Dominique then received a scholarship to studied genetically modified cacao and coffee plants at the École Supérieure d'Application d'Agriculture Tropicale [fr] in Paris.
Dominique, who had been working with the ti peyizan to defend their land rights against the chefs de section (local Duvalierist authorities) and wealthy landowners, was arrested a few weeks after his brother's attempt to overthrow the regime, and he spent six months in prison in Gonaïves.
During the 1960s, Dominique also founded Haiti's first film club at the Institut Français in Port-au-Prince, which he understood to be a way of subverting and resisting the political repression of the Duvalier dictatorship.
[2][4] Throughout the 1970s, Jean Dominique used Radio Haiti to highlights aspects of Haitian culture rooted in its Creole-speaking majority and repressed for almost two centuries by its French-speaking elite.
For example, Radio Haiti reported in 1972 for weeks, on the fall of the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle, as a proxy for talking about Duvalier.
For days.”[5] As the Haitian government relied on assistance from the United States, Duvalier had little choice but to comply with certain human rights rules and principles while Jimmy Carter was president.
Dominique, reading the writing on the wall, responded with one of his most famous editorials, entitled “Bon appétit, messieurs,” addressed to the journalists of the state press.
You will not be distracted from your plentiful feast by the cries of the poor, the screams of the boat people devoured by sharks, the gunshots killing our cane-cutter brothers in Santo Domingo or in Nassau or La Romana... No, you will not hear those discordant, disagreeable noises that might trouble your meal, that might prevent you from celebrating -- it will be only silence...
And in that profound silence: Bon appétit, messieurs!”[6] On 28 November 1980, shortly after Ronald Reagan won the US presidential election, Duvalier cracked down on the independent press, human rights activists, and union leaders in Haiti.
Haiti's first democratic elections were scheduled for 29 November 1987, but were violently suppressed by the army, which slaughtered voters at Ruelle Vaillant and destroyed electoral bureaus throughout the country.
Radio Haiti came under armed attack that day, as ordered by Williams Régala; Dominique and the other journalists stood on the roof throwing rocks and bottles as the army fired machine guns and grenades.
When the military under Raoul Cédras overthrew the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, Radio Haiti once more had to close and Dominique and Montas again went into exile in New York.
During these years, Dominique published op eds and appeared on the Charlie Rose show to encourage a return to constitutional order in Haiti.
In June 1993, Dominique was part of Aristide's entourage at the Governors Island meeting between the democratically elected government in exile and the leaders of the military junta.
He investigated Pharval Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, for selling cough syrup contaminated with diethylene glycol that was responsible for the poisoning of two hundred children, of whom sixty died.
He did, however, strongly support grassroots peasants’ rights groups, especially KOZEPEP whose leader, Charles Suffrard, was a close friend and collaborator of Dominique.
In a tense 16 December 1996 Face à l’Opinion interview, Dominique questioned Aristide about state corruption, particularly in his petits projets de la présidence.
President René Préval ordered three days of official mourning, and 15,000 people, among them 10,000 peasant farmers, attended the joint funeral at Stade Sylvio Cator in downtown Port-au-Prince on 8 April.
The first judge in the Jean Dominique case, Claudy Gassant, was subject to repeated threats to his safety, and in 2002, Aristide refused to renew his mandate.
In March 2003, Judge Bernard Saint-Vil concluded that a small group of low-level criminals were responsible for the murder, but that there was insufficient evidence to indict Dany Toussaint—findings that Dominique's widow Michèle Montas contested in an appellate court, demanding that the intellectual authors of the crime be found and punished.