Aristide and the Violence of Democracy  Part 1 of 2  Go to Part
2  A review of Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, the International Community and Haiti. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. ISBN 0-7425-3831-1, 238 + xi pages.
The basic argument of Alex Dupuy’s new book is that between 1990
and 2006, Haiti’s ‘tumultuous transition to democracy’ was
‘temporarily derailed by both Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his
enemies’ (p. 203). In particular, Dupuy sets out to show that
‘when he left [Haiti] in February 2004, Aristide had become a
discredited, corrupted and increasingly authoritarian president
who had betrayed the trust and aspirations of the poor majority’
(2).  Alex Dupuy is an experienced and highly regarded scholar
who has already written two other substantial books on modern
Haitian politics. He has a sophisticated grasp of the workings
of the ‘new world order’, of transnational capitalism and of
contemporary forms of political and economic domination. Readers
familiar with the re