Macoutes in the Army, government service or among the wealthy have reasserted themselves in recent months...
...People are mobilized...
...A few peasant uprisings over land seizures had occurred during the Duvalier years, notably in the Artibonite village of Bocozelle in March 1975, when six people were killed in a clash with the Army's anti-subversion troops, the Leopards...
...FOS unsurprisingly gets a good write-up in U.S...
...U charged...
...Author's interview, February 19, 1987...
...The war between the unarmed poor majority and the armed rich in the Caribbean's most tragic country has not yet begun in earnest...
...women marched to demand their rights for the first time in Haitian history...
...Electoral preparations resumed under the restored CEP, but prospects remain poor and no new date has been set for twice-postponed local council elections...
...But by the first anniversary of the Duvaliers' fall, pressure for change was blunted by the distraction of campaigning presidential candidates, such as the popular but lightweight Louis Dejoie II and industrialist Thomas Desulm6--both old-style operators unlikely to challenge seriously the bankrupt political system...
...Its network of provincial reporters chronicled the regime's abuses and united the country as rarely, if ever, before...
...HE COUNTRYSIDE CONTINUED TO seethe...
...Haiti Inter and Radio Soleil publicized the new peasant organizations and their angry demands for justice and action...
...Leading Duvalier opponents within Haiti, despite the courage of those such as the populist Christian Democrat Sylvio Claude, were seen as inadequate...
...According to rightist presidential candidate D6joie, U.S...
...Despite its rapid degeneration into brutality and murder, the Duvaliers' militia-which their ideologues described as a "people-Army duality"--was a genuine elevation of the poor black majority for the first time in Haiti's tortured history...
...ROTESTS ERUPTED ANEW, CENTERED again on Gonaives, as cassettes circulated of a revolutionary sermon by Father Yvan Pollefeyt, one of three expelled Belgian priests...
...sentiment would grow...
...That is the only reason it exists, the only reason for its actions . . . We want an open, constructive dialogue so we can build a new Haiti based on reason, social justice, tolerance and freedom...
...University professor Leslie Manigat warns that all classes, particularly the elite, have a debilitating "welfare mentality" which must be eradicated...
...Agence France-Presse, August 4, 1987...
...2 3 But the congress, which set up a standing body, Konakom, to push for a "democratic, nationalist state" impressed most Haitians with its representativity and its calls for purging the "Macoutist remnants" of the Duvalier regime, decreasing dependency on foreign countries, declaring Creole an official language and bolstering respect for Voodoo, the national religion...
...The Duvaliers' repression was no longer efficient...
...The Church hierarchy, in an intervention which perhaps clinched approval, said it "seems a good guarantee of freedom . . despite gaps and contradictions...
...Violence was common in the northern plain and the Artibonite Valley as peasants tried to repossess land taken from them under the dictatorship...
...Embassy literature, which says Washington and the CNG favor the growth of "apolitical, responsible unions...
...Now some felt politicians in the capital were trying to take over again as usual...
...His fall came soon after a campaign by Radio Soleil against the regime's plan to legalize political parties on its own strict terms...
...The constitution must now be written in Creole as well as French...
...The Catholic progressives remain in the vanguard of the movement against neo-Duvalierism and are led by Bishop Willy Rom61lus of J6r6mie, whose tough statements, highly critical of the United States, were the backbone of the July demonstrations...
...Three weeks later, an alarmed government organized its own smaller gathering of rural delegates in the capital, at which Namphy insisted that the peasantry was "in power" for the first time in Haitian history and must make decisions...
...The lone politbureau survivor was Th6odore, party leader since October 1978, who claims more than 1,000 PUCH members died under the dictatorship...
...In May 1984, the first major street protests against the regime in nearly 25 years erupted when hungry slumdwellers looted CARE warehouses in Gonaives and Cap Haitien and attacked a prison and police station...
...6. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 190...
...IT WAS THE OLD ORDER, NOT NEW FORCES, however, which provoked the latest crisis...
...T HE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES LIKE TO theorize...
...Voters endorsed it almost unanimously (99.8%, though with a turnout of under 50%) in a referendum last March which foreign and local observers agreed had been honest...
...But Haiti's elite--except for some who had made too many headlines or too many enemies-was safe...
...Y ET THE MILITARY VIOLENCE AGAINST the vigorous media, a partial ban on demonstrations in the capital, the attempted eviction of the revolutionary Father Aristide from his parish and Duvalierist-linked atrocities in Jean Rabel and elsewhere, including the assassination of center-Left presidential candidate Louis-Eug6ne Athis, are likely to be only temporary setbacks for the opposition...
...And if there is no serious economic and social change, he predicts, Duvalierism could return.' 6 But the presidential candidates, says Serge Gilles, don't realize things have changed...
...Clearly, the CNG and its friends in U.S...
...Author's interview with social democrat leader Serge Gilles, May 4, 1986...
...Before 1976, only a few miles of roads outside the capital were paved...
...But the Conference of Bishops, under the control of the Church's de facto head, Bishop Frangois Gayot of Cap Haitien, also strongly condemned the Army repression and spoke of possible civil war, though its tone was more conciliatory...
...Namphy and his military-civilian government, is perhaps the clearest opportunity Haitians have ever had to build a strong and lasting defense against future tyranny...
