The export sector at its peak offers sixty thousand jobs

At the height of the export processing sector's growth in the late nineteen seventies there were between forty thousand and sixty thousand formal jobs in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people had already moved to Port-au-Prince in search of work. Most of them remained unemployed on paper and joined the ranks of the urban poor, earning what they could in what gets called the informal sector. When the export sector contracted through the nineteen eighties and nineties, the recorded unemployment rate rose to between sixty and eighty per cent of the available labour force. With little formal housing built and public land easy to occupy, new arrivals squatted and built their own houses as close as they could get to services, markets or jobs. The Duvalier government had accepted structural adjustment, with trade liberalisation and an export production zone as conditions for foreign development money, so the ruin of the peasant economy and the growth of the slums followed the same policy.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

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.

Under Reagan the link between American aid and human rights was replaced in the Caribbean by a link between aid and cooperation against migration and drug smuggling. The interdiction agreement authorised the United States to board any Haitian vessel its coast guard believed was carrying passengers irregularly out of Haiti, detain it, return it, or hold the migrants in American detention centres. Haitian eligibility for assistance was conditioned on compliance. In December the Senate passed a development act making funds available only if the president determined that Haiti was cooperating in halting emigration, was not abetting it, and would cooperate fully with American assistance programmes. The article notes the government had no interest of its own in stopping people leaving, and complied because its dependence on American money left it no bargaining position.