1986, May – December: (Le Siphonage, Miami Rice, Twelve Thousand Assembly Jobs Lost, ENAOL Closed and Cooking Oil Drops 30% but No Thanks for Delatour, Namph…

1986, May – December: (Le Siphonage, Miami Rice, Twelve Thousand Assembly Jobs Lost, ENAOL Closed and Cooking Oil Drops 30% but No Thanks for Delatour, Namphy Takes to His Bed Pleading Extreme Fatigue, Record Flooding Sweeps Away Five-Year-Old Bridges, the $3.12-to-$6.24 Minimum Wage Demand Meets Macoute-Like Thugs, the Chef Seksyon Still Rules, Delatour’s Own Ministry Employees Netting $400,000 a Month in a Mandat-Style Scheme, the Constitution Written in Four Months by 5% of Voters, PREN — the Duvalierist Party Whose Acronym Means Take — Dissolved After 50,000 March, Namphy Promises to Choke at Birth Any Anti-Democratic Movement, One Thousand Delegates Form KONAKOM, and the Christian Science Monitor Says There Is Simply No Alternative to the CNG): Leslie Delatour labored mightily to restart the economy — Haiti had no lack of studies but the trick was implementation. In closing the cooking-oil monopoly ENAOL, he was picketed by employees who lost their jobs; when the price dropped thirty percent, he received no thanks. The phenomenon of le siphonage — the Duvalier-era funneling of state revenue into private accounts — had left no one knowing where all the accounts were. In the four months following the coup, nearly twelve thousand, or twenty percent, of Port-au-Prince’s assembly plant jobs disappeared as foreign investors sought more docile labor forces overseas; unions demanding a doubling of the minimum wage from $3.12 to $6.24 were met by thugs bearing remarkable resemblance to Tonton Macoutes. In the countryside, the dreaded chef seksyon still held sway; regional ports were now wide open as local officials allowed smugglers to bring in vast quantities of U.S.-grown rice — the Miami rice pitted city dweller against farmer, with the latter setting up roadblocks throughout the Artibonite. As the CNG staggered from crisis to crisis, Namphy took to his bed pleading extreme fatigue — the teledjòl had it that he had resumed heavy drinking, leaving Regala to take the lead. Record flooding in June swept away crucial bridges in the Cayes area, many fewer than five years old. Delatour found his own ministry employees netting $400,000 a month in a scheme whereby ministry checks were reissued with new payees and amounts — echoes of l’Affaire des Mandats a century earlier. An October special election to choose writers of a new constitution attracted barely five percent of eligible voters, but the constituents set to with a will, producing a widely praised document in four months — it called for elections leading to a presidential vote in November 1987, created a Prime Minister, sharply limited presidential powers, banned prominent Duvalierists from political life for ten years, and deprived the army of the right to conduct elections. On October 30, a group of Duvalierists including Claude Raymond and Clovis Désinor announced the Party for National Togetherness — whose French acronym PREN sounded too much like the Creole word for take. Fifty thousand marched on the palace in protest; two weeks later PREN announced its dissolution. In January 1987, more than one thousand delegates from some three hundred center and left organizations met as the National Congress of Haitian Democratic Movements, setting up KONAKOM. As the first anniversary of the CNG approached, the Christian Science Monitor reflected that there was simply no alternative.