1980 to 1981 · Haitianspan

Cheap Mexican oil meant for Haiti is sold on to South Africa

Interpol guesses what is happening and seven million dollars stops short of Ernest Bennett.

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the early 1980s · Diasporadecade

Haitian detainees in America win a status called Entrant

Camps in the desert, hearings without lawyers and jailed children produced a temporary reprieve.

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1980 · Diasporayear only

Two hundred thousand Haitians are living in the Dominican Republic

Three separate movements across the same border, and the last one was built on sugar.

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August to December 1980 · Haitianspan

Hurricane Allen takes the south and nobody sends sympathy

Two hundred dead, 150,000 without houses, and donors who had stopped believing what they were told.

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November to December 1980 · Haitianspan

A minister rings a hand bell to stop a speech about human rights

The donors accept the interruption and raise Haiti's aid by twenty percent for the coming year.

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28 November 1980 · Haitian

A crackdown ends the Creole-language opening in Haitian media

Artists and journalists had carried peasant demands in Creole since 1976; one day of repression stopped it.

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1981 · Haitianyear only

The creole pig was a savings account and it was killed

School registration in the countryside falls by about a third within a year of the slaughter.

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1981 · Haitianyear only

Mexico and Venezuela cut off Haiti's concessionary oil

A cargo was sold before it docked, and the difference went into private hands.

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1981 to 1982 · Haitianspan

An exile lands on La Tortue and Namphy and Regala put him down

Militiamen fire on the government troops sent to help them, taking them for the invaders.

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1981 to 1982 · Haitianspan

A new disease is given a nationality

Doctors in Florida notice their Haitian patients, and Haitians become a category of risk.

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1981 to 1989 · Diasporaspan

Six people out of twenty one thousand are brought ashore

Eight years of screening at sea produced almost nobody the interviewers judged worth a hearing.

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1981 · Haitianyear only

A young man dies in Beaufort hours after a blow of powder

A schoolteacher in the Artibonite gave the year, the section and the name.

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1981 · Diasporayear only

A poster of a film star and a snake is read in Brooklyn as a wedding portrait

Richard Avedon made the picture; a priestess saw a marriage to Danbala in it.

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early 1981 · Diasporayear only

A Miami review finds Haitian patients whose immune systems have stopped working

Young, employed, well fed before they fell ill, and carrying three infections at once.

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October 1981 · Diasporamonth known

Thirty three Haitians drown off a Florida beach

Their boat broke up near Fort Lauderdale and the bodies came ashore on television.

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July to 29 September 1981 · Haitianspan

Haiti agrees to kill every pig and to let its boats be turned back

Two agreements in three months take away the countryside's savings and the only exit left.

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September 1981 · Diasporamonth known

Haiti signs away the right to leave, and aid hangs on interception

The interdiction agreement lets American cutters board Haitian boats and return the passengers.

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29 September 1981 · Diaspora

An executive order turns the Windward Passage into a checkpoint

Twenty eight people out of twenty four thousand were allowed to argue their case on land.

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25 October 1981 · Diaspora

A cutter stops a sloop and sends fifty six people back the next day

The first interdiction under the new American program took one group interview and one night.

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1982 to 2013 · Indigenousspan

Two kinds of pottery and thirty years of argument about who made them

Rouse read the difference as decoration; Chanlatte Baik read it as a separate people.

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1982 to January 1983 · Haitianspan

Haitian tourism falls from 200,000 visitors to 10,000

A passport inspector in New York asks a traveller to open the document himself.

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1982 · Haitianyear only

UNESCO lists the Citadelle and the ruins of Sans-Souci

The only World Heritage Site in Haiti, entered on the register while Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled.

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the early 1980s · Haitianapproximate

Kreyol gets an agreed spelling and the religion changes how it writes its name

Eighty per cent of the people who speak the language have been kept from reading it.

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1982 · Haitianyear only

Jean Casimir publishes La culture de l'opprime

A Haitian sociologist reached conclusions the Latin American theorists reached separately.

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February 1982 · Haitianmonth known

Reagan offers the Caribbean duty free access against Cuban influence

The Caribbean Basin Initiative taxes only the work that Haitian hands add.

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February to 3 July 1982 · Haitianspan

Mr Clean lasts six months at the finance ministry

He is dismissed for billing the president's father in law a million dollars in back taxes.

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13 December 1982 · Haitian

A decree defines what a non governmental organisation is in Haiti

Registration at the planning ministry, and the first legal shape of the republic of NGOs.

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1983 to 2013 · Indigenousspan

Small islands were settled because the sea fed people, not the land

A village worked a catchment of five kilometres, which an island of five square kilometres supplies.

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1983 · Haitianyear only

An activist loses her mother in 1983 and is shot in church in 1988

The bullet near her heart travelled down into her womb before she noticed.

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9 March 1983 · Haitian

The Pope steps off the red carpet and says Fok sa chanje

He declines the food flown in from Miami and eats with Haitian priests instead.

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March 1983 · Haitianmonth known

The Pope tells the government to its face that things have to change

The regime wanted the legitimacy of a papal visit and got a sentence used against it for three years.

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March 1983 · Haitianmonth known

The church changes sides and a Salesian priest is noticed

Below the bishops, a decade of literacy classes and farming groups suddenly has cover.

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March 1983 · Haitianmonth known

Sixty one bishops meet in Port-au-Prince about Protestant growth

The pope's only Haitian visit doubled as a council of war over the evangelical missions.

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April to December 1983 · Haitianspan

Generals learn of their retirement from a midnight television broadcast

An issue naming eleven possible successors is not seized; it simply leaves the newsstands.

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1984 · Diasporayear only

A boat breaks up two hundred yards from a Florida beach and thirty two die

They had paid two hundred dollars each and crossed the Windward Passage forty to a boat.

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5 February 1984 · Diaspora

Washington certifies Haitian compliance two years before the fall

A memorandum tells Congress that Haiti has cooperated and should keep receiving aid.

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May to December 1984 · Haitianspan

Gonaïves erupts and Radio Soleil carries it

A CARE warehouse stormed, a pregnant woman beaten to death, and food riots that become something else.

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20 May to December 1984 · Haitianspan

Food riots at Gonaives turn into the first mass revolt since 1961

Ministers sent to investigate report that the crowds want the Bennetts expelled, and are sacked.

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January to August 1985 · Haitianspan

Only Jesus Christ is forever, and the referendum returns 99.9 percent

Nobody votes except where free kleren is handed out, and the result is announced anyway.

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Summer 1985 · Haitianseason

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

The organising had grown inside the little church, where women were unusually prominent.

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Autumn 1985 · Haitianseason

Two officers and an old macoute plan the end of the Duvaliers

The militia chief agrees to stand aside on one condition: an American visa for herself.

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November to December 1985 · Haitianspan

A tanker sails away unpaid and the country works out what that means

The first lady spends 1.7 million dollars in Paris and the treasury cannot buy a cargo of fuel.

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28 November 1985 · Haitian

Three schoolchildren are shot in Gonaives

The killing that lit the fire which carried the regime away eleven weeks later.

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