The army refuses to restore a macoute and the coup collapses

On 6 January 1991 Roger Lafontant, who had commanded the tonton macoutes under Jean-Claude Duvalier, seized the National Palace and took the interim president Ertha Pascal-Trouillot hostage. His purpose was to prevent the inauguration of Jean-Bertrand Aristide a month later. The army did not join him. Its officers worked out that restoring a macoute chief three weeks after two thirds of Haitian voters had chosen Aristide would set off violence they could not contain, and they retook the palace within twenty four hours. Lafontant was arrested and later sentenced to life. The episode showed what the December election had settled and what it had left standing. The Duvalierist apparatus had lost the state. It still held money, weapons and men, and it would move against any government that proposed to try its members for what they had done. The same calculation that saved Aristide in January was made against him nine months later.

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.

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.

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.