An activist loses her mother in 1983 and is shot in church in 1988

A Port au Prince organiser who used a dozen pseudonyms, one of them Marlene Larose, was threatened with death by the squads and answered by moving her husband and four children out of their house and onto a rooftop. From that open air position the family surveyed and documented the squads on their nightly rounds, sending to human rights organisations in the United States for infrared film so they could photograph the killers. Her mother, eighty three years old, had been assassinated and dismembered in 1983. In 1988 zenglendo stormed a mass she was attending and she was shot twice, once through the neck and once between her lung and her heart. Several years later she became pregnant, and doctors found that the bullet lodged near her heart had travelled down into her womb. They told her the pregnancy and her own health were at risk. She refused to end it. Both of them survived and the child was called Tibi.

On 29 September 1981 Ronald Reagan ordered the Coast Guard to patrol the water between Haiti and Florida and to stop boats carrying people toward the United States. Crews were to interview passengers at sea, return anyone judged ineligible and bring the rest ashore to make an asylum claim. Nobody interviewed on a cutter had access to a lawyer. In the first ten years of the programme, up to the coup that removed Jean Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, more than twenty four thousand Haitians were interviewed at sea and twenty eight were brought to the United States to pursue a claim. After the coup the numbers overwhelmed the cutters, and the administration built a tent city at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where from November 1991 people picked up at sea were sent for screening. It filled with Haitians and Cubans and was hard to empty.

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.

Haiti had been receiving about 200,000 visitors a year. In the season of 1982 to 1983 it received 10,000. The AIDS story did that, arriving in south Florida among a public already hostile to Haitian boats. Haitians in the United States were asked not to give blood. Newspapers recalled the export of Haitian plasma under the Duvaliers and described ceremonies in which the blood of freshly killed animals is drunk. A businessman flying into New York was told by the passport inspector to open the document himself, because the inspector did not want to touch it. The government closed the few guest houses that had served foreign gay tourists, which was a measure about publicity rather than health. Haiti ended 1982 with imports exceeding exports by some 40 million dollars and no season ahead of it. A bomb went off near the palace on New Year's Eve. The Duvaliers were out and unhurt, and the Te Deum the next day was cancelled for the first time within memory. Their son Nicolas was born on 31 January 1983.