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Deadly Road to Democracy

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Since Haiti gained its independence from the French in 1804, volatile governments stifled the country's growth. Although it was the Western Hemisphere's second democracy, the impoverished country remained islolated for many years. However, Marc Yves Regis I has written a personal and provacative story of Haiti's disenchanted poor. Regis, a Hartford Courant photographer, opens the door to Haiti's dark, brutal secrets with explicit photographs taken in his native country. During the last decade, Regis traveled back-and-forth to Haiti, an impoverished country pushed further into dispair in the early 1990s by an international embargo that was supposed to punish an illegal military government. Instead, peasant children starved because food prices rose during the U.S.-led embargo. In addition, armed paramilitary thugs controlled the poor with iron fists. Gunfire rang out each night and dead bodies lined the roads each morning. In the book, Regis uses his mother's voice to tell a poignant story of how the Haitian military and its hired thugs tortured and killed innocent people. The book outlines Haiti's democractic reforms, beginning with the 1990 appointment of the country's first woman president. A year later, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot handed power to Jean-Bertrand Aristide who captured the presidency with an overwhelming 67 percent of the vote in the country's first true, democratic election. The military, however, overthrew the fiery former priest in a bloody coup d'etat. Aristide lived in exile in a plush Washington, D.C. suburb for mare than three years until the United States, in a military show of force, restored him to power.