Two thousand march in Washington for a human rights policy on Haiti

On 4 April 1977 several Haitian organisations put two thousand people on the streets of Washington to support President Jimmy Carter's human rights policy and to call for the isolation of the Duvalier government. The march belonged to the conservative side of an exile community split down the middle. Groups such as Exodus and the newspaper Haiti Observateur worked through their relations with the American government and with corporations doing business in Haiti, and they welcomed the arrival of human rights as a stated goal of American foreign policy. The left called that policy a cover for continued support of the dictator. When Andrew Young, the American ambassador to the United Nations, met the conservative sector in New York, Haiti Observateur praised him in an editorial. Washington never withdrew its backing from the Duvalier government, and it did press Jean-Claude Duvalier into a loosening that let journalists and artists inside Haiti criticise him openly.

The depression of the 1970s cut agricultural production and investment in Haiti. World demand for commodities was falling, and the Duvalier government had no agricultural policy that might have absorbed the shock. In 1977 the opposition newspaper Le Patriote Haitien, published by exiles, reported that seventy five people in the Northwest Department of Haiti had died of starvation and disease inside two days, and that a number of students at Cap-Haitien, the country's second city, had fallen ill with tuberculosis. The Northwest is the driest part of Haiti. When the same depression came back in the late 1980s it produced famine there again, and thousands left by boat for the United States and for other islands of the Caribbean. Pierre-Louis lists the economic crisis as the second of three things that turned Haitian migration into a mass movement, after the election of Francois Duvalier and before the drive against the peasantry under his son.

An estimated 540,000 hectares of good arable soil existed in Haiti in 1938. By 1954 the figure had shrunk to 370,000. By 1970 it was 225,750 hectares, and the figure reported for 1985 was 205,000, with no sign afterwards that the trend had reversed. In the mid 1980s between six thousand and ten thousand hectares of arable land were being lost each year, and in the early 1990s the range ran from six thousand to fifteen thousand. The mechanism is a substitution. As the rural population grows, labour intensive food crops replace land intensive export crops, above all replacing coffee, whose roots and canopy hold the soil, on steep hillsides. Food crops are cleared and replanted in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, and the downpours then wash the soil into the valleys and streams. Once running, the process feeds itself without further population growth.

In 1960 South African police fired on an unarmed crowd at Sharpeville, and most of the dead were hit from behind as they ran. The government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, which pushed the opposition underground and into exile. The ANC formed an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and in 1963 Nelson Mandela and his co-accused were sentenced to life. Resistance came back through trade unions and through Steve Biko's Black Consciousness movement. In 1976 police fired on fifteen thousand schoolchildren in Soweto who were protesting against the schooling designed for them, and parts of the country stopped being governable. Biko died in police custody. Botha declared a state of emergency in 1985. In 1989 F W de Klerk repealed the Population Registration and Group Areas acts, lifted the bans, and released Mandela in February 1990. The first election open to every adult was held in 1994 and Mandela won it. Political rights changed hands that year. The ownership of the economy did not move.