Three hundred peasants are cut down near Jean-Rabel

The good feeling after the constitutional vote lasted about eight weeks. On 22 June 1987 General Henri Namphy announced that the army would run the coming elections after all. People filled the streets to defend the charter, the council shot at them, and scores died before Namphy went on television on 30 June and promised that the vote would go ahead as written. The State Department had said the day before that American aid depended on it. The crowds kept marching, using a line from a bishop's sermon: rache manyok, bay te a blanchi. Pull up the cassava and clear the ground. On 23 July, near Jean-Rabel in the northwest, a march by the peasant cooperative Tet Ansanm was attacked by other peasants and by militiamen carrying machetes. More than three hundred were killed. Many of the wounded who reached clinics were taken away and never seen again. The roads were closed for days while the evidence was dealt with. The bishops warned of civil war.

Tens of thousands of Haitians reached Palm Beach County by boat between 1979 and 1981. Almost all of them arrived as Catholics and found no Catholic church that could receive them in their own language. The church in Miami, dominated by Irish Americans, was slow to notice them. The first Haitian priest settled in the area in 1987, a Scalabrinian raised and trained in Haiti who moved down from New York and founded Notre Dame in Delray Beach. A second Haitian church followed in the 1990s at Fort Pierce. The evangelical congregations had meanwhile answered quickly, repatriating parts of North American missions with Haitian pastors at their head. Many Catholics who wanted to worship in Creole went to Protestant services, some staying Catholic and some converting. By 2001 the priest at Delray Beach, serving about seventeen thousand Haitians, the densest concentration in the county, reckoned Protestants slightly outnumbered Catholics.

The constitution promulgated in March 1987 was designed backwards from the thing it meant to prevent. Haiti had spent twenty nine years under a president who could not be removed, so the new text moved the running of the government to a prime minister answerable to parliament and left the president as head of state. It set out fundamental rights, made the judiciary independent, and handed elections to a body outside the army. It recognised Kreyol as an official language beside French, which acknowledged the ninety percent of the population who spoke no French at all. It was the most ambitious charter written in the country's one hundred and eighty three years. It was also written by and for a population that had never lived under the arrangements it described. Charters in Haiti had been discarded roughly once a decade since 1804. Whether this one could hold against the army, the old militia and the families who financed both was the question the next four years answered.

Haiti voted on its new constitution in March 1987 and nearly ninety nine percent of those who turned out approved it. The charter had been drafted after the fall of the Duvaliers by a commission elected the previous October. Among its provisions was one that had waited since independence in 1804. French had been the sole official language of the republic for one hundred and eighty three years, in a country where roughly nine people in ten spoke only Kreyol, the language that had formed on the plantations. The 1987 text gave Kreyol official standing alongside French, and the constitution itself was printed in both so that a voter could read what he was voting for. That decision reached further than any of the political clauses. A law nobody can read is a law written for somebody else. Making Kreyol official meant the state had to answer, on paper at least, in the language its citizens used to argue, pray, trade and complain.