Avril's record reads Duvalier from top to bottom

Prosper Avril was valedictorian of the 1961 class at Haiti's military academy, the last class to graduate before Francois Duvalier closed the school as a nest of plotters. He trained at the Marine Corps school at Quantico in Virginia under the American naval mission. He joined the presidential guard in 1969, well placed to benefit when power passed from father to son in 1971. He made money on arms purchases through the 1970s and managed much of the family's foreign portfolio. His wife, an army medical officer, became the Duvalier family nurse. He also hated Roger Lafontant, and he lacked the appetite for killing that ran through the militia. Taking power in September 1988 he promised an irreversible democracy, retired Williams Regala and Jean-Claude Paul, released prisoners, pulled in the death squads, refused Franck Romain safe passage and promised inquiries into the Jean-Rabel and election massacres. He sent Francois Benoit to Washington as ambassador. Duvalier had murdered Benoit's parents and relatives twenty five years earlier.

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.

On Sunday 11 September 1988 more than a thousand people were at mass at Saint Jean Bosco in Port-au-Prince, many of them wearing white to protest against Henri Namphy's plan to rewrite the 1987 constitution. The priest was Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Armed men in red armbands, most of them former members of the Duvalier militia, came into the church, accused the congregation of being communists, opened fire and set the building alight. The attack went on for three hours. An army barracks stood directly across the road and the soldiers in it did nothing. At least twelve people were killed and eighty wounded. Aristide was not hurt. The following day several of the attackers appeared on state television, described what they had done and announced that they would do it again at any mass he said. That broadcast finished Namphy. His own soldiers removed him within the week. Aristide came out of the affair a national figure.