1988, October – December: (Colonel Paul’s Poisoned Pumpkin Soup, $15 Million Released but $70 Million Still Held Back, France Suspicious, the Drug Trade’s Pr…

1988, October – December: (Colonel Paul’s Poisoned Pumpkin Soup, $15 Million Released but $70 Million Still Held Back, France Suspicious, the Drug Trade’s Profitability vs. Reform, a Thousand Mourners at Paul’s Funeral Including Key Army Figures, Avril Relents and Allows Romain to Slip into Exile, and the Salesians Expel Aristide for Inciting Violence and Class Struggle — Imperialists in Cassocks, No Marches Can Reverse the Verdict, and Titid Retreats to His Orphanage to Ponder His Future): All of these steps were taken with an eye toward international opinion. Colonel Paul’s sudden death — many said after eating poisoned pumpkin soup — several weeks later removed yet another irritant in Washington–Port-au-Prince relations. Relenting somewhat, the State Department released some fifteen million dollars in aid that had been suspended, but still held back was an additional seventy million — the real prize that Avril was angling for. France, suspicious, decided to await developments before opening her pocketbook. In taking these actions Avril was gambling: the drug trade was greatly profitable for many in the army, and the officer corps had grown increasingly confident in its ability to withstand external pressures for change. More than a thousand people showed up for Colonel Paul’s funeral, many of them key army figures. In December, when it became clear that no further aid would be immediately forthcoming, Avril relented and allowed Franck Romain, author of the St.-Jean-Bosco massacre, to slip into exile. That same month the Salesian order, taking its signals from a Rome fed up with the fire-breathing Haitian cleric’s brand of radicalism, expelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide, accusing him of inciting violence and class struggle. Aristide’s description of senior church hierarchy as imperialists in cassocks had done nothing to endear him to the Vatican. This time no protest marches or sit-ins could reverse the verdict. Expelled from the order but still a priest, Titid — the nickname derived from his slight stature — as he was becoming known, retreated to the orphanage he had set up for Port-au-Prince street urchins, there to ponder his future. The expulsion of Aristide — a priest driven from his order by the same Vatican that had thundered Fòk sa chanje five years earlier, expelled not for any doctrinal heresy but for taking the Pope’s own words seriously enough to act on them — revealed the structural contradiction at the heart of the Church’s engagement with Haitian politics: Rome wanted change in Haiti but not the kind of change that Ti Legliz was producing, a liberation theology rooted in the lived experience of the Haitian poor whose logical conclusion was not the moderate democratic transition the Vatican and Washington envisioned but a radical redistribution of power that threatened ecclesiastical authority as surely as it threatened military authority.