9/11/2008: The 20th anniversary of massacre at St. John Bosco

During the Duvalier regime and the turmoil after, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a renegade priest, delivering homily after homily calling for the economic and political liberation of the Haitian people. Consequently, on September 11, 1988 his little church in La Saline, Port-au-Prince was burned during a massacre killing thirteen parishioners, injuring at least seventy-seven others.

Amy Wilentz’s book The Rainy Season gives an authoritative and eye-witness account of this attack. Reading the section on St. Jean Bosco requires a strong stomach; she was there during the massacre. First, the thugs shot through the wall protecting the church, while church children hurled rocks back over it, in defense. Aristide continued mass, but told people to leave if they wished. The assailants shot the lock off the gate and stormed the front of the church, shooting people and causing mayhem and screaming. Victims were being held down and stabbed to death. Machetes were used to slash the tops of heads off congregants. A pregnant woman was stabbed in the stomach. Aristide fled through the sacristy, and was soon to face down another assassination attempt. (He has survived many in his life.) As a grand finale, gasoline was poured all over the grounds of the church and it burned.

Haitian army officers stood by and watched all of this. Not one person from the police station across the street stepped in. The fix was in. According to all accounts, each thug was paid seven dollars and a bottle of three-dollar rum by the government for the attacks. Thirteen people were killed, and seventy-seven were injured. The local Catholic Bishops did not even comment on the massacre for two full weeks

For my first pilgrimage to St. Jean Bosco, my tour guide and friend was Bobby Duval, a longtime friend of Aristide’s. Bobby, held for years as a political prisoner and was released upon Jean Claude Duvalier’s departure in 1986, was intimately involved in Aristide’s work at the time of the 1988 massacre. Like many others, Bobby has lost several friends in the name of liberation theology, in the name of fighting systemic poverty and oppression.

After a visit and walk around Cité Soleil, I reminded Bobby of my desire to visit the church in La Saline. He told our driver to take us. The driver turned to him with a viscerally ill look on his face, and asked two questions in Kreyol. Bobby looked out the window with a face of grief, and said, “She wants to see it. Let’s just go.”

Bobby’s celebrity as a leader and hero for the poor allowed an easy entrance through the gate. Upon exiting the vehicle, I thought the grounds looked like an overgrown grave yard, and I was surprised by how small everything was. I suppose that is how it is sometimes, when we visit places where big things have happened. We keep them sort of frozen in our minds in the time and condition they once were at their time of historical importance.

The armed guard had a million questions for me. “You know about this place? Why do you want to come to this place? Do you know about Father Aristide?” It has probably been a while since a white American woman set foot within those walls. Needless to say, as a student researching and passionate about liberation theology and Haiti, this visit was a very powerful experience. Bobby quietly guided me along the grounds of the church. There is no roof, and the walls are covered with bullet holes, and graffiti of phrases such as “Titid Returnay,” and “Pep Ayisyen se Titid." My research of the place allowed me to point to places and ask – “This is the rectory, isn’t it?” Or to suggest, “Let’s around the back to see the courtyard.”

The remains of St. Jean Bosco serve as a monument for justice and peace. Standing on the decrepit altar, I looked around and thought of the martyrs. The parishioners came to church that day acutely aware of the danger. Many wore white to honor the new (and government ignored) Constitution that was being ignored by the violent government, and residual Duvalier thugs. The people in white were the first to be shot. The brave parishioners peacefully prayed and sang hymns, standing in resistance to the violence of political oppression. It is difficult to imagine what they must have felt as they heard the gunshots beginning to sound outside.

Around the time of the St. Bosco massacre, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, in light of the fall of the Soviet Union and fall of the Berlin Wall, liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff, and Jon Sobrino were called up on to speak for to the relevance and role of liberation theology. Jon Sobrino chose to focus on the martyrdom that was still occurring, such as the martyrdom of at St. Jean Bosco. He wrote of taking the crucified down from the cross. In a book about the Salvadoran Jesuits he wrote: “The price to be paid for all this has been very high, but inevitable. Today when we hear so much about evangelizing cultures, we should remember a deeper form of evangelization, so that society itself becomes the good news.” In this “changed world” when NAFTA was being celebrated in the United States, masked Zapatistas stormed Chiapas and declared that free trade was a death certificate for the poor in Mexico. Liberation theology still had a call and a role all through Latin America, perhaps the need was the greatest in the poorest country of all countries in the western hemisphere - Haiti.

Aristide was ultimately blamed for causing political trouble like the September 11 massacre, and later expelled from the Salesian Order. He mixed theology with politics. As if there is a difference. Aristide wrote, “The Vatican sides not with an entire people defending these values at risk of life and limb, but with the men of the old regime trained to bury them.”