May 2004 Caribbean floods with over 1,300 homes being destroyed and about 2,000 people being killed. Due to this destruction, nearly 15,000 people were displaced with nowhere to live. The area that felt the worst of the flooding was the town of Jimaní, near the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In fact, the destruction present at Jimaní was so bad that Dominican president Hipolito Mejia declared a national day of mourning after seeing the effects of the storm. A broad low pressure area developed over Central America on May 19, accompanied by heavy rainfall. The system drifted eastward into the Caribbean Sea,
Michel Martelly called compas, the only music allowed under the Duvaliers." After the 1991 Haitian coup d'état saw the expulsion of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Martelly opened a Pétion-Ville club called the Garage, where he entertained many of the coup's main architects, including the much-feared chief of national police, Michel François, later convicted in absentia for massacring Aristide supporters." Martelly has been heralded as a pioneer of a unique genre of compas, a style of Haitian dance music sung predominantly in the Haitian Creole language. Originally, compas, was the creation of Nemours Jean-Baptiste. Martelly, a keyboardist and the self-proclaimed "President of Compas," popularized a