Former Haiti president Preval, champion of poor, is dead

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Haiti’s former president Rene Preval, an agronomist and champion of the poor who served two terms as the country’s leader, died on Friday, officials said. He was 74.

“I have sadly learned of the death of former president Rene Preval,” President Jovenel Moise wrote in a post on Twitter. “I bow before the remains of this dignified son of Haiti.”

Michel Martelly, another former president, also took to social media to express his sorrow.

“President Preval, Little Rene, my brother, my friend and adviser, your passing leaves us in shock,” tweeted Martelly, who served as president from 2011 to 2016.

Martelly used the Creole “Ti Rene” in the tweet, Haitians’ term of endearment for the diminutive Preval.

According to local media reports, citing Preval’s sister, the former president died after a cardiac arrest.

With a reputation as an honest and efficient administrator, Preval served as president of Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with a long history of political violence, in 1996-2001 and 2006-2011.

Since the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, Preval was the only Haitian leader to have completed two terms as president, the constitutional limit, without suffering a coup or having to flee in exile.

Born on January 17, 1943 in Port-au-Prince, Preval studied agronomy in Belgium. He lived for five years in New York in the 1970s.

After he returned to Haiti in 1975, he was employed by the National Institute for Mineral Resources.

He later became active in humanitarian work, including at an orphanage in Port-auPrince run by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was then a Roman Catholic priest.

Preval, a moderate leftist, first served as prime minister to president Aristide from February 1991 until the government was toppled in September that year.

Following the coup, he sought refuge at the French and Mexican embassies in Port-au-Prince, and eventually joined Aristide in Washington, where he stayed until 1994.

Preval led as president of Haiti from 1996 to 2001. At the time, he was only the second democratically elected president in the Caribbean country’s history.

In February 2001, Preval returned the presidential sash of office to Aristide.