Wealthy families buy the army eight months into Haitian democracy

The first coup came in September 1991, eight months after Aristide took office, installing a military government under Raoul Cédras. The authors report that as soon as Aristide was elected several of the wealthiest families began collecting the millions they would need to pay the army to conduct another coup, work carried out over the summer of 1991, and that the New York Times reported in October that some wealthy Haitians offered as much as five thousand dollars apiece to selected soldiers and policemen for their participation. This is the event their statistical work is built on: they test whether a family's centrality in the historical marriage network predicts participation, using genealogical data matched to import firm records, and find that highly central families were more likely to participate even holding economic interest constant. Where this account departs from the standard one: The paper argues against explanations of coups that rest only on elite interests, showing that among families with equivalent economic stakes it is position in the marriage network that predicts who actually participates.

Haitians had been settling in New York for thirty years, and Rara had surfaced there in bursts: at demonstrations against the Duvalier government in the early 1980s, and during strikes involving Haitian labour groups. None of it was organised. The summer of 1990 changed that. A band called Rara Djakout was founded in Brooklyn, and a full Rara went out in Prospect Park every Sunday, the same people returning each week to dance and to add verses. Musicians from the Haitian roots movement started it after a drumming circle in the park refused to lend them a drum. They borrowed drums from a friend, came back the next day playing Rara, and walked past. Word of mouth brought hundreds of young people out. By 1995 four separate bands were playing in Prospect Park and in Central Park on summer weekends. Lifted out of Lent into July, the New York Rara had no queens, no cemetery visits and no seven year contracts with the spirits.

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.

Archaeologists working in the Caribbean have often judged the size of a pre-Columbian settlement from the spread of pottery and stone visible on the ground. Work published by Versteeg in 1993 showed that the measure is unreliable, because what reaches the surface is a small and uneven sample of what was buried and does not mark the edges of the place where people actually lived. Many island villages have therefore been recorded as smaller than they were. The finding carries a second warning. A finished artefact is the end of a process, and reading only the end product hides the labour, the movement of materials and the shifts of style that made it. Caribbean sites were reworked continually, and careful mapping and excavation are what recover that. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the Taino settlements of Hispaniola were sized by the same rough method, and how many people met Columbus in 1492 has been argued over ever since.