René Préval
Encyclopedia
René Garcia Préval is a Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

an politician
Politics of Haiti
The Politics of Haiti have often been defined with conflict when strongmen have taken over the government. Only within the latter part of the twentieth century, has normal political activity transpired.-History:...

 and agronomist
Agronomist
An agronomist is a scientist who specializes in agronomy, which is the science of utilizing plants for food, fuel, feed, and fiber. An agronomist is an expert in agricultural and allied sciences, with the exception veterinary sciences.Agronomists deal with interactions between plants, soils, and...

 who was the President
President of Haiti
The President of the Republic of Haiti is the head of state of Haiti. Executive power in Haiti is divided between the president and the government headed by the Prime Minister of Haiti...

 of the Republic of Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

 from 14 May 2006 to 14 May 2011. He previously served as President from February 7, 1996, to February 7, 2001, and as Prime Minister from February 1991 to October 11, 1991.

Early life and career

Préval was born in Marmelade
Marmelade
Marmelade is a town and former duchy in the Artibonite Department of Haïti. It is the chief town of the Marmelade Arrondissement, which also includes the commune of Saint Michel de l'Attalaye.Marmelade is the home town of Président René Préval...

, Northern Haiti. He studied Business
Business
A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit...

 at the College of Gembloux and the University of Leuven
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is a Dutch-speaking university in Flanders, Belgium.It is located at the centre of the historic town of Leuven, and is a prominent part of the city, home to the university since 1425...

 in Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 and also studied Biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 at the University of Pisa
University of Pisa
The University of Pisa , located in Pisa, Tuscany, is one of the oldest universities in Italy. It was formally founded on September 3, 1343 by an edict of Pope Clement VI, although there had been lectures on law in Pisa since the 11th century...

 in Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, Italy.

Préval's father, an agronomist
Agronomy
Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, feed, fiber, and reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. Agronomy is the application of a combination of sciences like biology,...

 also, had risen to the position of Minister of Agriculture in the government of Général Paul Magloire
Paul Magloire
Paul Eugène Magloire was a Haïtian military ruler from 1950 to 1956.Paul Magloire was born a general's son. In 1946 he participated in a successful coup against the president, Élie Lescot...

, the predecessor of Duvalier. Leaving Haiti because his political past presented him as a potential opponent, Preval's father found work with UN agencies in Africa.

After spending five years in Brooklyn, New York, occasionally working as a restaurant waiter, Préval returned to Haiti and obtained a position with the National Institute for Mineral Resources. Préval was very much involved in the agricultural workings of society. After a few years, he opened a bakery in Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince is the capital and largest city of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The city's population was 704,776 as of the 2003 census, and was officially estimated to have reached 897,859 in 2009....

 with some business partners. While operating his company, he continued to be active in political circles and charity work, such as providing bread to the orphanage of Salesian Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Catholic priest and politician who served as Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies...

, with whom he developed a close relationship.

After the election of Aristide as president
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...

 in 1990, Préval served as his Prime Minister from February 13 to October 11, 1991, going into exile following the September 30, 1991 military coup
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...

.

On December 6, 2009, Preval married Elisabeth Débrosse Delatour
Elisabeth Delatour Préval
Elisabeth Débrosse Delatour Préval is a Haitian businesswoman, presidential economic advisor and economist. She has been the First Lady of Haiti since December 6, 2009, when she married President René Préval.-Professional and personal life:...

 — one of his economic advisors and widow of Leslie Delatour, the former governor of Haiti's central bank. Preval's first and second marriages, to Guerda Benoit and Solange Lafontant respectively, both ended in divorce.

First presidency

In 1996, Préval was elected as president for a five-year term, with 88% of the popular vote. Upon his 1996 inauguration, Préval became the second democratically elected head of state in the country's 200-year history. In 2001, he became the second President of Haiti to leave office as a result of the natural expiration of an uninterrupted term, the first being General Nissage Saget
Nissage Saget
Jean-Nicolas Nissage Saget succeeded Sylvain Salnave as President of Haiti in 1869. He was the first Haitian president to serve out his term of office and retire voluntarily, although his retirement led to a renewal of the political turmoil between blacks and the country's mulatto elites. He...

, president from 1869 to 1874.

