[4] After Jean-Claude Duvalier was ousted on 7 February 1986, Delatour was chosen to be Minister of Finance starting in April 1986 under the intirim government of General Henri Namphy.
[8] At one point, Delatour found himself on a hit list compiled by Aristide's Interior Minister, Brigadier General Mondesir Beaubrun, due to his practice of taxing the elite.
He reasoned that Haitians were wasting their time with inefficient agriculture, that the law of comparative advantage dictated that Haiti move much of its rural population to the cities[11] where they could serve as cheap labor for industrial assembly plants as part of the global supply chain.
He thus accelerated the neoliberalism introduced under Jean-Claude Duvalier, arguing that he was removing the means through which corrupt officials could steal development aid and sabotage profitable planning.
His decision to open the country up to subsidized American rice helped drive domestic producers out of business and to the capital, Port-au-Prince, and most notably in the rapidly expanding shantytown of Cité Soleil.
To appease these forces who distrusted him based on his left-wing reputation, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had previously denounced Delatour's "death plan", made him part of his team in 1991 after he won the Haitian presidency.
In September 1991, Delatour openly condemned the coup d'état that deposed Aristide and brought Raoul Cédras and Michel François into power.
In October 1994, after Aristide was restored to the presidency, Delatour threatened to not be involved in the government in order to force the neoliberal Smarck Michel, whose businesses included the rice importation that was damaging the Haitian peasantry,[15] into the premiership.
[16][17] After Aristide capitulated to this demand, Delatour accepted the post of Governor of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti where he raised the interest rates consistent with his Chicago School ideological position.
Delatour's approach, characterized by pro-globalization and anti-nationalism sentiments, is also seen as contributing to nostalgia for the Duvalier regimes, alongside the country's economic challenges.