Word: priestly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...story chronicled the building of a night club in a small Peruvian town and its wild success despite the sermons of the local priest...
Back in Haiti, Mr. Miracle had been an embattled figure, the tumultuous center of a brewing storm. After the Duvalier dynasty was overthrown in 1986, the slender but resilient priest slowly emerged as the embodiment of hope. Aristide's church was filled with the excitement that lit up Haiti's poor, its unemployed, its peasantry and most of all its youth, when he and other liberationists taught that there was a slim possibility for democratic change...
Aristide is a man of contradictions. Soft-spoken and relaxed in private, he is like a pillar of fire when he addresses the public. As a priest he spoke tirelessly against what he considered "sham" elections -- then he became a candidate himself. In 1987 he thought the new, liberal Haitian constitution was a fancy-dress costume being worn by a brutal dictatorship; as President he learned to use it well. A longtime champion of human rights, he has been reticent until very recently about condemning mob violence...
...same kind of fervor that surrounded him as a priest followed him through his short but memorable candidacy in Haiti's first free and fair presidential elections. Aristide called his movement Lavalas, which in Creole means flood , or avalanche, and Haitians flooded around him in waves as he made visits to every corner of his country. Running against a former leader of the Duvaliers' repressive Tontons Macoutes and a handful of recidivist candidates, Aristide turned a lackluster election into a colorful political cockfight...
...slap in the face to certain sectors of Haitian society. The army was concerned, since Aristide had never made deals with the military in the tradition of most Haitian presidential candidates. The economic elite was worried because they had been telling each other for years that "that little priest" was a communist. The Roman Catholic Church was nervous because Aristide's relations with the Haitian hierarchy continued to be rocky...