An army unit under the police chief overthrows the government

Three days after the speech, a unit of the army commanded by the chief of police Michel Francois, at that point a major, carried out the coup that brought down Aristide and his government. Dupuy's account of the mechanism is a coalition rather than a barracks revolt: the army high command and the macoute camp acted with the support of the bourgeoisie, particularly its wealthiest faction, and loosed a campaign of terror, repression and killing on Aristide's supporters and on the prodemocratic camp as a whole. Aristide's life was spared only through the intervention of the French, United States and Venezuelan ambassadors, who arranged his passage into exile. The three years that followed, which occupy the last third of the book, are Dupuy's case study in how an internationally negotiated restoration changed what the restored president could be.

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.

Much of the armed conflict in Africa since 1990 has been a contest between armed entrepreneurs over minerals, people and territory. Richard Reid sets that pattern in a long history whose roots run well behind the immediate postcolonial decades. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu and then spilled west, as Ugandan and Rwandan forces helped remove Mobutu from power and afterwards fell out with each other, leaving eastern Congo a permanent war zone of shifting identities. Somalia collapsed entirely, and the American led relief operation there ended in disaster. In Sierra Leone and Liberia the state gave way to leaders of ragged youth militias who exchanged precious minerals for weapons. Sudan signed a peace accord in 2005 while Khartoum backed killing in Darfur that many called genocidal. Sierra Leone and Liberia began to recover, and Liberia elected the first woman head of state on the continent in 2006. The United Nations has spent more on African wars since Rwanda. The continent has been awash in cheap weapons since the Cold War ended.

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.