January to 29 March 1987 · Haitianspan
The new charter takes elections out of the army's hands
›Read the full entryClose
In Haiti the power that decided who governed was the power to run the vote. The constitution put to the country on 29 March 1987 took that power from the army and handed it to an independent electoral council. More than half the electorate turned out and over ninety nine percent voted yes, in a poll that foreign observers judged fair. The text was published in Kreyol as well as French so that ordinary voters could read it, and a former minister remarked that Kreyol had become the political language. Anticipating what was coming, the council promoted Williams Regala to general, bringing the number of generals over an army of seven thousand five hundred men to seventeen. Meanwhile a New York law firm hired to chase the money Jean-Claude Duvalier had taken abroad, put at somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred million dollars, ran into French courts that refused American jurisdiction and Swiss banks that cited their tradition of discretion. In France the exile was spending ten thousand dollars a month on telephone calls.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.