19 September to 10 October 1994 · Haitianspan
American troops land to cheers and find no one left to surrender to
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The first American soldiers came down at the civilian airport in Port-au-Prince at half past nine on the morning of 19 September 1994, in full battle gear, and found thousands of Haitians cheering them through the perimeter fence. Lieutenant General Henry Shelton commanded them. Haitians renamed him Shelltox, after the insecticide. Over the following days troops spread out to Cap-Haitien and across the country, and in most places there was nobody to take a surrender from, because the Haitian army had changed into civilian clothes and gone home, leaving its barracks and offices standing empty. Evans Paul came out of hiding after three years. Legislators flew back from exile so that parliament would have a quorum for whatever Washington needed passed. Fifty Special Forces men moved into the Casernes Dessalines and spent their first days cleaning the latrines. On 4 October soldiers raided the headquarters of FRAPH and carried off some sixty thousand pages of documents, which the public learned about a year later. Within days it emerged that the FRAPH leader Emmanuel Constant had been on the CIA payroll. Cedras handed over command on 10 October and flew to Panama.
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