Abstract

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in 2000, with a massive parliamentary majority. My book Damming the Flood (2007) tried to explain how and why his government overthrown, several years later, in an internationally-sponsored coup-d’état. Novelist Lyonel Trouillot helped prepare the ground for this coup by deriding Aristide as a corrupt and brutal dictator with no popular support, and in his contribution to this Small Axe forum he dismisses Damming the Flood as racist and dishonest propaganda. My response to Trouillot aims to refute these accusations, and to demonstrate that Trouillot’s apparent commitment to ‘formal democracy’ is a contradiction in terms.

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