1988, June – September 11: (Namphy Unleashed: Outright Military Rule, the Killing Squads Roam Freely as in 1964, Other Regime Members Tarred with the Drug Br…

1988, June – September 11: (Namphy Unleashed: Outright Military Rule, the Killing Squads Roam Freely as in 1964, Other Regime Members Tarred with the Drug Brush, a Haiti Trans Air 727 Yields 50 Kilos of Cocaine Leading Back to Williams Regala, and the St.-Jean-Bosco Massacre — Gunmen Under Franck Romain Pour into Mass on Sunday September 11, Aristide Miraculously Escapes, Machete-Wielding Thugs Mutilate and Decapitate, a Dozen Parishioners Lie Dead, and the Church Burned Down for Good Measure): With the resumption of outright military rule, any hint of restraint that had been exercised to package the Manigat government for outside consumption disappeared. Foreign aid continued to be withheld while killing squads roamed freely in the capital and provinces, eliminating — as at the height of 1964 — anyone who incurred their displeasure. Other members of the regime in addition to Colonel Paul were tarred with the drug-smuggling brush: a 727 leased by Haiti Trans Air, the successor operation to the Bennett airline, yielded some fifty kilos of high-grade cocaine to observant customs officers in Miami, the trail leading back to Williams Regala. In early September the officers judged the time right to complete the task they had undertaken a year before. Still installed in his parish of St.-Jean-Bosco, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was packing them in with his fiery rhetoric. Under orders from Franck Romain, the macoute mayor of Port-au-Prince, a large party of gunmen poured into St.-Jean-Bosco on Sunday, September 11, 1988, during mass. As in the Election Day massacre ten months earlier, this was hardly a surgical strike — but to the intense annoyance of the macoutes, their main target, père Aristide, miraculously escaped. Once again, machete-wielding thugs followed those who had done the shooting, mutilating and decapitating; when they had finished their work, a dozen parishioners lay dead. For good measure, they then burned down the church. The St.-Jean-Bosco massacre — a Sunday congregation slaughtered and dismembered while at worship, the church itself put to the torch on orders of the mayor who bore the same name as the officer who had commanded the Drouin-Numa firing squad in 1964 — marked the point at which the Namphy regime ceased to be merely authoritarian and became openly terroristic: the attack was not directed at political opponents or armed insurgents but at unarmed worshippers engaged in the most protected act of any civilization, and its perpetrator was not a rogue element but the sitting mayor of the capital acting under the authority of the military government, the state itself now indistinguishable from the death squad.