page_title: Brignol Lindor
section_title: Context
hierarchical_section_title: Brignol Lindor / Context
caption_attribution_description: English: A view from Olivier Coquelin's hotel, Le Relais de L'Empereur in Petit-Goâve, Haiti in 1981.
context_page_description: Brignol Lindor, was a Haitian radio journalist and news editor, lawyer and teacher. Lindor was a prominent voice in politics, speaking mostly on behalf of the Democratic interests of the Haitian people. His brutal murder was blamed on threats from leftist politicians who supported President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
context_section_description: Haiti has experienced several long periods of political tension, one of which can be traced back to the decision by a group of small political organizations to boycott the presidential elections of 2000. This boycott was their way of protesting the parliamentary elections earlier that year, which they claimed had fraudulently awarded 15 of the 19 Senate seats and eighty percent of seats in the House of Assembly to Jean Bertrand Aristide's newly formed Fanmi Lavalas party. This group of political organizations later joined together to form an alliance known as the Convergence Démocratique, also referred to as the "opposition," which sought to undermine the authority of President Aristide.
  Directly related to this political tension, the beginning of 2001 marked an enormous decline in press freedom in Haiti, with close to 40 journalists having faced violent threats or attacks in that year alone. The majority of these threats and attacks were initiated by either police or supporters of President Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas Party, therefore greatly reducing the likelihood of any government intervention on behalf of the victims of this violence. That situation was a direct result of President Aristide's instatement of a "zero tolerance" campaign against crime in June of that year. Through this campaign, police officers were allowed and even encouraged to punish criminals on the spot, without a trial, if they are caught red-handed. Members of the press/media in Haiti were often characterized by President Aristide as members of the opposition, but such allegations served as a way of justifying the violence that was being committed against them, regardless of whether or not the allegations were in fact true.
  Lindor has not been the only journalist to be killed in Haiti, as in 2000 Jean Léopold Dominique of Radio Haiti-Inter and Gérard Denoze of Radio Plus met the same fate.
caption: Petit-Goâve from around 1981.
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