Haitian Coup d’etat

In February 2004, I traveled to Haiti to document a nation on the brink. I arrived on February 25th as the crisis reached its peak — armed rebel forces had swept through the country, seizing Gonaïves, capturing Cap-Haïtien, and closing in on Port-au-Prince. On the morning of February 29th, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned under deeply contested circumstances and was flown out of the country by U.S. military personnel, in an act he himself described as a kidnapping. These photographs capture those volatile days: looting and burning in the streets, armed men and grieving civilians, crowds celebrating or mourning a president's fall, and a month later, U.S. Marines patrolling a capital where schoolchildren sat in classrooms and ordinary life tried, cautiously, to resume.