June to 11 September 1988 · Haitianspan
The mayor of Port-au-Prince sends gunmen into a Sunday mass
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With Manigat gone and Henri Namphy ruling openly, whatever restraint had been kept up for foreign audiences went as well. Killing squads worked the capital and the provinces at a rate not seen since 1964. The drug business kept surfacing. A Boeing 727 leased by Haiti Trans Air, successor to the airline the president's in-laws had owned, gave up fifty kilos of cocaine to customs officers in Miami, and the trail led back to Colonel Williams Regala. In early September the officers finished a job begun the year before. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was still preaching at Saint Jean Bosco to full congregations. On Sunday 11 September 1988, on the orders of Franck Romain, the mayor of Port-au-Prince and a former militia commander, armed men walked into the church during mass. Aristide got out. The gunmen fired into the congregation and the men behind them went to work with machetes. A dozen worshippers were killed. The attackers then set fire to the church.
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