Aristide’s tumultuous reign

Haiti’s first freely elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was a former Catholic priest who believed in liberation theology and promised to redistribute wealth. But after just eight months, he was toppled in a 1991 military coup, by officers who had been trained by the U.S. years earlier. In 1994, President Clinton restored Aristide to the presidency via a U.S. military invasion. But in 2004, he was deposed from his second term by another military coup, which he blamed on the George W. Bush administration. He left the country on an American chartered plane, saying he had been kidnapped. The

U.S. sent in troops again along with Canada and France to restore order, and then handed military control to a U.N. peacekeeping force that stayed until 2017. Aristide returned to live in Haiti in 2011, and last month he was flown to Cuba for medical treatment—reportedly for Covid-19. Last week, he returned to Haiti, where he was greeted at the airport by hundreds of supporters.