22 September to 18 October 1977 · Haitianspan
The state frees 104 prisoners and declares it holds no others
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On 22 September 1977 the government marked twenty years of Duvalier rule. Newspapers and radio stations were instructed to run slogans praising the achievements of the period and to renew the country's attachment to the head of state and to his mother Simone Ovide Duvalier, whose official style was Vigilant Witness on the nights of watchfulness and meditation of the illustrious departed. To decorate the anniversary the state announced the release of 104 political prisoners. It then announced that it now held none at all, and invited families whose relatives had disappeared into its jails to apply to the courts to have them declared dead. Three young reporters crossed the border into the Dominican Republic and on 18 October described the condition of the Haitian press to a hemispheric conference: Marc Garcia of Radio Metropole, Guy Meyer of Radio Haiti and, from the weekly Hebdo Jeune Presse, Bob Neree, whose father was the pastor who had written to Carter. Months earlier Gasner Raymond of Le Petit Samedi Soir had been murdered after writing about conditions at the state flour mill.
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