A boycotted election produces a president for the army

The election the army destroyed in November 1987 was rerun on 17 January 1988 under rules the army wrote. Marc Bazin, Louis Dejoie and Sylvio Claude, the candidates with the largest followings, refused to take part. The polling stations were nearly empty. Counting was done behind closed doors by a council the military government had appointed, and it announced that Leslie Manigat had won with 50.27 percent, a figure precise enough to be obviously manufactured. Manigat was a political scientist who had spent more than twenty years in exile writing about Haitian history, and he had argued openly that no civilian could govern without the army's consent. He was installed in a palace full of officers. Haitians treated the presidency as what it was, a civilian face on military rule, and the foreign donors whose money the government needed treated it the same way. Manigat lasted until June. The general who had made him unmade him.

On 10 April 1990 an estimated fifty thousand Haitians walked over the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan and surrounded city hall. The target was the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, which had classified Haitians as a group at risk for AIDS and kept the classification after the scientific evidence had gone against it. Traffic did not move. Taxis were hard to find because so many drivers were Haitian and had taken the day off to march. The same day brought demonstrations in Miami and outside the American embassy in Port-au-Prince, and delegations went on to Washington to meet federal officials. Some months later the agencies stopped describing Haitians as a risk group. The march then travelled back along the radio and the telephone. In towns like Port Salut, people who had never left Haiti repeated one sentence about it for years afterwards: the demonstration was so big that the bridge shook.

Haitians were to elect a president on 29 November 1987 under the constitution they had approved in March, and it was to be the first vote in thirty years that the army did not control. Gangs loyal to the old regime spent the night before shooting people and knocking the radio stations off the air with grenades. In the morning voters queued at a school on Avenue John Brown, five blocks from the palace. An army convoy stopped, its officers spoke with the armed men waiting nearby, and drove on. The gunmen went into the school and killed everyone they found, finishing with machetes. About twenty bodies were left. Similar attacks ran across the capital. By midday the military council had cancelled the election and dissolved the electoral council that had organised it, explaining that this would allow Haiti to have a president freely chosen by the people. The United States suspended all aid. Nothing moved in Port-au-Prince for days.

At five in the morning on 7 February 1986 a single church bell began ringing in Port-au-Prince, and other sacristans climbed their towers and joined in. The message was that Jean-Claude Duvalier had gone. The city came out into the streets. Within hours the joy turned into a reckoning. Militiamen who had slept through the news put on their denim uniforms and walked into crowds that killed them, some with stones, some with a tyre filled with petrol and set alight, a killing Haitians named Pere Lebrun after the country's largest tyre importer. People carried green branches and the old blue and red flag, and painted those colours on their faces when they had no cloth. They walked on the pavement in front of the palace, which had been forbidden for a generation. A mob broke open Francois Duvalier's tomb and found it empty. The word for all of this was dechoukaj, a farmers' word meaning to uproot.