The rise and fall of Aristide

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians cheered when U.S. troops helped restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994. Last week, rebels drove him into exile. What went wrong?

How did Aristide get his start?

Aristide became a national hero in the 1980s as a crusading Roman Catholic priest at the St. Jean Bosco church, in one of Port-au-Prince’s worst slums. From the pulpit and on a regular national radio broadcast, he denounced the brutal Duvalier family dictatorship and demanded justice, political rights, and a decent standard of living for Haiti’s desperately poor masses. Aristide’s church was burned to the ground, and several attempts were made on his life. But he refused to be silenced. A fellow priest, the Rev. Antonio Sele, said the tiny, bespectacled Aristide was “the one chosen by God for Haiti to denounce injustice and show us the truth.”

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