René Préval
René Préval was president of Haiti from 1996 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2011, the only president in the country's history to have been elected twice, served two full terms, and handed over both times to an elected successor. He was the agronomist and baker who had been Aristide's prime minister in 1991 and his successor in 1996. He then, in the second presidency, put the distance between them that the country had assumed did not exist. The first term was the one after the restoration of Aristide. There were the privatisations the IMF wanted and Aristide's party fought, and the flour mill and the cement works sold. The parliament was dissolved in January 1999 when its term had expired and nobody could agree on an election. There were the two years of rule by decree, the elections of May 2000 that the opposition boycotted and the Organisation of American States would not certify, and the aid frozen accordingly. That was the inheritance Aristide took back in 2001. The second was the one after the removal of Aristide. He won the election of February 2006 on the votes of the slums, which believed he was Aristide's man, with a count that stopped at forty-eight per cent until the blank ballots were reassigned and the crowds came out of Cité Soleil. He governed five years in which the UN force under the Brazilians cleared the gangs from the slums in 2007. The food riots of April 2008 brought down his prime minister. Four hurricanes in a month drowned Gonaïves. On 12 January 2010 the earthquake killed perhaps two hundred thousand people and brought down the palace behind him. After that he was, for the world's cameras, the president who was not seen, and for the country, the one who could not be. The cholera the Nepalese peacekeepers brought in October 2010 killed ten thousand more. The election of November 2010 was fought in the rubble. He left in May 2011 to the singer Martelly, whom the Americans had made the run-off candidate by having the OAS recount. He was born in Port-au-Prince, the son of an agriculture minister under the Duvaliers' predecessor who had fled the Duvaliers. He studied agronomy at Gembloux in Belgium and geothermal science in Pisa, and worked as a waiter in Brooklyn. He came home in 1975 and ran a bakery in the slums. He gave its bread to Aristide's orphanage, which was how the friendship began. He died of a heart attack at Marmelade, the northern town where he had retired to grow bamboo and make cooperatives, in March 2017, at seventy-four. He was given the state funeral that no other former president of the century had lived to have.
- Lived: 1943 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Haitian
- Roles: president, agronomist, politician
