Three killings at Gonaives turn years of quiet organising into open revolt

During a hot and angry summer in 1985, Tontons Macoutes shot three young people dead in the town of Gonaives. The killings marked the line between contained rage and open fury, and years of covert organising became a public declaration of opposition. That organising had been building around the tilegliz, the little church, the congregations formed on liberation theology which taught the poor that justice is the will of God. Among both clergy and laity, women were more central and more vocal in it than they had ever been. The revolt that followed crippled the country and Jean-Claude Duvalier's grip weakened quickly. Two other pressures helped: the wealthy were growing alienated as the economy declined, and the United States government, pushed by an international human rights movement led by Haitian exiles and looking for stronger allies, withdrew its support. Washington negotiated the departure of the president for life to France on 7 February 1986 and helped install a military junta the following day.

In 1984 the bodies of thirty two Haitians washed up on a beach just north of Miami. Their boat, built by hand and open to the weather, had broken apart in a squall before dawn about two hundred yards from shore. Survivors said they had paid smugglers two hundred dollars a head and that forty people had crowded aboard for the run up the Windward Passage from Haiti to Florida. Most of those who died were too worn down by the crossing to swim the last stretch. Television carried the footage that evening: the wreck half buried in sand, waves breaking over it, the dead lying along the beach and shifting slightly with each wave. The station apologised the following night for having broadcast it. Those who lived were taken to the detention camp on Krome Avenue. They were not allowed to attend the funerals of the people they had sailed with.

From the early 1960s both superpowers took part in African wars directly, and hardly a conflict on the continent stayed local. John F Kennedy launched a doctrine of counter insurgency, and the CIA played a large part in raising Joseph Mobutu. The energy crisis of 1973 made central Africa more urgent still. Angola and Mozambique carried rival guerrilla armies with rival paymasters, and South Africa took Western weapons on the argument that the ANC leaned to the left. By the early 1970s the map divided cleanly. The United States held security agreements with Kenya, Zaire, Ghana, Liberia and Senegal. The Soviet Union supplied Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Uganda, and signed friendship treaties with Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique. China had arrangements with Cameroon, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania, Cuba with Congo Brazzaville, Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Government without accountability was funded by both blocs rather than merely tolerated, and African leaders in turn used the foreign backing to keep bankrupt administrations upright and to jail their own opponents.

By the autumn of 1985 two things were running at once. In the streets a hungry and unarmed population was organising, largely through young priests. In private the institutions that had lived off the regime and saw no future in it, the army, the newer rich and the bishops, were looking for an exit. The plot formed around two officers. Henri Namphy, born at Cap-Haitien in 1932 to a mulatre family and commissioned in 1954, had survived every purge by staying out of politics; Duvalier made him a brigadier in 1981 and head of the army in 1984, and he had refused more than once to order his men to fire on crowds. Williams Regala was five years younger, black, and wholly a product of the regime, having served in the presidential guard, the Dessalines battalion and the Leopards. The militia had to be neutralised, so they sent Clovis Desinor to Madame Max Adolphe, who commanded it. She agreed on one condition, an American visa for herself. Washington objected, then supplied it.