...Ambassador Brunson McKinley told him ominously that if disorders did not stop, "perhaps we'll be back in 1915," the year the occupation began...
...and Belgian priests, which took over from the shut-down Haiti Inter as voice of the powerless...
...Minor Tontons Macoutes went on trial in many MAY/JUNE 1987 19Haiti towns and were sentenced to death for murders committed as long as 20 years ago...
...They had little to say and did not join the center-Left Committee of 57, mainly grassroots organizations that led three MAY/JUNE 1987 15ReHaiti A Haiti weeks of strikes and demonstrations which forced the three-man National Government Council (CNG) to' cancel two repressive decrees...
...This sociological shift engineered by Franqois Duvalier to protect his own power was challenged in May 1980 when his son and successor, Jean-Claude, married into the mulatto aristocracy Papa Doc had tried to destroy...
...military mission in what U.S...
...AFTER A SPECTACULAR WAR OF INDEpendence which jolted the world's European masters two centuries ago, Haitians kept their guns and a sturdy tradition of confronting their rulers...
...The politicians aren't used to talking about immediate problems-they prefer long-term issues," says Gilles...
...Peasants in the Artibonite Valley, where a mass mobilization had halted construction of a dam, mounted a makeshift radio network...
...It's enabling the masses to participate and a stronger national identity to emerge...
...Most of the U.S...
...It was congress leaders who set up the Committee of 57 which directed the latest protests...
...Former minister Desroches, a non-candidate despite some public support, warns that if the next president is not backed by a political party, he will be "obliged by the people to become a dictator...
...Because of the CNG's initial reluctance to crack down, and its restoration of basic freedoms, especially in the press, street demonstrations managed to force the removal of major Duvalierists still in power and the arrest and token trial of others...
...Benoit denies charges that the January congress fudged criticism of the United States...
...We have to have a pluralist regime first...
...D ECHOUKAJ-UPROOTING-RULED THE land as Haitians administered a people's justice, looting the villas of the rich, lynching Tontons Macoutes and staging strikes and sit-downs to drive Duvalierists out of their jobs and into hiding...
...We also have a favorable international situation right now...
...The most pessimistic call it "Duvalierism without Duvalier...
...2. Amy Wilentz, "Voodoo in Haiti Today," Grand Street (New York), February 1987...
...Haiti-Progrds (New York), January 21, 1987...
...New York Times, March 30, 1987...
...456-459...
...Haitian saying HE EUPHORIA WHICH FOLLOWED LAST year's collapse of the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship, the most destructive and enduring in Haitian history, has gone...
...7. Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 97...
...After the shooting of four schoolchildren in a demonstration in Gonaives on the fifth anniversary of the November 28, 1980 crackdown, the regime's authority outside the capital evaporated...
...Le Monde, (Paris), April 9, 1986...
...168-169...
...It has blood on its hands and was put in power by the Americans and the Duvalierists...
...These were matched and overtaken, however, by stations such as Jean Dominique's Radio Haiti Inter, which broadcast from the countryside the complaints of ordinary Haitians about the Duvaliers' misrule...
...For some time, even the new government radio, starring Compare Plume, today a left-wing activist, gave vent to peasant complaints...
...Perhaps the most important foundation of the modem mass movements, given 80% national illiteracy, was the flowering of the country's radio stations...
...investment is around $130 million and more than half of Haiti's trade is with the United States...
...government, which had escaped serious public blame after its long backing of the Duvaliers, took a fall in the latest crisis and is now perceived and hated by many as the CNG's last crutch...
...Williams Regala, the regime's strongman The government must go...
...32 But another 22REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22 REPORT ON THE AMERICASU.S...
...Despite its serious organizational work, the attraction of a clear ideology and the popularity of its shrewd leader, Ren6 Th6odore, the party has met tough opposition from the Protestant and Catholic churches, who have managed to implant a visceral anti-communism in the country...
...2 The countryside was pitted against the power and officials of the towns-simply called l'dtat-and against "the Republic of Port-au-Prince," as the capital was nicknamed...
...He was not followed, however, by CATH's biggest component and the country's most powerful union-the Port-au-Prince drivers' union...
...Former Duvalier minister and current presidential candidate Hubert de Ronceray complained it would make the president "a puppet in the hands of parliament" and warned that proposed provincial councils would "institutionalize civil war...
...Author's interview, February 14, 1987...
...Another peasant congress, backed by Catholic activists and Konakom at Papaye, near Hinche, in late March, called for an end to the import of pigs and smuggled rice and sugar which it said was destroying the national economy...
...When they tried to form a political party in October 1986, they were forced to retreat after huge public protests...
...By 1957, the name of black demagogue Daniel Fignol6 was on the lips of Port-au-Prince slumdwellers...
...Sabine Vogel, "Que Dieu Sauve Haiti...
...Apart from the economic and psychological ties created by the some $125 million Haitians receive annually from relatives working in the United States, total U.S...
...A presidential limousine met him at the airport...
...Gen...
...Dupuy is believed to have access to a large U.S...
...Perhaps a quarter of a million people depend on the earnings of some 50,000 workers at 140 light assembly plants which have grown up around the capital over the past 20 years and are the economy's most dynamic sector...
Vol. 21 • May 1987 • No. 3
