Lafontant seizes the palace and a crowd burns the cathedral

The American ambassador met the winner at once, and a State Department official explained that the point was to warn the Duvalierists and the army off any thought of undermining him. Aristide told foreign businessmen they were welcome in Haiti, though word had spread that he had stood outside a rich man's house on election day and remarked that a dozen families could live in it. Roger Lafontant promised on Christmas Eve that Attila the Hun would not get through the gates. On New Year's Day 1991 Archbishop Ligonde used his sermon to warn against authoritarian rule and Bolshevism. On the evening of 6 January Lafontant and a band of macoutes took the National Palace, the interim president and the broadcasting stations, and he announced on television that he held power. The army stayed loyal and retook the palace at noon the next day. Crowds then hunted macoutes through Port-au-Prince, burned the eighteenth century cathedral, sacked the papal nunciature and killed thirty seven people.

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.

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.