September to 17 December 1995 · Haitianspan
Aristide keeps his promise to go and Preval wins on a quarter turnout
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Lavalas took seventy-one of eighty-three seats in the parliamentary elections at the end of September 1995. Washington had by then spent close to six hundred million dollars in Haiti and cut its garrison to two thousand soldiers. Pressure built for Aristide to claim the three years he spent in exile as time owed to his term, and he said nothing for weeks while forty-five percent of his budget arrived from foreign donors. In November his cousin, the deputy Jean-Hubert Feuille, was shot dead after leaving the palace. At the funeral Aristide told his followers to go into the districts of big houses and heavy weapons and disarm the people living there, and reminded the assembled diplomats that Haiti had one head of state. Houses burned, a radio station was attacked, and the gourde fell sixteen percent. On 27 November he confirmed he would leave on 7 February 1996. Rene Preval, an agronomist and bakery owner trained in Belgium, won the December election with eighty-eight percent of a twenty-eight percent turnout.
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