Istwa Nou

In May 1984 a CARE warehouse was stormed at the Cap. Radio Soleil, the Church station, broadcast it, and Gonaïves went up after a pregnant woman was beaten to death by police. The food riots turned political within days, with crowds calling for the expulsion of the Bennetts and the president's divorce. Michèle gave Jean-Claude an ultimatum over Roger Lafontant and he chose Lafontant. School enrollment was collapsing, and the phrase that stuck was cochons blan, the white pigs, the imported swine that lived better than the people did after the Creole pig eradication had wiped out the peasantry's savings account. Two things to hold. The radio is infrastructure, and killing the Creole pig removed rural liquidity in a country with no rural banking. Gonaïves 1984 is where those two facts meet, and 7 February 1986 is fourteen months away.

On 20 May 1984 staff at the CARE warehouse at Cap-Haitien loaded spoiled food onto trucks bound for animal feed. Word went round the market that supplies were being diverted for sale, a crowd stormed the warehouse, and militiamen fought them for four hours. Three people died, none of them militiamen. Whether by Radio Soleil or by word of mouth, the news reached Gonaives, where residents marched on police headquarters to protest at the beating to death of a pregnant woman. They were clubbed at the barricades, and this time they hit back. Thousands protested over two days and looted food warehouses until reinforcements arrived from the capital with machine guns. Ministers sent to find out what had happened reported that the food riots had become something else, that the crowds were calling for the expulsion of the Bennett family and the president's divorce. Five ministers were dismissed for reporting it. Eighty two thousand children in the Cap region alone were living on rations from foreign agencies.