February to October 1992 · Haitianspan
Washington exempts the factories and Haiti paves the smuggling road
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In February 1992 the Bush administration exempted goods made in Port-au-Prince assembly plants from the embargo. More than fifty thousand jobs in that sector had gone already. Writing in March, Elliott Abrams set out the trap the policy had built: the United States was wrecking an economy, producing emigrants, and then refusing them shelter. Guantanamo filled and Washington began returning people to Haiti. Water was diverted from the Artibonite to drive the Peligre generators, which hurt farming, while Petionville dined on French wine and Norwegian salmon. The officers found the money to surface the last rough stretch of road to the Dominican border at Malpasse, through which the embargo leaked. A fresh proposal that acknowledged Aristide's title without fixing a date for his return, and offered the officers amnesty, could not win a majority in the rump parliament, where members waved guns during debate. Petrol reached eighteen dollars a gallon. Georges Izmery was shot dead in daylight two hundred yards from a police station. Marc Bazin took over as de facto prime minister in June.
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