As president, Préval instituted a number of economic reforms, most notably the privatization of various government companies. By the end of Préval's term, the unemployment rate (though still quite high) had fallen to its lowest level since the fall of François Duvalier
François Duvalier
François Duvalier was the President of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. Duvalier first won acclaim in fighting diseases, earning him the nickname "Papa Doc" . He opposed a military coup d'état in 1950, and was elected President in 1957 on a populist and black nationalist platform...

. Préval also instituted an aggressive program of agrarian reform in Haiti's countryside. His presidency, however, was also marked by fierce political clashes with a parliament dominated by opposition party members (OPL) and an increasingly vocal Fanmi Lavalas (party of the former president), which opposed the structural adjustment and privatization program of Préval's government.

As president, Préval was a strong supporter of investigations and trials related to human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 violations committed by military and police personnel.

Préval dissolved the parliament in 1999 and ruled by decree for the duration of the final year of his presidency.

Second presidency

Election

Préval ran again as the Lespwa
Lespwa
Fwon Lespwa is a Haitian political coalition headed by René Préval, who served as president from 1996 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2011. The name Lespwa is the Haitian Creole form of the French l'espoir, meaning "hope". The coalition's full French name is Front de l'Espoir...

 candidate in the presidential election of 2006. The election took place after nearly two years of international peacekeeping, which some described as an unelected dictatorship. Partial election results, released on February 9, indicated that he had won with about 60% 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 popular demonstrations in favour of Préval followed in Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince is the capital and largest city of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. The city's population was 704,776 as of the 2003 census, and was officially estimated to have reached 897,859 in 2009....

 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. Protesters paralyzed the capital with burning barricades and stormed a luxury hotel — Hotel Montana
Hôtel Montana
The Hôtel Montana was a hotel in the Pétionville suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Built in 1946, the hotel was a popular four star tourist resort until the main building collapsed along with most buildings in the city during the 2010 Haiti earthquake...

, located in the affluent suburb of Petionville — to demand results from Haiti's nearly week-old election as ex-President Rene Preval fell further below the 50% needed to win the presidency. On February 16, 2006, Préval was declared the winner of the presidential election by the Provisional Electoral Council with 51.15% of the vote, after the exclusion of "blank" ballots from the count.

He was sworn in on May 14, following Haiti's legislative run-off vote in April; he could not be sworn in until a sitting Parliament was in place. When he was sworn in, Préval emphasized the importance of unity, saying that division was Haiti's "main problem" and that Haitians had to "work together". On May 17, he nominated Jacques-Édouard Alexis
Jacques-Édouard Alexis
Jacques-Édouard Alexis is a Haitian politician. He served as the Prime Minister of Haiti from 1999 to 2001 and was Prime Minister for a second term from 2006 to 2008 when he was dismissed due to political fallout from food riots....

, who had served as Prime Minister during Préval's first term, as Prime Minister again. After taking office, Préval immediately signed an oil deal with Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

 and traveled to the United States, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

, and France.

Préval drew much of his support from Haiti's poorest people; he was especially widely supported in the poorest neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. However, many of the poor demanded that the former President Aristide be allowed to return and that civil enterprise workers fired by the Latortue government be reinstated. This caused increasing tension in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Préval promised to build a massive road system which would boost trade and transportation around the country.

Since Preval's induction, the economy has been on a sizeable increase.

Latin American integration

Haiti under Préval has been cooperating diplomatically and fraternally with countries of Latin America. Haiti's Latin American alliance provides the country with much of its needed aid. The slowly-stabilizing country has seemingly benefited in a rather solid economic partnership with Venezuela. This recent friendship between Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...

 and the Haitian president has resulted in various economic agreements. Four power plants (a 40-megawatt, a 30-megawatt, and two 15-megawatts) are set to be built in Haiti. An oil refinery
Oil refinery
An oil refinery or petroleum refinery is an industrial process plant where crude oil is processed and refined into more useful petroleum products, such as gasoline, diesel fuel, asphalt base, heating oil, kerosene, and liquefied petroleum gas...

 is also scheduled to be installed, with a production capacity of 10000 barrels (1,589,873 l) of oil per day. Venezuela's aid to Haiti is founded upon a historic act where the newly-independent Haiti welcomed and tended to Simón Bolívar
Simón Bolívar
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...

 and provided military power to aid Bolivar's cause in liberating Latin America.

Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...

