Dupuy traces Haiti's contested path toward democracy through the rise and collapse of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Carried into office in 1991 by the poor majority demanding a more equal and participatory society, the priest turned president lasted seven months before the military removed him. Popular resistance to the junta pushed the United States into leading a multinational force that returned him to power in 1994 for the balance of his term, ending in 1996.

By his re-election in 2000 he was a changed figure, expelled from the priesthood, no longer preaching liberation theology, and bent on consolidating power for himself and Lavalas while leaving intact the predatory state he had promised to dismantle. Armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian methods kept him in place until foreign-backed opponents drove him out in 2004, this time without the population rising to defend him.

Dupuy sets the crisis inside the relations of power binding a poor peripheral country to the core capitalist states.