9 February to September 1991 · Haitianspan
Aristide governs around parliament and the officers start counting
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Aristide chose as prime minister Rene Preval, an agronomist and bakery owner with no political record who had survived the 1988 attack on St Jean Bosco with him. Doubting that the National Assembly would confirm the choice, he never submitted it. He set about turning Lavalas into a personal movement, much as Francois Duvalier had built his own party thirty years earlier, and left out of the cabinet the party that had carried him to office. In March a Haitian youth delegation went to Cuba. In April a crowd chanting for Aristide for life gathered outside an uncooperative Senate. Ertha Pascal-Trouillot was briefly jailed as an alleged accomplice in the January coup attempt. Lafontant received a life sentence in July and Aristide declared an impromptu holiday. He replaced General Abraham with Cedras that same month, kept every senior military appointment provisional, ordered the rural section chiefs to report to the justice ministry, proposed a security force of his own, and moved against smuggling and the drug trade. By September the officers had counted their losses.
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