1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan
The cordon fails and swine fever reaches the Artibonite
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The barrier failed. Despite the killing of 27,000 pigs along the Dominican border, African swine fever appeared in the Artibonite valley, the best farmland in the country. Prices moved with it. Inflation in the United States passed straight into an economy now tied to it, and drought cut the Artibonite rice harvest. Workers at the sugar company HASCO, permitted months earlier to elect their own union officers, struck for higher pay and were put down by the army and the militia under a law against strikes promulgated at speed to protect the country's standing with investors. In the palace the family quarrelled. Marie-Denise Duvalier hired a leading Port-au-Prince lawyer to divorce Max Dominique and let it be known that he had squandered much of her fortune. The old Duvalierists who regarded her as her father's rightful heir took heart, and her brother sent her abroad again. The interior ministry announced that visitors would need passports from March 1979, then delayed the rule, then abandoned it for Americans and Canadians when the travel industry complained.
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