Forty six thousand assembly jobs in 1990 fall to five thousand by 1995

Light assembly manufacturing grew fast in Haiti from the middle of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s and was for that whole stretch the one part of the economy that worked. In 1990 it employed 46,000 people spread across some 250 firms. The workforce was mainly women, and each employee supported about three or four other people, mostly in the capital. The industry ran on imported raw materials, sold into the American market, and made toys, electronics and textiles on the strength of Haiti's one comparative advantage, low wages. Its share of total export value rose from under five percent in the mid 1960s to over two thirds by the mid 1980s. After the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, international sanctions sent energy costs up, removed spare parts and inputs from the market, and took the customers away. By the beginning of 1995 no more than 5000 workers were left in the sector.

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.

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.

In February 1992 the Bush administration exempted goods made in Port-au-Prince assembly plants from the embargo. More than fifty thousand jobs in that sector had gone already. Writing in March, Elliott Abrams set out the trap the policy had built: the United States was wrecking an economy, producing emigrants, and then refusing them shelter. Guantanamo filled and Washington began returning people to Haiti. Water was diverted from the Artibonite to drive the Peligre generators, which hurt farming, while Petionville dined on French wine and Norwegian salmon. The officers found the money to surface the last rough stretch of road to the Dominican border at Malpasse, through which the embargo leaked. A fresh proposal that acknowledged Aristide's title without fixing a date for his return, and offered the officers amnesty, could not win a majority in the rump parliament, where members waved guns during debate. Petrol reached eighteen dollars a gallon. Georges Izmery was shot dead in daylight two hundred yards from a police station. Marc Bazin took over as de facto prime minister in June.