1984, May 20 – December: (The Gonaïves Uprising: The CARE Warehouse Stormed at the Cap, Radio Soleil Broadcasts the News, Gonaïves Erupts Over the Beating De…

1984, May 20 – December: (The Gonaïves Uprising: The CARE Warehouse Stormed at the Cap, Radio Soleil Broadcasts the News, Gonaïves Erupts Over the Beating Death of a Pregnant Woman, Food Riots Become Anti-Government Riots, Rioters Call for Divorce and Expulsion of the Bennetts, Michèle’s Ultimatum — Lafontant or Me — and Jean-Claude Picks Lafontant, the Cochons Blan That Live Better Than We Do, School Enrollment Plummets, Congress Conditions 1985 Aid on Certifiable Human Rights Progress, and Aristide Returns from Montreal to St.-Jean-Bosco): Lafontant’s political antennae may have been more keenly tuned than those of foreigners. In Gonaïves, just north and west of the Artibonite breadbasket, the rains had failed and people were hungry; the rains that had failed Gonaïves had also failed Péligre, leaving Port-au-Prince with fitful electricity. No pigs rooted about in peasant courtyards — all had been slaughtered. At the Cap, no cruise ship had docked for eighteen months, with a withering effect on the economy; some eighty-two thousand children in the Cap region alone were dependent on CARE and other organizations for a meager daily ration of grain. Lafontant seemed to be running the country day-to-day; rumor had it the first couple was enmeshed in domestic difficulties — Michèle had demanded her husband sack Lafontant, whom she cordially detested, presenting an ultimatum: Lafontant or me. Jean-Claude picked Lafontant. Momentarily humbled, Michèle skulked back to the palace and took refuge in shopping and the cocaine that her father was so instrumental in importing; the president’s tough stance may have been facilitated by the rumor that the child due shortly had been fathered not by him but by the Minister for Social Affairs, Théodore Achille. On May 20, 1984, officials at the CARE warehouse in the Cap loaded some spoiled food onto trucks destined for farm animals; as the trucks pulled out, a rumor swept the market that supplies were being diverted to the black market, and an angry mob stormed the warehouse — miliciens fought a pitched battle lasting four hours, with three people killed, none of them miliciens. Perhaps the news was broadcast over Catholic Radio Soleil, perhaps the teledjòl carried it, but by the next day violence erupted elsewhere. In Gonaïves, a group of residents marched on police headquarters to protest the beating death of a pregnant woman; refusing to stop at barricades, crowd members were clubbed with rifle butts and kokomakak — instead of passively submitting, the crowd fought back. Over the next two days thousands protested, looting food warehouses; only the arrival of machine-gun-toting reinforcements from Port-au-Prince finally quelled the sullen, hungry mob. Government ministers sent to investigate reported that the riots had metamorphosed from food riots into anti-government riots — rioters were calling for Jean-Claude’s divorce and expulsion of the Bennett clan. The message was unwelcome, and five cabinet ministers were sacked for bearing bad tidings along with most of the local government in Gonaïves. The riots marked the first broad public resistance to Duvalier rule since the student strike in 1961. Grégoire Eugène, home barely three months, told the press: the people were eating dog and overripe fruit — Gonaïves and Cap Haïtien used a language that was loud enough to be heard in Port-au-Prince. Even Aubelin Jolicoeur, consummate survivor of nearly thirty years of Duvalierism, put down a marker: the food was there but it was not distributed — they have CARE here, but they don’t care. The U.S. Congress had voted to make 1985 aid contingent on certifiable human rights progress; the government’s response was to put Eugène and Hubert de Ronceray under house arrest and haul Le Petit Samedi Soir’s Dieudonné Fardin into the Dessalines barracks. School enrollment plummeted for a second year as the pig purge’s effects continued — small merchants found themselves with surplus stocks of school supplies as paysans, stripped of their savings, kept children home. Six years after the first pig slaughter, the first foreign pigs — cochons blan — began to be delivered, but unlike the hardy Haitian stock, they could not survive by rooting in garbage piles and instead required expensive feed and cement pigpens. These pigs, one peasant commented bitterly, live better than we do — nothing could better symbolize the failure of foreign aid to Haiti. Into this Haiti — sullen, hungry, and angry — Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned in January 1985 from two years of Church-mandated exile in Montreal, taking up duties at a parish in one of Port-au-Prince’s poorest quarters: St.-Jean-Bosco.