Macoutes attack a congregation at Saint Jean Bosco during Sunday mass

Dupuy records the bloody Sunday massacre at Father Aristide's church of Saint Jean Bosco on 11 September 1988 as the immediate provocation for what followed. The mechanism was reprisal from below. Within days of the attack, bands of the macoutes who had taken part were hunted down through Port-au-Prince, beaten and killed, and the same rage inside the ranks of the army produced the coup that removed Namphy the following week. The episode is central to Dupuy's larger account of Aristide, whose survival of repeated attempts on his life confirmed his prophetic standing among his followers and made him the emblem of resistance to the macoute system. It also shows the pattern Dupuy returns to, in which violence against the popular movement generated a popular counterviolence that the army command could neither control nor disown.

In 1990 the Haitian Centers Council was among the principal organisers of the biggest demonstration Haitians had ever held in New York City. The target was a policy of the Centers for Disease Control that barred Haitians from giving blood. The agency had listed Haitian immigrants as probable carriers of the virus that causes AIDS, and the label followed Haitians in the United States through the whole of the 1980s, into their housing, their work and their children's schools. The council itself had been formed in 1982, when the Haitian Neighborhood Center in Manhattan, Haitian Americans United for Progress in Queens, Charlemagne Peralte and the Flatbush Haitian Center in Brooklyn and two other centres created an umbrella body. It went on to sue the New York Board of Education over underfunded bilingual programmes and to lobby Congress for asylum for the forty nine thousand Haitians who fled after the coup of 1991.

The 1987 constitution sent the presidency to a member of the Cour de Cassation, and the judge next in line, Gilbert Austin, was thought too close to the departing general to be able to govern. Austin removed himself. The post went instead to Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, at forty six the youngest judge on the court, appointed to it by a liberal justice minister during the years of the military council. Prosper Avril had agreed to leave office while refusing to leave the country, where he would have served as a rallying point for the right. American pressure settled that too, and on Monday at dawn a United States Air Force plane carried him and his family to Florida. Pascal-Trouillot was sworn in on 13 March 1990 as the first woman to head the Haitian state. General Herard Abraham handed her the blue and red sash and said that the army awaited her orders. In a white linen suit she told a cheering crowd that she wanted nothing except to serve the country. Elections were set for December.

The constitution promulgated in March 1987 was designed backwards from the thing it meant to prevent. Haiti had spent twenty nine years under a president who could not be removed, so the new text moved the running of the government to a prime minister answerable to parliament and left the president as head of state. It set out fundamental rights, made the judiciary independent, and handed elections to a body outside the army. It recognised Kreyol as an official language beside French, which acknowledged the ninety percent of the population who spoke no French at all. It was the most ambitious charter written in the country's one hundred and eighty three years. It was also written by and for a population that had never lived under the arrangements it described. Charters in Haiti had been discarded roughly once a decade since 1804. Whether this one could hold against the army, the old militia and the families who financed both was the question the next four years answered.