Istwa Nou

The massacre at Saint Jean Bosco was too much even for the Haitian army. A week later junior soldiers flew General Henri Namphy out of the country. He checked into the Concord Hotel in Santo Domingo, one floor beneath Leslie Manigat, whom he had deposed in June and sent to that same city. Franck Romain, who had ordered the church attack, walked into the Dominican embassy and claimed asylum. The soldiers who had made the coup then discovered they could not agree on a leader. The man who emerged was Prosper Avril, who two and a half years earlier had been forced off the first military council because the crowds would not accept a Duvalier insider. Haiti had reached the point where the same men rotated through power, exile and power again, and where each government arrived denouncing the excesses of the one before it while preparing its own. Four governments had come and gone since February 1986. Two of the four were now in the same hotel.

Prosper Avril was valedictorian of the 1961 class at Haiti's military academy, the last class to graduate before Francois Duvalier closed the school as a nest of plotters. He trained at the Marine Corps school at Quantico in Virginia under the American naval mission. He joined the presidential guard in 1969, well placed to benefit when power passed from father to son in 1971. He made money on arms purchases through the 1970s and managed much of the family's foreign portfolio. His wife, an army medical officer, became the Duvalier family nurse. He also hated Roger Lafontant, and he lacked the appetite for killing that ran through the militia. Taking power in September 1988 he promised an irreversible democracy, retired Williams Regala and Jean-Claude Paul, released prisoners, pulled in the death squads, refused Franck Romain safe passage and promised inquiries into the Jean-Rabel and election massacres. He sent Francois Benoit to Washington as ambassador. Duvalier had murdered Benoit's parents and relatives twenty five years earlier.

Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, indicted in Miami and an obstacle between Prosper Avril and American money, died suddenly in the autumn of 1988. The story in Port-au-Prince was poisoned pumpkin soup. The State Department released fifteen million dollars of suspended aid and held back seventy million more. France waited. More than a thousand people attended Paul's funeral, a good number of them senior officers, which said something about how much of the army lived off the drug trade. In December, with no further money coming, Avril let Franck Romain leave for exile. That same month the Salesian order expelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide on the grounds that he incited violence and class struggle. He had called the senior church hierarchy imperialists in cassocks. This time the marches and sit-ins that had reversed earlier decisions changed nothing. Still a priest and no longer in the order, Aristide went back to the orphanage he had opened for street children in Port-au-Prince and considered what to do next.