1988, February – June: (The Intellectual Besieged: State Companies Clogged with Patronage, Army Commanders Smuggling Rice to Cocaine, Roger Lafontant Plottin…

1988, February – June: (The Intellectual Besieged: State Companies Clogged with Patronage, Army Commanders Smuggling Rice to Cocaine, Roger Lafontant Plotting Two Hundred Miles East, Manigat Forced to Dismantle Catholic Creole Literacy Programs, Colonel Jean-Claude Paul Indicted for Drug Dealing by a Miami Grand Jury, the Symbolic Indictment Without Extradition, Smugglers Dominate the Dominican Border, Factory Owners Quit and Assembly Jobs Decline Another 20%, and the Army-Run Fire Department Arrives Ninety Minutes Late): State companies were clogged with patronage appointments while army commanders sought to profit from smuggling everything from rice to cocaine. To add to his litany of woes, Manigat received word that Roger Lafontant was just two hundred miles to the east in Santo Domingo, again seeking to engineer a coup that would bring him to power. In cruel irony for an intellectual of impeccable pedigree, Manigat was compelled by his military patrons to order the dismantling of Catholic Creole literacy programs that had been achieving too much success in the view of those invested in the status quo. In mid-March a Miami grand jury returned a multi-count indictment for drug dealing against the commander of the Casernes, Colonel Jean-Claude Paul — the indictment was more symbolic than real, as there was no danger of extradition, and inasmuch as the United States had already cut off most aid, the stick with which Washington could beat Port-au-Prince was a slim reed at best. Economic bad news continued as smugglers, dominated by the army that supposedly guarded against smuggling, turned key crossing points at the Dominican border into vast transshipment depots. Fleeing the deteriorating conditions, ever more factory owners called it quits, with the result that by mid-1988 the number of assembly jobs in Port-au-Prince had declined a further twenty percent, aggravating the misery of the extended families that depended on those paychecks to survive. Fire — ever the outrider of trouble in the capital — hit several businesses in late May, and the army-run fire department arrived an hour and a half late. The Manigat presidency had become a masterclass in the structural impossibility facing any civilian leader in post-Duvalier Haiti: an intellectual who understood the country’s history better than anyone in the palace since Duvalier père found himself powerless to govern because every lever of the state — the customs houses, the border crossings, the barracks, the patronage networks — was controlled by the very military apparatus whose collaboration was the precondition of his holding office, so that the knowledge that should have been his greatest asset became instead the instrument of his humiliation, each compromise exacted by his patrons confirming with documentary precision the thesis he had spent a career elaborating in exile.