Death in the Street of the Brave

I went to Haiti in January 1987, at the time Baby Doc Duvalier’s government was collapsing. He fled the country the next month, and after an initial few days of revenge killings, the atmosphere was very hopeful and joyful. This tranquility lasted for a few months. It was a very exciting period— newspapers and radio stations flourished, and everybody was out in the street because for the first time in three decades of dictatorship, they were able to express themselves. But there were people who didn’t really want things to change, because they had too much to lose.

Then in November 1987, the first attempt was made to hold democratic elections. The polls opened at seven A.M. and closed by 9 A.M., and a lot of the polling stations were attacked. There was a particularly brutal attack in Port-au-Prince on a street called Rue Vaillant, the Street of the Brave. The polling station was in a school, and when we got there it was just bloody slaughter with people’s brains all over the floor. It was terrible, just terrible. And then twenty or thirty men, probably the same people who had committed this slaughter, came back and attacked the journalists. Several journalists were wounded and one was killed. I almost got killed three or four times that day myself, along with a couple of good friends. It was very bloody, and really violent. From that moment on, even if there have been times of tranquility, it’s remained very violent.

Maggie Steber: A native of Texas, Steber has been a photojournalist since 1978. She has worked in more than thirty-five countries, but none more than in Haiti. For her work in that nation she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant, and the Ernst Haas Grant. Her book Dancing on Fire: Photographs from Haiti was published in 1991.