1991, September 29–30: (The Coup d’État: Trouble Begins at the Frères Military Base and the Cafétéria on September 29, Radio Stations Go Off the Air, Sylvio …

1991, September 29–30: (The Coup d’État: Trouble Begins at the Frères Military Base and the Cafétéria on September 29, Radio Stations Go Off the Air, Sylvio Claude Burned to Death in Cayes After Emerging from a Political Meeting, Aristide’s Suburban Home Comes Under Fire the Next Morning, Loyal Soldiers Get an APC to the House by Noon, the French Ambassador Dufour Accompanies the President Six Miles to the Palace Under Fire, Roger Lafontant Killed in the Pénitencier — Some Said Aristide Ordered It as His Last Act as President): Trouble began September 29, 1991 at the military base at Frères, just outside Port-au-Prince, and at the Cafétéria. Radio stations went off the air, while in Cayes, Sylvio Claude — survivor of so much Duvalierist horror — was burned to death after emerging from a political meeting. The next morning, Aristide’s home in the Port-au-Prince suburbs, where he was resting for the weekend after his hectic visit to the United States, came under fire. By noon, loyal soldiers managed to get an armored personnel carrier to the house; accompanied inside by the French Ambassador, Jean-Rafaël Dufour, the president made the six-mile trip to the Palace, the convoy fired upon en route but sustaining no serious damage. At some point during the day, Roger Lafontant was killed in the Pénitencier — some said later that Aristide ordered Lafontant’s killing in his last act as president. The September 29 coup — launched from the same Frères base and Cafétéria where so many previous plots had germinated, silencing the radio stations as every previous coup had done, consuming in its first hours the life of Sylvio Claude, the indestructible human rights crusader who had survived every Duvalierist prison and every CNG beating only to be burned alive by unknown hands in the same city of Cayes where Salnave had been captured and Légitime had been driven from power — marked the end of the most radical democratic experiment in Haitian history after barely seven months, the elected president who had refused to accommodate himself to any of the traditional holders of power now learning the lesson that every Haitian ruler since Dessalines had learned before him: that in a polity where the only institution capable of sustained collective action was the army, and where every other form of organized power — the Church, the elite, the unions, the parties — existed in a state of permanent fragmentation, no president could survive who lacked either the army’s loyalty or the means to neutralize it, and Aristide, who had understood this truth intellectually better than anyone, had wagered that the mobilized will of the masses could substitute for institutional power and lost.