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1990-12-16

1990-12-16: (Jean-Bertrand Aristide Elected President With Sixty-Seven Percent of the Vote, the First Genuinely Democratic Election in Haitian History, a Lib…

Haitian

1990-12-16: (Jean-Bertrand Aristide Elected President With Sixty-Seven Percent of the Vote, the First Genuinely Democratic Election in Haitian History, a Liberation Theology Priest Swept to Power by the Poorest People in the Hemisphere): On December 16, 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the presidential election with sixty-seven percent of the vote, the most democratic election Haiti had ever conducted. Born on July 15, 1953, Aristide was a Roman Catholic priest ordained in 1983, a member of the Salesian order, and a practitioner of Liberation Theology who had built his following in the slums of Port-au-Prince. His fiery oratory, broadcast on Catholic radio, made him the most popular figure in Haiti among the poor majority. The Salesian Order had expelled him in 1988 for inciting class struggle. The masses did not care about the Vatican’s opinion. They elected him because he spoke for them in a language they understood, about injustice they lived every day, with a fury they recognized as their own. He took office on February 7, 1991, exactly five years after Duvalier’s flight, promising political, economic, and social reform. He would last seven months.