Istwa Nou

Ertha Pascal-Trouillot reopened the schools and abolished censorship in her first days, then found that little else lay within her reach. The army sat in barracks and grew restless. The tonton macoutes, the militia built by the Duvalier family, kept their weapons. A council of state with nineteen members could veto anything she proposed, and many of them meant to run in the December elections she had been installed to organise. On the day her cabinet took office, armed men seized six elderly nuns at St Rose of Lima, beat them and left. She made few public appearances, quarrelled with the council, and watched the killings climb again. In May 1990 the New York Times reported that General Herard Abraham's soldiers had gone unpaid. Haitian exports for 1989 came to 153 million dollars, down from 223 million in 1985, the last full year of Jean-Claude Duvalier's rule. In August the treasury could not raise the foreign currency for a tanker of oil, and the country went ten days with no petroleum at all.

Roger Lafontant, the Duvalierist enforcer, came home from Santo Domingo once Avril was gone and spent the autumn of 1990 rebuilding his following. The electoral council barred him from standing, and he answered with threats to wreck the vote as the 1987 election had been wrecked. Among the candidates who qualified, Marc Bazin was seen as Washington's man and the leading leftist, Victor Benoit, was thought dull. On 18 October the priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced that he would run, and the campaign changed shape overnight. His platform came to three words in Creole, participation, transparency and justice, with no mention of reconciliation. A grenade thrown into one of his crowds on 5 December killed seven people and wounded fifty three. More than a thousand foreign observers came, Jimmy Carter among them. Voters queued before the polls opened to mark the small fighting cock that was the symbol of Lavalas, and went home with a thumb stained in indelible ink. Aristide took sixty seven percent, three times the share of Bazin.