1975 to 1976 · Haitianspan
A journalist disappears and the amnesty is timed to an American election
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By 1975 the arrangement suited everyone inside it. Simone Duvalier kept the old Duvalierists quiet, enough loosening happened to satisfy the foreign donors, and Jean-Claude handed the tedious parts of governing to a younger and lighter-skinned set. Executives of a Dallas property firm then told the United States Senate that a small man resembling a film gangster had asked them for two hundred thousand dollars for the president's widows and orphans fund in return for permission to develop La Tortue; the widow and the orphan were Simone Duvalier and her son. Washington was turning. Jimmy Carter's candidacy alarmed a palace that remembered Kennedy. Jack Anderson wrote that American aid was being misused and that the government was refusing donated clothing for the drought-stricken Northwest. In July 1976 Gasner Raymond, a young reporter investigating labour unrest, disappeared. In October the president announced that 261 prisoners would go free on 17 November, days after the American election.
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