1977, October – December: (Todman’s Olive Branch Undercuts the Three Journalists, Marc Romulus Describes Fort Dimanche’s Baptism of Fire, Jean-Claude Declare…

1977, October – December: (Todman’s Olive Branch Undercuts the Three Journalists, Marc Romulus Describes Fort Dimanche’s Baptism of Fire, Jean-Claude Declares No Political Prisoners on Canadian Television, and the Miami Herald Reports an Easing of U.S. Pressure): What the three young reporters who had crossed the border did not suspect was that the voice that had thundered so sternly in August seemed, even as they made their dusty progress east from Port-au-Prince, to be quietly extending an olive branch. It was a startled group of delegates that heard the official American delegate to the press freedom conference, Terence Todman, fresh from a four-day visit to Port-au-Prince, declare that his government had noted with much satisfaction a series of Haitian government measures contributing to the amelioration of the fundamental human condition — Todman’s speech did not in fact represent administration policy, but no rebuttal was forthcoming from Washington. As the Carter administration was apparently softening its rhetoric, other voices filled the vacuum: several prisoners released in the August and September amnesties described in minute detail the conditions of their incarceration and quickly exposed the lie of the regime’s claim to hold no political prisoners. In Montreal, Marc Romulus stated that on entry to Fort Dimanche one was stripped naked, examined like a beast, and thrown against a wall to await the baptism of fire from the commandant — at two in the morning came shower time, twenty-five to thirty-three prisoners per cell with exactly five minutes to wash beneath a quarter-inch pipe from which trickled a stream of water, a mug of coffee and a stale roll at five-thirty, and at least forty-five to sixty percent of the prison population suffering from tuberculosis. The airwaves proved more powerful than the pen, however, and many foreigners believed Jean-Claude Duvalier when, in an interview given to Canadian television in mid-October, he declared there was not one single political prisoner in Haiti. The Miami Herald noted what it called an easing of U.S. human rights pressure on Haiti’s Duvalier, quoting one American official: if we push him too far, he might get mad and fall back into repression.