Istwa Nou

On 2 April 1989 the troops of the main barracks and the Leopard battalion rose against Prosper Avril. Their stated grievance was the constitution he had gutted, and in particular the article protecting soldiers from arbitrary dismissal. Their real grievances were pay and the American pressure to shut down the cocaine traffic that had become the officer corps' best business. The fighting ran on for a week in fits and starts. Avril won, and the victory cost him. He now owed his position to the men who had stayed loyal, which left him less room to move than before. He appointed his own electoral council and grew impatient when it produced nothing. Having failed to get an agreement out of Haitians, he invited foreigners to impose one. In August a delegation of Caribbean Community foreign ministers came to Port-au-Prince, met the council and announced that elections would be held in November 1990, there being too little time to arrange them for that November. Eighteen more months of military government.

Congress passed sixty million dollars in aid for Haiti in June 1989 and attached conditions: full restoration of the 1987 constitution and real reform of the army. Prosper Avril could not have met them had he wanted to, since he had survived April only by leaning on the officers those conditions were aimed at. President Bush declined to renew a ten million dollar food programme. Washington sent a new ambassador, Alvin Adams, who spoke Kreyol and used proverbs. On arrival he told reporters that Haiti needed democracy urgently because bourik chaje pa kanpe, a loaded donkey cannot stand about. The capital named him bourik chaje, and Avril kept him waiting weeks before accepting his credentials. In October, as the second anniversary of the election massacre approached, Louis Dejoie, Evans Paul and two others called a march on the palace. Paul and the other two were beaten and then shown on national television in bloodied shirts. Dejoie went into hiding and called it the beginning of Duvalier the third.