In the mid 1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a young parish priest working in
an impoverished and embattled district of Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. A
courageous champion of the rights and dignity of the poor, he soon became the
most widely respected spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series
of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the U.S.-backed
Duvalier dictatorship.