UNESCO marks a slave route and Ouidah builds the monuments to go on it

In 1992 UNESCO began a project on the routes of the slave trade, on the argument that hiding a history of that size blocks any reconciliation built on top of it. Ceremonies and monuments followed in Benin, Ghana and Ivory Coast. In Ouidah it produced a festival of Vodun arts, and dozens of artists from Africa and the diaspora were commissioned to make sculptures. Their work now lines the road running from the town down to the beach where captives were loaded into canoes. One stop is a memorial said to stand over the common grave of people who died before embarkation. Another is the Tree of Return, where guides say the departing were made to circle three times so their spirits would come home, and another the Tree of Forgetting, which was supposed to strip their memories. Robin Law finds no trace of either tree in any record before the 1990s.

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.

The Haitian army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency at the end of September 1991 and the boats began leaving. The United States would not send the people it stopped straight home as it had before, and it would not bring them ashore in Florida either, so the Coast Guard cutters became sea based jails while diplomats hunted for a third country willing to host the screening. By late November close to two thousand Haitians were crammed on the decks, some of the ships on patrol, others tied up at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay alongside an amphibious landing ship also being used to hold people. No third country agreed. On 17 November the cutter Confidence left Guantanamo with more than two hundred Haitians who had been screened out, and the next afternoon it put them on the docks at Port-au-Prince. Lawyers for the Haitian Refugee Center went to a federal judge in Miami that same day and obtained an order halting further returns.

On 30 September 1991 the Haitian army removed Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency, seven months after his inauguration. The officer at the head of the coup was Raoul Cedras, whom Aristide had made army chief of staff that July. Cedras and his partners governed until October 1994. Those three years were the most violent stretch in Haiti since the worst of the Duvalier period. Human rights organisations counted several thousand political killings. Bodies were left in the streets each morning as a message. Rape was used as a routine instrument against the families of Aristide supporters. Neighbourhoods identified with the Lavalas movement were burned. Hundreds of thousands of people abandoned their homes and lived hidden elsewhere in the country, and tens of thousands more went to sea in small boats toward Florida. The regime held on through a hemispheric oil and trade embargo, a United Nations arms embargo and three years of negotiation. It gave up power only when American troops were already in the air.