Istwa Nou

Jean-Claude Duvalier announced a referendum on 29 June 1985. It was Roger Lafontant's idea, and it asked Haitians to approve the creation of a prime minister and the legalisation of opposition parties, both conditional on their approval of the presidency for life. Almost nobody voted, except where free kleren was handed out at the polling station. Priests of the Ti Legliz movement had been telling congregations to stay away, one of them preaching that only Jesus Christ is forever, and Radio Soleil carried the sermon nationwide. Lafontant expelled three foreign priests connected with the station, and more than two hundred priests and church workers marched through Port-au-Prince to say they would not be silenced. The result was announced as 99.9 percent in favour. Clovis Desinor, who had served Francois Duvalier as a minister and believed the succession should have been his, said in public that half the nation had never voted for a leader and that he would found a party of his own. Lafontant was put on a plane to Montreal.

By the autumn of 1985 two things were running at once. In the streets a hungry and unarmed population was organising, largely through young priests. In private the institutions that had lived off the regime and saw no future in it, the army, the newer rich and the bishops, were looking for an exit. The plot formed around two officers. Henri Namphy, born at Cap-Haitien in 1932 to a mulatre family and commissioned in 1954, had survived every purge by staying out of politics; Duvalier made him a brigadier in 1981 and head of the army in 1984, and he had refused more than once to order his men to fire on crowds. Williams Regala was five years younger, black, and wholly a product of the regime, having served in the presidential guard, the Dessalines battalion and the Leopards. The militia had to be neutralised, so they sent Clovis Desinor to Madame Max Adolphe, who commanded it. She agreed on one condition, an American visa for herself. Washington objected, then supplied it.