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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Déjoie, Jr., Louis "Little Louis"
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| Affiliation | National Agricultural and Industrial Party |
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| Name | Louis "Little Louis" Déjoie, Jr. |
| Address |
, , Haiti |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
May 28, 1928
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| Died | January 11, 1998
(69 years)
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| Contributor | The Oncoming Storm |
| Last Modifed | User 13
May 28, 2005 12:51am |
| Tags |
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| Info | Louis Dejoie Jr was a throwback to a time when a Haitian politician of his
high class and colour might reasonably expect to win a presidential
election, though it would usually be the count rather than the election
itself.
He himself never did, but for 40 years he bore the standard of his
father, who famously went down to defeat in 1957 when the army decided to
engineer the victory of a black middle-class doctor, Fran=E7ois Duvalier,
and what became a ferocious dictatorship which liquidated thousands of
mulattoes like the Dejoies.
Ti Loulou ('Little Louis'), as he was nicknamed, left Haiti to make
his fortune as a construction magnate in Puerto Rico. When the Duvaliers'
fell in 1986, he returned to revive his father's political party, whose
acronym, PAIN, seemed to sum up the country's plight and needs in English or
French, however you read it.
He ran for president in 1987 and as a jolly and unpretentious man
among stiff and pompous rivals seemed to touch the heart of the poor, to
whom he boasted that his family wealth and lands meant he did not need to
pillage the national treasury. He would emerge from his air-conditioned
jeep in a teeming slum to playfully harness himself between the shafts of
one of the carts of charcoal or bananas usually pulled by the 'congos,'
those at the very bottom of Haitian society. But the cheers he drew were
not enough and the election was cancelled anyway by the army.
A few years later, under the real people's hero, President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to whom he came a distant third in the 1990
election, he was briefly minister of trade and industry.
He must have drawn some satisfaction in outliving by two weeks
Simone Duvalier, the last half of the deadly pair who laid waste to much of
his class and his country.
FRom Blythe.org entered by BillyW
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