Word: gros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with a piece of sugarcane. Her daughter Melina, 6, places the gourd on her head and begins a morning-long walk to a well. Mercius, meanwhile, picks up his wooden hoe, balances it on his shoulder and scuttles down the mountainside to till a field of millet for a gros neg, a landowning peasant. If he is lucky, he will earn 60 cents for his day's work...
Victims of hurricanes, drought, debts, superstition and disease, peasants are constantly preyed upon. Those with a bit of land are hesitant to improve it for fear of attracting the attention of covetous gros negs, who often hire corrupt lawyers to steal the land on one pretext or another. The rural police, notaries and Tonton Macoutes also seize property with a flourish of phony documents and a bag of city tricks. Even those who try to help the peasants often end up hurting them. When African swine fever hit the pig population of Haiti several years ago, Haitian authorities, under...
...inflation exploded, the government faced a barrage of protests. In response, Sarney decided to oust the president of Brazil's central bank, Fernando Bracher, who was under criticism for letting interest rates rise too high. His replacement was Francisco Gros, an economist trained at Columbia University and a friend of Finance Minister Funaro's. The appointment of Gros strengthened Funaro's grip on financial policy, but the minister has yet to convince foreign bankers that he has a viable program for straightening out the economy...