Aristide wins seventy percent and starts collecting import taxes

The 1990 election brought Aristide to power with almost seventy percent of the vote on a platform of pro-poor redistribution and a more interventionist state role in economic development. During the first period of democracy in 1991 the regime increased enforcement of tax collection including import fees and arrears, and the tax directorate recorded an unprecedented rise in total receipts, which reversed what earlier governments had managed. The government also imposed price controls on products of first necessity such as rice and wheat, and attempted legislation raising the minimum wage to about three dollars a day. The authors set this beside a long record of private sector participation in transitions, in which commercial interests were often wealthy enough in alliance to buy a segment of the army, a private army or crowds of demonstrators and thereby unseat a governing faction.

Through the autumn of 1992 nobody in the exiled Haitian government would say publicly what should happen if negotiation failed. Calls for armed resistance came mostly from people at a safe distance. Foreign military intervention was the one proposal nobody would make aloud, though debate at the United Nations was moving toward it. Nor did anyone suggest cutting off the money Haitians abroad sent home, which ran to 250 million dollars a year and was the country's largest source of foreign exchange. Aristide worked the constituencies open to him, speaking at rallies in Central Park and with the Congressional Black Caucus. Bill Clinton, campaigning for the presidency, called himself appalled that the Bush administration was sending Haitian boat people home. On 3 November 1992 he won. The Caucus counted for more in a Democratic administration, and Clinton had promised to change the refugee policy. One Haitian in four now lived outside Haiti. Who ruled in Port-au-Prince had become a question that American voters could be asked.

Ertha Pascal-Trouillot trained first in mechanography in 1969, then took her degree at the law school of Gonaives in August 1971. The school had just introduced a required final dissertation, and she was the first student to defend one, on the legal status of the Haitian woman in social legislation. She was sworn in at the Port-au-Prince bar, argued before the justices of the peace, the civil courts, the court of appeal and the court of cassation, and specialised in labour, family and civil status cases. She sat on the bar council from 1977, became the first Haitian woman judge of the Port-au-Prince civil court in January 1979, the first at the court of appeal in September 1985 and the first at the court of cassation in November 1986. From that seat she was called to the presidency of Haiti, which she held from 13 March 1990 to 7 February 1991.

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.