Word: lafontante
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President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot was at home with her family when an army tank driver knocked on her door at 10 p.m. As gunfire echoed in the distance, he told her there was trouble and that she would be safer at the presidential palace, three miles away in Port-au...
Lafontant forced Pascal-Trouillot to resign and named himself provisional President. He told reporters that his putsch had the full backing of the military, blustering that President-elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the radical priest chosen by an overwhelming majority last month and scheduled to take office Feb. 7, was a...
But Lafontant, a gynecologist who was the muscle behind the regime of exiled dictator Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier from 1981 to 1985, turned out to be a general without an army. In an unprecedented gesture of support for democracy, the Haitian military, led by army Chief of Staff General...
The coup was quashed too late, however, to prevent a bloody and destructive outburst of public anger. A mob scaled the 10-ft.-high walls of Lafontant's Port-au-Prince compound, killing a dozen suspected Tontons Macoutes holed up inside. Infuriated at what was seen as support for the...
By the time it was over, more than 70 people had been killed in four days of violence. Aristide helped to calm the rioting throngs by calling for "vigilance without vengeance." In hiding after several assassination attempts, he should benefit from the capture of his main enemy, which leaves the...