Overview:
A glance again at Roger Lafontant’s try to stop President-elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide from taking workplace after provisional President Ertha Pascal Trouillot was to step down.
Editor’s word: This story is a part of our “Right now in Historical past” sequence, the place The Haitian Occasions revisits pivotal moments that formed Haiti and its diaspora.
On Jan. 7, 1991, Haiti woke as much as the acquainted risk of a previous it was making an attempt to flee.
Roger Lafontant, a former inside minister below dictator Jean-Claude “Child Doc” Duvalier, introduced on state radio that he had seized energy and positioned President-elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide below arrest. Troopers loyal to Lafontant moved rapidly, occupying key authorities buildings in Port-au-Prince.
The tried coup got here only one month earlier than Aristide’s inauguration. His December 1990 victory — with practically 70% of the vote — marked Haiti’s first broadly-recognized democratic election after a long time of dictatorship, repression and army rule.
For a lot of Haitians, Lafontant’s transfer was not simply an assault on the president-elect. It was an try to pull the nation again into Duvalierism.
A well-recognized face of repression
Lafontant was no political outsider. As a senior determine within the Duvalier regime, he was intently related to the Tonton Macoutes, the dreaded paramilitary pressure that enforced dictatorship by way of violence and intimidation.
After Duvalier fled Haiti in 1986, Lafontant spent years in exile, largely in the USA. He returned as Haiti’s political transition faltered, positioning himself as a defender of “order” towards fashionable actions demanding accountability and reform.
His coup try adopted a well-worn script in Haitian historical past: elite backing, army pressure and the idea that the plenty might be subdued.
This time, that calculation failed.
Inside hours of Lafontant’s announcement, tens of 1000’s of Haitians poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince and different cities. Unarmed civilians confronted troopers, arrange barricades and demanded Aristide’s launch.
Radio stations broadcast pressing appeals for resistance. Church bells rang. Neighborhoods mobilized.
Confronted with overwhelming fashionable opposition and a army excessive command unwilling to totally help him, Lafontant’s management collapsed in lower than a day. Lafontant successfully managed to occupy the Nationwide Palace after taking provisional President Ertha Pascal Trouillot hostage. He dominated for about half a day earlier than getting arrested.
Justice, briefly served
Lafontant was tried by a civilian court docket and sentenced to life in jail for treason, a uncommon second of accountability for crimes tied to political violence in Haiti. Lafontant was killed on the night time of Sept. 29, 1991, by a soldier guarding the Nationwide Penitentiary, when the previous Macoutes militia chief tried to flee in the course of the buildup of the bloody army coup that successfully overthrew Aristide.
The failed coup didn’t finish Haiti’s political instability. Simply eight months later, Aristide was himself overthrown in a far bloodier army coup, ushering in three years of repression earlier than his return in 1994.
Nonetheless, Jan. 7, 1991, stays important.
It was a day when Haitians demonstrated that democracy was not solely one thing received on the poll field, however one thing they had been prepared to defend with their our bodies.
In a rustic the place coups have too usually succeeded, this one didn’t — as a result of the individuals refused to let it.