Aristide governs around parliament and the officers start counting

Aristide chose as prime minister Rene Preval, an agronomist and bakery owner with no political record who had survived the 1988 attack on St Jean Bosco with him. Doubting that the National Assembly would confirm the choice, he never submitted it. He set about turning Lavalas into a personal movement, much as Francois Duvalier had built his own party thirty years earlier, and left out of the cabinet the party that had carried him to office. In March a Haitian youth delegation went to Cuba. In April a crowd chanting for Aristide for life gathered outside an uncooperative Senate. Ertha Pascal-Trouillot was briefly jailed as an alleged accomplice in the January coup attempt. Lafontant received a life sentence in July and Aristide declared an impromptu holiday. He replaced General Abraham with Cedras that same month, kept every senior military appointment provisional, ordered the rural section chiefs to report to the justice ministry, proposed a security force of his own, and moved against smuggling and the drug trade. By September the officers had counted their losses.

The historical research department of the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews in Chicago in 1991. Its claim was that Jews had dominated the Atlantic slave trade. Through the late 1980s and the middle 1990s the same claim was preached on American college campuses by Nation of Islam speakers, among them Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, who described Jews as bloodsuckers, and it was taken up by Afrocentric professors such as Leonard Jeffries. This happened as the alliances between Black and Jewish organisations formed in the civil rights years were falling apart. Jesse Jackson and other Black leaders denounced the charge, and historians of slavery including David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher published refutations. The book did not go away. A reader looking for material on Blacks and Jews still meets it first, together with a supply of reviews praising its research.

Trouble began on 29 September 1991 at the army base at Freres outside Port-au-Prince and at the Cafeteria barracks. The radio stations went off the air. In Cayes that night Sylvio Claude, an opposition leader who had survived years of Duvalierist prisons, was burned to death after leaving a political meeting. The next morning soldiers opened fire on Aristide's house in the suburbs of the capital, where he was resting after his trip to the United Nations. Troops still loyal to him reached the house around noon with an armoured personnel carrier. The French ambassador, Jean-Rafael Dufour, rode beside him for the six miles to the National Palace while the convoy was shot at along the way. Somewhere in the course of the same day Roger Lafontant was killed in his cell at the national penitentiary, and it was said afterwards that the order had come from Aristide in the last hours he held the office. Seven months of elected government in Haiti had ended.

On 16 December 1990 Haitians went to the polls in an election that international observers judged clean. It was the first time in the country's history that the outcome was genuinely open and the count genuinely honest. Since independence in 1804 Haiti had held rigged plebiscites and army managed successions, and the presidency had passed by coup far more often than by ballot. The winner was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a parish priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince who had entered the race two months earlier. He took roughly two thirds of the votes cast, about three times the share of his nearest rival, the World Bank economist Marc Bazin. The margin mattered as much as the result. A president chosen by that many poor voters carried a mandate for land reform, higher wages and the prosecution of the old regime's killers, and everyone who stood to lose by those things understood it the same day. Aristide would hold the office for seven months.