Haiti signs away the right to leave, and aid hangs on interception

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.

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.

The Catholic church in Haiti had long served whoever held the country. It was staffed largely by foreign priests, it educated the elite and neglected everyone else, and after 1966 its bishops were appointed with the approval of Francois Duvalier. The papal visit of March 1983 ended that arrangement in public. Below the hierarchy a different church had been growing for a decade: priests, nuns, catechists and lay organisers working in the slums of Port-au-Prince and in the countryside, running literacy classes and small farming groups, reading scripture with people who had been told for two centuries that their condition was ordained. After 1983 they had cover. One of them was a Salesian named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who preached at St Jean Bosco in one of the poorest quarters of the capital, who was eventually expelled by his own order for his politics, and who was elected president of Haiti in December 1990 with two thirds of the vote.

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.