1988, September 17–18: (The Septembre Coup: The Army Packs Namphy Off to the Floor Below Manigat at the Concord Hotel, Franck Romain Takes Asylum in the Domi…

1988, September 17–18: (The Septembre Coup: The Army Packs Namphy Off to the Floor Below Manigat at the Concord Hotel, Franck Romain Takes Asylum in the Dominican Embassy, the Putschists Cannot Agree on a Leader, and Prosper Avril — Anathema to the Peuple Souverain Two and a Half Years Earlier — Emerges as Top Man): The St.-Jean-Bosco massacre proved too much even for the army. A week later, younger, lower-ranking soldiers packed Namphy off to Santo Domingo, where he took a suite at the Concord Hotel on the floor below Professor Manigat. Franck Romain sought and received asylum in the Dominican Embassy and from there waited to see how events would unfold. Having rid themselves of Namphy, the putschists were unable to agree on who should lead the new government. Prosper Avril — anathema to the peuple souverain two and a half years earlier because of his Duvalier ties — now emerged as top man. The September coup — Namphy exiled to the same hotel and the same city as the professor he had overthrown three months earlier, the perpetrator of the church massacre sheltered by the same Dominican embassy that had harbored Duvalierists for three decades, and the new leader a figure whose entire career had been built in the service of the regime the February revolution had supposedly uprooted — demonstrated that post-Duvalier Haiti’s political carousel had not merely come full circle but was accelerating: each revolution producing a government more compromised than its predecessor, each coup justified by the excesses of the last while replicating those excesses in new form, the cast of characters rotating through power and exile and back again with the mechanical regularity of the figures on a cuckoo clock.