A judge of the supreme court takes the presidency for eleven months

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.

In November 1991 roughly three hundred and ten Haitian men, women and children were held on the grounds of the United States naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They lived in huts with tin roofs inside barbed wire, guarded by marines with automatic weapons, using portable toilets that were rarely cleaned, among rats and vermin. They tied plastic rubbish bags to the walls to keep the rain out and hung sheets for privacy. They could leave only under military escort and could be sent to the brig without a hearing for breaking camp rules. Soldiers in full riot gear swept the sleeping quarters before dawn. Judge Johnson described these conditions in his opinion in the Haitian Centers Council case. The camp, known as Camp Bulkeley, ran from 1991 to 1993, and every person in it had tested positive for HIV. It was the only detention camp anywhere built for refugees with that virus.

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.

Jean Bertrand Aristide took the oath of office as president of Haiti in February 1991 in Kreyol, and received the presidential sash from a manbo, a priestess of Vodou. Both acts were read exactly as he meant them. French was the language of the elite and Catholicism was its religion, official in law until 1987, and the new president used the language of the majority and the hands of their priesthood at the moment of assuming power. In 1995 he opened the gates of the presidential mansion and served food to beggars himself, turning a white house built on the model of the Petit Trianon into something that could be called a national palace. Underneath the symbolism sat a hard count. Five provisional governments held power between 1986 and 1991, and after the coup a military dictatorship under Raoul Cedras ran three separate administrations from 1991 to 1994.