, Raúl Castro
Raúl Castro
Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who has been President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba since 2008; he previously exercised presidential powers in an acting capacity from 2006 to 2008...

 and other Cuban diplomats such as Vice President Esteban Lazo Hernandez
Esteban Lazo Hernández
Juan Esteban Lazo Hernández is a vice-president of the Cuban Council of State and a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.- References :...

 have thanked Haiti for consistently voting in the United Nations General Assembly
United Nations General Assembly
For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...

 against the United States embargo against Cuba
United States embargo against Cuba
The United States embargo against Cuba is a commercial, economic, and financial embargo partially imposed on Cuba in October 1960...

.

Préval's diplomatic relations with fellow Latin American nations have opened up many economic opportunities for Haiti. Préval has met with many Latin American leaders such as Fidel Castro, Evo Morales
Evo Morales
Juan Evo Morales Ayma , popularly known as Evo , is a Bolivian politician and activist, currently serving as the 80th President of Bolivia, a position that he has held since 2006. He is also the leader of both the Movement for Socialism party and the cocalero trade union...

 of Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...

 (with an economic situation similar to Haiti's), Martín Torrijos
Martín Torrijos
Martín Erasto Torrijos Espino is a Panamanian politician and the former President of the Republic of Panama.Torrijos was elected President on May 2, 2004...

 of Panama
Panama
Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

, and Leonel Fernández
Leonel Fernández
Leonel Antonio Fernández Reyna is a Dominican lawyer, academic, and the current President of the Dominican Republic since 2004. He held the same office from 1996 to 2000...

 of the neighboring Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...

. Relations with Dominican Republic have strengthened largely due to Préval's willingness to end volatile temperaments and to the two presidents' focus on cooperation. The Dominican Republic was Préval's first foreign visitation. Préval then visited the United States, where he was congratulated by US President Bush for his reelection. Préval had claimed that asides the Dominican Republic, the US should be his first diplomatic visit in office, putting it ahead of his eventual diplomatic visits to Venezuela, Cuba and France. The US considered Préval's meeting with Bush a good sign of excellent US-Haitian relations under his administration.

April 2008 riots

In early April 2008, riots broke out over the high cost of food; since 2007, prices for a number of essential foods, including rice, had risen by about 50%. As the riots continued, rioters attacked the presidential palace on April 8 but were driven away by UN soldiers. On April 9, Préval called for calm; he said that high food prices were a problem around the world
2007–2008 world food price crisis
World food prices increased dramatically in 2007 and the 1st and 2nd quarter of 2008 creating a global crisis and causing political and economical instability and social unrest in both poor and developed nations. Systemic causes for the worldwide increases in food prices continue to be the subject...

, but that the problem would not be solved by destroying stores, and he said that he had "ordered Haitian police and UN soldiers to put an end to the looting". Despite demands for all taxes on food imports to be lifted, Préval said that he could not do so because the money was greatly needed; he pledged to increase food production in Haiti so that the country would not be so dependent on imports, but this fell short of what many protesters demanded. On April 12, the Senate
Senate of Haiti
The Senate of Haiti is the upper house of Haiti's bicameral legislature, the National Assembly. The lower house of the National Assembly is the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate consists of thirty seats, with three members from each of the ten administrative departments. Prior to the creation of the...

 voted to remove Prime Minister Alexis‎ from office, and Préval announced that the price per 23  of rice would be reduced from $51 to $43. According to Préval, the rice would be subsidized with international aid, and the private sector was willing to reduce the price by $3. He also said that he was going to seek Venezuelan assistance in improving the economic situation.

2010 earthquake

On January 12, Port-au-Prince was hit by an earthquake
2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...

. Initial reports indicated that diplomats were unable to contact President Préval and they feared he might be trapped beneath the rubble of the building. However later reports – including ones quoting the Haitian ambassador to the United States, Raymond Alcide Joseph – said that the President and First Lady Elisabeth Delatour Préval had escaped unharmed and had been moved to a safe location on the island. The couple were about to enter their home when the earthquake struck. Préval and his wife were able to step away from the building before the house collapsed, escaping injury.

Much of the Haitian government, including President Préval, has relocated to a police barracks near Toussaint Louverture International Airport. The death toll has so far been estimated to be possibly in excess of 200,000.

Since the earthquake, President Préval has been criticised at home and abroad for his allegedly weak disaster response; critics include U.S. Senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 Dick Lugar (R
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...

-IN
Indiana
Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

).

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