Forty one of fifty two rapes fall in the junta's final year

The army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the Haitian presidency at the end of September 1991 and General Raoul Cedras held the country until September 1994. In 1995 a survey of ninety eight women who had been abused during those years found that forty five of them had been raped, several more than once, for fifty two separate incidents. Ten of those incidents fell in the first two years. Forty one fell in the last twelve months, between September 1993 and September 1994. Reports of politically motivated rape reaching human rights organisations in Haiti, American immigration officials in Port-au-Prince and at Guantanamo Bay, and refugee advocates rose sharply from August to November 1993. Both patterns point at one moment. Rape entered the regime's repertoire in the summer of 1993, in the weeks around the Governors Island agreement that won the junta a suspension of the international embargo, and from then on it was used at a scale the earlier years had not seen.

Before building Haiti Global Village, Henri Deschamps and his assistants studied what a Haitian internet would have to look like. Their conclusion was that its first language would be English, with French second and a small amount of Kreyol. The reasoning was demographic. The heaviest users would be Haitians living in English speaking countries, above all the United States, along with their children born abroad. Deschamps described the project as a bridge home for people who had left because they had to and who meant to return one day. The site was laid out as a town, with a central square named for Toussaint Louverture, a bulletin, a poll and a set of small squares called anba tonel, after the shelters put up in the Haitian countryside where people sit and talk. The choice had a cost. Users writing from Europe objected, and the exchange revealed that many of the American born posters could read neither French nor Kreyol.

In 1993 the chief officer of the Disney corporation was paid 325,000 times what the average Haitian worker in Disney's subsidiary plants earned. The two figures came out of one company. Nothing in the comparison depends on setting a rich country against a poor one, because the garment stitched near Port-au-Prince and the salary drawn in the United States belonged to a single accounting system. Around the same time the president of Morgan Stanley collected fourteen million dollars in bonuses in 1996 alone, more than several countries received in American aid that year, and by 1998 the three largest personal fortunes on earth were worth more than the combined national product of the forty eight poorest countries, home to six hundred million people. Where a person lives has become the strongest single predictor of what that person will earn, in absolute terms and relative ones. Haitians assembling goods for North American brands sit at the far end of that spread while producing for the near end.

In 1993 a ship called The Neptune sank between Jeremie, on Haiti's southern peninsula, and Port-au-Prince. She was carrying more than two thousand people, and almost everyone aboard died. Among the dead were members of a community from Jeremie who had resettled in Cite Soleil, the seaside slum of the capital. That community had its own Rara band, and the band answered the wreck in the one public form available to it, which was song. The lyric names the ship, names the crossing, and turns on a single domestic image of a cooking pot going over. Its refrain says the singer has no family left to bury the dead. The same band had members who had tried to leave Haiti by boat, had been held at the American naval base at Guantanamo, and had been sent home. They made a second song about that, counting up the pigs and the goats they had sold to pay for the passage.