Haiti‘s political tumult goes back decades, including dictatorship, coups, crises and now the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

He was killed in his home Wednesday, tipping the impoverished and crisis-hit Caribbean nation into renewed uncertainty.

Here is a timeline of its turbulent past:

In 1986 Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc”, went into exile following a popular uprising against the human rights abuses of his internationally condemned regime. The army took power.

Duvalier had become self-proclaimed “president for life” in 1971 at the age of 19, on the death of his father Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a physician by training and also a repressive dictator who had ruled for about 14 years.

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His son, dubbed “Baby Doc”, sought to similarly control the poverty-ridden country with an iron fist.

On fleeing the protests against his rule, Duvalier went into exile in France for 25 years, returning in 2011.

He died there three years later of a heart attack, just months after the start of a judicial investigation into charges of crimes against humanity against him.

In 1990 charismatic shantytown former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide swept to victory as Haiti’s first democratically elected president.

But just eight months later he was ousted in a bloody military coup.

He returned to office in 1994, thanks to a US military intervention.

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In 1996 he handed power to his political heir, former prime minister Rene Preval who had won a presidential election, in the first-ever democratic transition of power in Haiti.

Aristide returned to power in 2001 in a vote dogged by claims of rigging.

Accused of fostering corruption and human rights abuses, he was forced to quit in 2004 in the face of an armed rebellion and under international pressure.

He went into exile in South Africa and the UN took control of the country for two years, also sending in a peacekeeping force.

In 2006 Preval narrowly won the first presidential election since the departure of Aristide and he became the only Haitian leader to complete the two terms allowed under the constitution.

Michel Martelly, a former carnival singer, became president in 2011 and reestablished Haiti’s armed forces.

He ended his term without a successor after the annulment of the first round of the 2015 presidential election, tainted by massive fraud.

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After various delays, the next presidential election was held in 2016 and won by Moise, a one-time banana exporter in which barely 20 percent of the election participated.

Moise was soon hit by protests triggered by fuel shortages that turned violent.

He was further undermined when in 2019 court auditors investigating where $2 billion in aid from a Venezuelan oil fund had gone found that companies run by Moise before he became president were “at the heart of an embezzling scheme”.

Repeated protests and barricades later the same year erected on the country’s main roads blocked almost all activities, prompting a majority of schools to shut down for more than two months.

Moise had been governing Haiti by decree since January 2020.

Anger was rising over increased gang violence and political instability, drawing protesters onto the streets.

In March the government declared a month-long state of emergency to restore state authority in gang-controlled areas, including in the capital.

Tensions were piqued in April with the abduction of seven Catholic clergy and the government resigning days later in a change aimed at tackling the insecurity.

A controversial constitutional referendum planned for late June was put off due to the coronavirus pandemic.