1990, February – March 10: (The Joint Declaration of Eleven Parties, the General Strike, an Eleven-Year-Old Girl Killed by a Stray Bullet While Studying, Ada…

1990, February – March 10: (The Joint Declaration of Eleven Parties, the General Strike, an Eleven-Year-Old Girl Killed by a Stray Bullet While Studying, Adams Invokes the Nixon Resignation and Threatens to Freeze Avril’s U.S. Bank Accounts, Avril Steps Down at 2:40 P.M. on Saturday March 10 Issuing No Public Statement, General Hérard Abraham Announces Haiti’s Fifth Change of Government in Four Years, the Army Caretaker for Seventy-Two Hours Under the 1987 Constitution, and Three Days of Confusion): Roy and de Ronceray were soon back in Haiti, and over several weeks there evolved enough consensus among the opposition to issue a joint declaration calling for Avril to resign. The signers were a veritable who’s who of Haitian politics — Louis Roy, Marc Bazin, Hubert de Ronceray, René Théodore, Sylvio Claude, and the redoubtable père Antoine Adrien; all told, some eleven parties signed the manifesto. To underline the urgency of matters, shops shuttered, schools closed, and people took to the streets. Inevitably there were casualties, among them an eleven-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet while studying. Three days later, at the request of Ambassador Adams, Prosper Avril met with the American envoy. Adams, invoking the Nixon resignation and, more practically, threatening that Avril’s U.S. bank accounts would be frozen, prevailed on Avril to step down in order to avert further bloodshed. At 2:40 in the afternoon on Saturday, March 10, 1990, issuing no public statement, Prosper Avril was taken by motorcade to his Pétionville home. At three o’clock General Hérard Abraham, the acting army Chief of Staff, went on television to announce Haiti’s fifth change of government in four years. In a one-minute speech, Abraham announced that the army would act as caretaker for seventy-two hours while, in accordance with the 1987 constitution, an as yet unnamed Supreme Court Justice would take power until elections could be held. There then ensued three days of confusion. The fall of Avril — accomplished not by popular insurrection or military coup but by an American ambassador’s threat to freeze a general’s bank accounts — revealed the ultimate dependency that had come to define Haitian governance in the post-Duvalier era: a sovereignty so thoroughly hollowed out by decades of kleptocracy that the transfer of power could be effected by a single diplomatic conversation about personal finances, the republic’s fate decided not in the streets or the barracks but in the space between a dictator’s fear of losing his money and an ambassador’s willingness to exploit that fear, the entire apparatus of the Haitian state reduced to a negotiation between one man’s greed and another man’s leverage.