Port-au-Prince – The man shaping up as Haiti’s next president has been a political exile as a child and adult, a baker, his nation’s chief executive and a manufacturer of bamboo furniture who impressed his compatriots with a modest lifestyle and evident incorruptibility.
Agronomist Rene Preval appears to have won a landslide victory in last Tuesday’s elections, the first presidential balloting in the impoverished nation in nearly six years.
The 63-year-old Preval was prime minister and held the defense and interior portfolios during the first Aristide administration in the early 1990s, and later served as Haiti’s elected president from 1996 to 2001.
Preval was once the political protege of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now an exile in South Africa after being ousted as Haitian president in early 2004.
But according to the presumed president-elect himself as well as people close to him, Preval and Aristide have grown irreconcilably estranged, on both the personal and political levels.
Until now, however, talk of that split has been downplayed, as leaders of Aristide’s Lavalas (Avalanche) Party urged their supporters to vote for Preval.
Married and the father of two daughters, Preval has spent the years since 2001 running a modest concern that makes and exports bamboo furniture. Neither his business venture nor his public service has generated a great fortune, which only enhances his standing in the eyes of Haiti’s desperately poor masses.
When Aristide left the country in 2004, he bequeathed his lavish residence to Preval, but the latter – preferring to remain at his grandmother’s home in the northern town of Marmalade – donated the mansion to the state, which used the building as an office for interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue.
Preval was educated partly in Belgium, where his father, a former Haitian agriculture minister, took the family to escape persecution under dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
After his time in Europe and a five-year sojourn in the United States, Rene Preval came home to Haiti in 1975 and became manager of a bakery. He got involved in politics in 1986, the year Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier stepped down under pressure from Washington and fled to the French Riviera.
Preval’s activism soon brought him into contact with Aristide, then a maverick Roman Catholic priest known for his devotion to the poor, and many credit Preval and businessman Antoine Izmery with engineering the firebrand cleric’s sweeping victory in the 1990 presidential election.
Aristide appointed Preval as prime minister in 1991, but their government was ousted in September of that year by then-armed forces chief Gen. Raoul Cedras.
The president left the country and his premier went underground, taking refuge at the residence of the French ambassador in Port-au-Prince for several months before managing in February 1993 to escape to Mexico, where he received political asylum.
Aristide was restored as Haiti’s president in 1994 by a U.S.-led international effort, but Preval did not join the government.
Under Haiti’s constitution, Aristide was barred from seeking a second consecutive term, and though his supporters argued that the prohibition was unreasonable because much of his first term was lost to the Cedras coup, Washington insisted the charter be respected.
Aristide anointed Preval, whom he called his “twin,” as the presidential candidate of Lavalas, and the prime minister won the 1995 election with nearly 88 percent of the vote. Turnout was light, however, as most Haitians were angry about Aristide’s exclusion from the race.
The 1996-2001 Preval administration was not very successful, though he did earn the distinction of becoming the only president in Haitian history to serve out his entire term and hand over power to an elected successor – in this case, Aristide, who won a second mandate in late 2000.
Preval’s government rejected a recommendation from international bodies that observed the Spring 2000 legislative elections to rerun 10 Senate contests. Lavalas’ adamant stand on that point prompted opposition parties to boycott the presidential ballot in the fall, which helped set the stage for the ouster of Aristide in 2004.years.
