A priest enters the race in October and takes two thirds of the vote

Roger Lafontant, the Duvalierist enforcer, came home from Santo Domingo once Avril was gone and spent the autumn of 1990 rebuilding his following. The electoral council barred him from standing, and he answered with threats to wreck the vote as the 1987 election had been wrecked. Among the candidates who qualified, Marc Bazin was seen as Washington's man and the leading leftist, Victor Benoit, was thought dull. On 18 October the priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he would run, and the campaign changed shape overnight. His platform came to three words in Creole, participation, transparency and justice, with no mention of reconciliation. A grenade thrown into one of his crowds on 5 December killed seven people and wounded fifty three. More than a thousand foreign observers came, Jimmy Carter among them. Voters queued before the polls opened to mark the small fighting cock that was the symbol of Lavalas, and went home with a thumb stained in indelible ink. Aristide took sixty seven percent, three times the share of Bazin.

The Haitian army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency at the end of September 1991 and the boats began leaving. The United States would not send the people it stopped straight home as it had before, and it would not bring them ashore in Florida either, so the Coast Guard cutters became sea based jails while diplomats hunted for a third country willing to host the screening. By late November close to two thousand Haitians were crammed on the decks, some of the ships on patrol, others tied up at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay alongside an amphibious landing ship also being used to hold people. No third country agreed. On 17 November the cutter Confidence left Guantanamo with more than two hundred Haitians who had been screened out, and the next afternoon it put them on the docks at Port-au-Prince. Lawyers for the Haitian Refugee Center went to a federal judge in Miami that same day and obtained an order halting further returns.

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.

Through February 1990 the Haitian opposition assembled a common front. Eleven parties signed a declaration calling on General Prosper Avril to resign, among the signatories Marc Bazin, Louis Roy, Hubert de Ronceray, Rene Theodore, Sylvio Claude and the priest Antoine Adrien. Shops shut, schools closed and crowds filled the streets. An eleven year old girl was killed by a stray bullet while she sat studying. The American ambassador, Alvin Adams, then asked Avril to meet him. Adams reminded the general of Richard Nixon's resignation and told him his accounts in United States banks could be frozen. Avril agreed to go. At twenty minutes to three on the afternoon of Saturday 10 March 1990 he was driven to his house in Petionville, having issued no public statement. Twenty minutes later the acting army chief of staff, General Herard Abraham, appeared on television to announce the fifth change of government in four years. The army would hold power for seventy two hours while a Supreme Court judge was found to serve as interim president.