Fignole Falls

"Cote li, cote li?" cried the black workers of Port-au-Prince last week, tears in their eyes. But Daniel Fignole, their idol, could not tell them where he was. He had gone. Nineteen days after he vaulted to power as Provisional President, the silver-tongued mathematics professor, who boasted he could unleash a "steam roller" of black supporters, fell without a shot fired. He went meekly into exile, and was replaced by a military junta.

Fanatic Daniel Fignole suffered the disability of excessive ambition. Lunging too fast for power, he postponed the presidential elections originally set for June 16, then maneuvered to get himself a full six-year term without an election. He ordered the army to purge itself of anti-Fignole officers, demanded commissions for his black civilian partisans. Once he routed Brigadier General Antonio Kebreau, the chief of staff, out of bed at 2 a.m. because he wanted to talk.

One night last week, while the mob slept, the army struck. General Kebreau's troops invaded the palace, forced Fignole to sign a letter of resignation, later whisked him to Miami on an air force plane. Next morning Kebreau went on the air and announced Haiti's seventh government in six months: a three-man military junta, headed by himself, to rule--as usual--until "fair and free elections" could be held.

For two days it was uncannily quiet, then at midnight the blacks hit back with an animal roar. Propelled by a rumor that their Fignole had been put to death, they burst out of the slums, put the torch to eight buildings, sacked a government warehouse. Truckloads of soldiers rolled up, sprayed the wailing, raging rioters with gunfire in the light of the flames and machine-gunned their flimsy shacks. Trucks loaded with prisoners taken at bayonet point rolled off to the jails, and the morgues of Port-au-Prince were full.

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