Jean Bertrand Aristide, b. July 15, 1953, the first freely elected president of Haiti, was deposed and exiled on Sept. 30, 1991, eight months after his election, and restored to power under U.S. protection on Oct. 15, 1994. A Catholic priest (until 1994) with an ardent following among Haiti's impoverished majority, he was exiled to Montreal by the autocratic regime of Jean Claude Duvalier in 1982 but returned in 1985 and helped expel Duvalier in 1986. Following a succession of Duvalierist proxies, Aristide was elected president and was inaugurated on Feb. 7, 1991. He promptly set about purging the military, which provoked the coup. A hemisphere-wide boycott of the new, military regime and other pressures, including the clear threat of a U.S. invasion, persuaded the ruling junta to yield in 1994. Aristide was barred by law from seeking reelection in December 1995 and was succeeded by Rene Preval, his former prime minister and closest political associate, on Feb. 7, 1996. He married Mildred Trouillot, a Haitian American lawyer, on Jan. 20, 1996.

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