Washington calls the junta a pariah and the border stays open

The Organization of American States met in emergency session on 2 October 1991. Secretary of State James Baker told the delegates that the officers who had seized Haiti would be treated as a pariah regime, without friends, without support and without a future, and that the hemisphere had to act together on behalf of the elected government. Two days later George Bush said publicly that he wanted Aristide back in office. The OAS agreed on language for an embargo. The United States froze Haitian government assets everywhere except those the exiled president and a few aides could reach, which guaranteed him money to work with. Two facts undid the measure before it began. The OAS speaks for the Americas alone, and the rest of the United Nations membership considered itself free to trade. Haiti also shares a long and unpoliced land border with the Dominican Republic, whose conservative government had no reason to help Aristide. The embargo ran for nearly three years and the officers grew richer under it.

On 10 April 1990 an estimated fifty thousand Haitians walked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan and surrounded city hall. The target was the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, which had classified Haitians as a group at risk for AIDS and kept the classification after the scientific evidence had gone against it. Traffic did not move. Taxis were hard to find because so many drivers were Haitian and had taken the day off to march. The same day brought demonstrations in Miami and outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince, and delegations went on to Washington to meet federal officials. Some months later the agencies stopped describing Haitians as a risk group. The march then travelled back along the radio and the telephone. In towns like Port Salut, people who had never left Haiti repeated one sentence about it for years afterwards: the demonstration was so big that the bridge shook.

Alerte Belance sold in a Port au Prince market and had organised her neighbourhood for Jean-Bertrand Aristide's presidential campaign. After the coup of September 1991 the paramilitaries of the group known as FRAPH taunted her as the godmother of the militants, and she spent two years moving between hiding places. The Governors Island accord signed in New York promised that the president would come back on 30 October 1993, so she came out. Men seized her on 15 October and took her to Titanyen, the killing ground north of the capital, where they cut her apart with machetes. They cut out part of her tongue, took the gums, teeth and jaw on her right side, opened her face, her eye and her ear, severed her right arm and cut the fingertips from her left hand. She woke in the brush the next morning, dragged herself to the roadside and raised the stump of her arm so a passing driver would see she was alive. She was thirty two and had three children.

By 1995 New York carried thirty hours of Haitian television a week. Miami carried eight, New Jersey four, and Boston, Chicago and Hartford two each. The best known programme made by the diaspora in New York was a magazine show that ran on one public channel in 1988 and 1989 before moving to another. Its producer, J. Raynal Louis, also made a teenage show, an education show that covered bilingual teaching, a programme about the United Nations, an arts hour, and monthly programmes for Asian American and Jewish American audiences. Three of his programmes were in French and Creole for African and Haitian immigrants, among them a Creole talk show and a community news show. Some were broadcast simultaneously in Miami and the tapes were shown again in Montreal, so a Creole programme made in Brooklyn was watched in three countries.