Istwa Nou

The regime read the American papers and adjusted. A working group under the defence minister Aurelien Jeanty was told to deal with what the president called the intolerable attitudes of the so called independent press. Two Port-au-Prince papers were closed, one before its first issue reached the street. In the provinces, out of sight of foreign reporters, militiamen went back to beating schoolchildren and extorting money. Luc Neree, the Baptist pastor whose letter to Jimmy Carter had begun the trouble a year earlier, was set upon by macoutes on the interior minister's orders and left for dead. He came out of the coma the next day and was sent home to recover slowly, while his son supplied daily bulletins on his condition to foreign contacts, having worked out that publicity was the only protection available. Then the government reached for older methods. Zacharie Delva, the boko who ran the Gonaives region, opened 1978 by presiding over a ceremony at which a bull carrying a photograph of Jimmy Carter was killed. Simone Duvalier had concluded that Gede had turned his back on her family.