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| Affiliation | Truth |
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| Name | René Préval |
| Address |
, , Haiti |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
January 17, 1943 |
| Died |
March 03, 2017
(74 years) |
| Contributor | The Oncoming Storm |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Sep 17, 2022 09:56pm |
| Tags |
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| Info | René Garcia Préval is currently President-elect of Haiti. He previously served as president from February 7, 1996 to February 7, 2001.
Préval holds a degree in agronomy from the College of Gembloux in Belgium. He was forced to leave Haiti with his family in 1963 after being targeted by the then-dictator, François Duvalier aka "Papa Doc".
Préval's father, an agronomist too, had risen to the position of Minister of Agriculture before the arrival of Duvalier. Exiled from Haiti because his political past presented him as an opposant, he found work with UN agencies in Africa, more specifically in Belgian Congo, where he raised his family.
After spending five years in Brooklyn, New York, in the United States, occasionally working as a restaurant waiter, Préval returned to Haiti and obtained a position with the National Institute for Mineral Resources.
Préval served as Prime Minister from February 13 to October 11, 1991, but was replaced and went into exile following the September 30, 1991 military coup. He was an ally of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and a leader of the Lavalas Family party.
He was elected as president for a five-year term, with 88% of the popular vote, in 1996. Upon his 1996 inauguration, Préval became the second democratically elected head of state in the country's two-hundred-year history. In 2001, he became the first President of Haiti to leave office as a result of the natural expiration of his term.
As president Préval instituted a number of economic reforms, most notably the privatization of various government companies. Some have suggested that these privatizations were a result of Préval bowing to the pressure exerted on him by external entities including the IMF. The unemployment rate (though still quite high) had fallen to its lowest level since the fall of Duvalier by the end of Préval's term. This trend toward a decreasing unemployment rate continued during the subsequent tenure of Aristide until the 2004 coup.
As president, Préval was a strong supporter of investigations and trials related to human rights violations committed by military and police personnel.
Préval ran again in as an independent candidate in the Haitian presidential election of 2006. Partial election results, released on February 9, indicated that he had won with about sixty percent of the vote, but as further results were released, his share of the vote slipped to 48.7% – thus making a run-off necessary. Several days of population demonstrations in favour of Préval followed in Port-au-Prince and other cities in Haiti. On February 14, Préval claimed that there had been fraud among the vote counts, and demanded that he be declared the winner outright of the first round. On February 16, 2006, Préval was declared the winner of the Presidential Election by the Provisional Electoral Council with 51.15 percent of the vote, after the exclusion of "blank" ballots from the count.
Préval draws much of his support from Haiti's poorest people; he is especially widely supported in the poorest neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince.
During his campaign, he sought to distance himself from any former association with the Lavalas party, and ran as a candidate for Lespwa (aka "le Front de l'Espoir"). Préval supports the presence of United Nations forces in Haiti, saying they "should stay as long as it is necessary", in contrast to Aristide and many members of Lavalas who denounce the U.N. forces and accuse them of carrying out a campaign of repression and violence at the behest of the U.S., France, and Canada.
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