Right-wing paramilitary violence in Haiti is Sprague's subject, and his case is that it has worked steadily against the democratic hopes of ordinary Haitians.

He begins in 1990, the year Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti's first democratically elected president, and traces the reactionary movements that succeeded in forcing him from office. Over the two decades that followed, the violence fell mainly on the poor and on people aligned with Aristide's Lavalas movement, and it cost thousands of Haitian lives.

Girard centers his account on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's political career, the calculations he made, the concessions he accepted, and the long negotiation he conducted with the Clinton administration. Rather than place one leader in the right, Girard weighs what each man needed and the moral claims each pressed against the other.

The method gives both sides substance. Aristide and Clinton appear with their constituencies behind them, and the bargaining between them reads as consequential rather than procedural. At the book's core sit the confrontation itself and the foreign-policy machinery running between Haiti and the United States.

Around that core Girard also sketches Haiti as it stood at the time of writing, setting out with unusual clarity the tensions that built toward the violence of recent years and Aristide's removal from office.

Hallward begins from a discrepancy. The 1991 coup against Aristide drew international condemnation and a campaign for his restoration; the coup that removed him again in February 2004 met resignation, indifference, or approval. In the interval a president twice elected by landslide had been rewritten in mainstream commentary as corrupt, aloof and hostile to rights, so that his removal could be presented as a service to Haitian democracy.

The book reconstructs how that was accomplished: sustained misrepresentation in the press, foreign-funded democracy promotion aimed at manufacturing an opposition, and finally armed intervention with American and French backing. Hallward rates it the most effective piece of neo-imperial subversion since the defeat of the Sandinistas, and the more so for scarcely registering as a coup at all.

He also weighs what Lavalas managed and where it failed, setting the movement's emergence in the 1980s against the Duvaliers, the Macoutes, and an elite structurally insulated from the poor majority.