Thirty years ago, President Aristide, victim of a military putsch, returned to power following the intervention of the United Nations. 

On December 16, 1990, at the end of an electoral campaign supervised by the UN but marked by violence, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, candidate of the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD), was elected President of Haiti with almost 67% of the vote and a turnout of over 75% of the electorate. The country, the poorest on the continent, was marked by chronic institutional instability. No fewer than five presidents had succeeded one another between 1986 and 1991, all of them overthrown by a military coup. On February 7, 1991, the young priest, a follower of liberation theology, took the helm of the country, despite an attempted putsch a month earlier, designed to prevent him from taking power. 

His program, launched as soon as he was inaugurated, was resolutely progressive, with agrarian reform, an increase in the minimum wage and a fairer distribution of national wealth, which won him broad popular support as well as the resentment of local elites. Above all, he displayed a firm determination to overhaul the army, police and public administration, inherited from the bloody Duvalier family dynasty, which had ruled the country with an iron fist for over three decades, and riddled with corruption. A special commission was also set up in February 1991 to investigate past crimes and human rights violations, including the massacres at Dandi, Rabel and Labadie.  

Aristide quickly became the target of a coalition of the wealthy: the bourgeoisie, the Church, the army and the press. On September 29, 1991, the latter orchestrated a military coup and overthrew the democratically elected president, barely seven months after his inauguration. The putsch caused little stir in Washington, which was wary of the new leader’s socialist tendencies and had in fact largely financed his conservative opponent, Marc Bazin, through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Indeed, unlike Aristide, Bazin was a former World Bank official, respectful of established interests and social hierarchies. 

The commander-in-chief of the army, Raoul Cédras, who had been promoted by Aristide and had sworn loyalty to the Constitution, then took power and carried out a ferocious crackdown on the deposed president’s supporters, killing several hundred people in the first few days. Several hundred thousand people were forced to flee abroad, in particular to the neighboring Dominican Republic and the United States, and the boat people issue quickly became a domestic political problem for Washington. President Aristide, a refugee in the United States, continued to enjoy the support and recognition of the international community, which imposed economic sanctions against the military junta.

In July 1993, Bill Clinton imposed the Governors Island agreements on Aristide and Cédras, placing the legitimate president on an equal footing with the putschist. These agreements provided for Aristide’s return within three months, on condition that he renounced his program of socio-economic reforms and strictly followed the neo-liberal recommendations of the IMF. On July 31, 1994, after several months of prevarication and the junta’s insistence on remaining in power despite the naval blockade, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 940, authorizing the deployment of a multinational military force, Operation Uphold Democracy, under the aegis of the United States. 

Faced with imminent intervention, the putschist Cédras agreed to receive a US delegation led by former president Jimmy Carter in September 1994, who succeeded in convincing him to relinquish power and leave the country, in exchange for a total amnesty. The UN was excluded from these negotiations, leading to the resignation of its special representative for Haiti, Dante Caputo, in protest. US troops landed on September 19, 1994, and on October 15, 1994, after three years in exile, President Aristide returned to Haiti and regained power. But he had no room for manoeuvre to carry out his project, apart from the IMF’s neo-liberal directives, made up of privatizations – in favor of US multinationals – and anti-social measures, in a country occupied by several thousand US soldiers until March 1995, and ravaged by poverty. According to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, more than 3,000 people were murdered during the three years of dictatorship by the military regime, which terrorized the population by leaving “severely mutilated corpses in the streets of Port-au-Prince, which, faced with the inaction of the authorities in power, were then devoured by animals”.

In 1995, Aristide decided to dissolve the army, discredited by its crimes and numerous interferences in the country’s democratic life, and to create a new police force. Washington demanded a key role in training the new police force, undermining the authority of the president and the sovereignty of the nation. Despite the obstacles imposed by the White House, Aristide remained very popular and aspired to stand for re-election on December 17, 1995, having been able to serve only a few months of his five-year term. Washington, unfavorable to Aristide, categorically refused, citing the 1987 Constitution, which prohibits two consecutive terms. Aristide supported his Prime Minister, René Préval, who was triumphantly elected.

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