Soldiers and macoutes shoot voters and the junta cancels the election

By early November 1987 it was clear that the governing council meant to sabotage the elections set for the 29th. It withheld all logistical support from the independent electoral council and allowed soldiers and macoutes to run a month-long campaign of terror. When people turned out to vote anyway, soldiers and macoutes opened fire, killing at least twenty-two and wounding sixty-seven. The council immediately cancelled the elections and dissolved the electoral commission. Dupuy identifies the mechanism as an existential calculation: control of the state was the only guarantee the Duvalierist forces had for the interests built up over thirty years of dictatorship, and any result they had not chosen would have been unacceptable. Namphy justified the cancellation by claiming the commission would have handed victory to the left, a claim Dupuy says had no basis in fact.

In 1990 the Haitian Centers Council was among the principal organisers of the biggest demonstration Haitians had ever held in New York City. The target was a policy of the Centers for Disease Control that barred Haitians from giving blood. The agency had listed Haitian immigrants as probable carriers of the virus that causes AIDS, and the label followed Haitians in the United States through the whole of the 1980s, into their housing, their work and their children's schools. The council itself had been formed in 1982, when the Haitian Neighborhood Center in Manhattan, Haitian Americans United for Progress in Queens, Charlemagne Peralte and the Flatbush Haitian Center in Brooklyn and two other centres created an umbrella body. It went on to sue the New York Board of Education over underfunded bilingual programmes and to lobby Congress for asylum for the forty nine thousand Haitians who fled after the coup of 1991.

The Khian Sea was a Liberian registered barge carrying fourteen thousand tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia. In January 1988 it arrived off Gonaives, the town on the northern coast where Haitian independence had been declared one hundred and eighty four years earlier. The crew told the authorities the cargo was fertiliser and began unloading. About four thousand tons went onto the shore. When Haitian officials established what the ash actually was and ordered it reloaded, the ship left in the night with the remainder still aboard, and that remainder was later tipped into the Indian Ocean. The ash stayed at Gonaives for twelve years. In April 2000 roughly two thousand five hundred tons were finally lifted and shipped back to a landfill in Pennsylvania, where it had been produced. A country is treated as sovereign in proportion to what it can enforce. Haiti in 1988 could not enforce the removal of a pile of poison from its own beach, and nobody stopped the ship that left it there.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.