The shooting starts at Freres and Sylvio Claude is burned alive

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.

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.

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.

In 1991 the painter Edouard Duval Carrie produced a representation of Baron Samdi, head of the spirits of the dead, in which the figure's resemblance to Francois Duvalier is unmistakable and blood streams from his exposed phallus. Duvalier had ruled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971 and had deliberately dressed himself in the iconography of the Baron, black suit, black hat, nasal voice. The painting takes the borrowing back. It is a standing feature of Haitian art that the spirits are shown intervening in politics, quarrelling over the country, removing presidents and installing them. Camaau Rameau painted an assembly of the principal spirits, Azaka, Ezili Freda, Ogou, Ezili Danto and Baron Samdi, gathered to give counsel on the bloody dramas that surround power in Haiti. Duval Carrie's version is less consultative. It says that the evil forces running the country have taken up residence in the cemetery.