Mr Clean lasts six months at the finance ministry

The donors had insisted on a finance minister they could trust and got Marc Bazin, a World Bank official who brought other Haitian technocrats home with him. He took the job seriously. He put a levy on imported cars and collected it from everyone, pursued unpaid taxes owed by the elite, and cancelled a short term note issue of 3.7 billion dollars that senior officials had been looking forward to, on the ground that it resembled the nineteenth century loans Haiti had spent a hundred years repaying. Time called him Mr Clean. He lasted six months and was dismissed after billing Ernest Bennett, the president's father in law, for about a million dollars in arrears. Out of office in New York, Bazin let friends know that part of his duties had been to find up to 15 million dollars a month in state accounts for transfer to the couple's Swiss bank. Roger Lafontant came back as interior minister. On 3 July 1982, the president's twenty ninth birthday, Bishop Romelus of Jeremie ordained a thirty year old priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Between 1981 and 1989 United States immigration officers working from Coast Guard cutters stopped 21,461 Haitians at sea. Six of them were carried to the United States for a fuller interview. That is under one quarter of one percent of the people they questioned. The written standard was not demanding. Officers were told to stay watchful for any sign, including a bare claim, that someone aboard an intercepted vessel might qualify as a refugee. A senior immigration official with direct knowledge of the program later said the interviewers had received no instruction and no training, that they went on whatever they felt at the moment, and that everyone in front of them was black. Former colleagues of his said much the same. Nobody supervised the interviews. A judgement was reached on a deck in the Windward Passage, written into a file, and almost never read again. The boats went back to Port-au-Prince.

The economies handed over at independence were organised around a handful of export crops. Colonial administration had never tried to feed the territories or to link them internally. The aim was a possession that paid for itself out of export duties and tax, so roads and railways ran from the growing districts to the nearest harbour and stopped there. By the 1950s the acreage under cash crops was rising while the capacity to grow food for local eating was falling, which put rural households in a position where growing more left them poorer. Marketing boards bought at fixed low prices and sold abroad at much higher ones, and independence did not close them. The pattern was old. In the nineteenth century the continent exported captives, ivory and palm oil. In the twentieth it exported cotton, cocoa and gold. Around 1950 there was reason for optimism, with high postwar prices, expanding mines, and a West African merchant class better off than its South Asian equivalent.

In July 1981 the government signed a protocol with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture providing for the killing of every pig in Haiti within two years, so that African swine fever should not reach the North American mainland. Peasants were to be compensated and foreign animals brought in afterwards. What the countryside saw was the forced sale, often at distress prices, of the one asset a family could turn into cash in a bad month. Some hid their animals. Others killed them as offerings to the lwa rather than hand them to the blan, and such sacrifices were reported from every part of the country. Within a year registration at rural schools had dropped by thirty percent. On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan announced that a Coast Guard cutter would be stationed permanently off Haiti, with other vessels rotating through, to stop boats carrying Haitians toward Florida. The United Nations questioned whether it was legal. Haitian officials spent October in Washington settling their price, and in November American aid was increased.