Word: port
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...begins another day in the "other republic," as rural Haiti is known. Governments come and go in Port-au-Prince, but daily life in the western hemisphere's poorest country remains a tedious grind, with little chance for Mercius and the hundreds of thousands of other landless peasants to improve their lot. Hope flared briefly in 1986, when Haitians rebelled and forced "President-for-Life" Jean-Claude Duvalier into exile. Since then, the government has changed hands three times, most recently last month, when a coup installed the regime of Lieut. General Prosper Avril. No matter how good Avril...
...desperate as life is in Port-au-Prince's slums, a truer picture of Haiti's plight emerges in the countryside, where some 75% of the country's 6.3 million people live. Land is both the hope of these peasants and the yoke that dooms them to poverty. Over the years, land parcels have shrunk to handkerchief size through repeated division among descendants and illegal seizures by landowners. Even the practice of voodoo has had an effect: some peasants have been forced to sell their land to pay for elaborate religious rituals for dead relatives...
...touch their shores in the past century -- and by far the worst. But for officials in Managua and Washington, it was just politics as usual as Joan's 125-m.p.h. winds cut a swath of panic and devastation across the country, leaving 116 dead and flattening the Atlantic port city of Bluefields...
Within a week, outrage over that Sept. 11 attack at St. John Bosco Church in the capital of Port-au-Prince provoked an army revolt that installed the new regime of Lieut. General Prosper Avril. The atrocity added considerably to the mystique surrounding the slight, bespectacled 35-year-old Roman Catholic priest, a socialist who is widely called a "prophet." Formerly a little- known worker among the dispossessed of his parish, Aristide is the only authentic leader who has emerged from the Haitian masses during the chaotic period since the despised dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was overthrown...
Once word of the Salesians' directive was out, impoverished Haitians by the thousands surged through the streets, threatening to set fire to Port-au- Prince and marching to the airport to block the rumored departure of the beloved priest. Though the Vatican has been blamed for demanding Aristide's departure, Salesian officials in Rome insist that the Holy See was not involved. Instead, the decision came from within their order. "We advised Aristide time and time again to tone down his sermons," explains Belgian priest Luc Van Looy, a top-ranking Salesian. Van Looy explains that the Salesians are concerned...