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Haiti FRANÇOIS DUVALIER, 1957-71
Like many Haitian leaders, Duvalier produced a
constitution
to solidify his power. In 1961 he proceeded to violate the
provisions of that constitution, which had gone into
effect in
1957. He replaced the bicameral legislature with a
unicameral
body and decreed presidential and legislative elections.
Despite
a 1957 prohibition against presidential reelection,
Duvalier ran
for office and won with an official tally of 1,320,748
votes to
zero. Not content with this sham display of democracy, he
went on
in 1964 to declare himself president for life. For
Duvalier, the
move was a matter of political tradition; seven heads of
state
before him had claimed the same title.
An ill-conceived coup attempt in July 1958 spurred
Duvalier
to act on his conviction that Haiti's independent military
threatened the security of his presidency. In December the
president sacked the armed forces chief of staff and
replaced him
with a more reliable officer. This action helped him to
expand a
Presidential Palace army unit into the Presidential Guard.
The
Guard became the elite corps of the Haitian army, and its
sole
purpose was to maintain Duvalier's power. After having
established his own power base within the military,
Duvalier
dismissed the entire general staff and replaced aging
Marinetrained officers with younger men who owed their
positions, and
presumably their loyalty, to Duvalier.
Duvalier also blunted the power of the army through a
rural
militia formally named the Volunteers for National
Security
(Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale--VSN), but more
commonly
referred to as the tonton makouts (derived from the
Creole
term for a mythological bogeyman). In 1961, only two years
afterDuvalier had established the group, the tonton
makouts had more than twice the power of the army.
Over time,
the group gained even more power. While the Presidential
Guard
secured Duvalier against his enemies in the capital, the
tonton makouts expanded his authority into rural
areas.
The tonton makouts never became a true militia, but
they
were more than a mere secret police force. The group's
pervasive
influence throughout the countryside bolstered
recruitment,
mobilization, and patronage for the regime.
After Duvalier had displaced the established military
with
his own security force, he employed corruption and
intimidation
to create his own elite. Corruption--in the form of
government
rake-offs of industries, bribery, extortion of domestic
businesses, and stolen government funds--enriched the
dictator's
closest supporters. Most of these supporters held
sufficient
power to enable them to intimidate the members of the old
elite
who were gradually co-opted or eliminated (the luckier
ones were
allowed to emigrate).
Duvalier was an astute observer of Haitian life and a
student
of his country's history. Although he had been reared in
Port-au-
Prince, his medical experiences in the provinces had
acquainted
him with the everyday concerns of the people, their
predisposition toward paternalistic authority (his
patients
referred to him as "Papa Doc," a sobriquet that he
relished and
often applied to himself), the ease with which their
allegiance
could be bought, and the central role of voodoo in their
lives.
Duvalier exploited all of these points, especially voodoo.
He
studied voodoo practices and beliefs and was rumored to be
a
houngan. He related effectively to houngan
and
bokò (voodoo sorcerers) throughout the country and
incorporated many of them into his intelligence network
and the
ranks of the tonton makouts. His public recognition
of
voodoo and its practitioners and his private adherence to
voodoo
ritual, combined with his reputed practice of magic and
sorcery,
enhanced his popular persona among the common people (who
hesitated to trifle with a leader who had such dark forces
at his
command) and served as a peculiar form of legitimization
of his
rapacious and ignoble rule.
Duvalier weathered a series of foreign-policy crises
early in
his tenure that ultimately enhanced his power and
contributed to
his megalomaniacal conviction that he was, in his words,
the
"personification of the Haitian fatherland." Duvalier's
repressive and authoritarian rule seriously disturbed
United
States president John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy
administration
registered particular concern over allegations that
Duvalier had
blatantly misappropriated aid money and that he intended
to
employ a Marine Corps mission to Haiti not to train the
regular
army but to strengthen the tonton makouts.
Washington
acted on these charges and suspended aid in mid-1962.
Duvalier
refused to accept United States demands for strict
accounting
procedures as a precondition of aid renewal. Duvalier,
claiming
to be motivated by nationalism, renounced all aid from
Washington. At that time, aid from the United States
constituted
a substantial portion of the Haitian national budget. The
move
had little direct impact on the Haitian people because
most of
the aid had been siphoned off by Duvalierist cronies
anyway.
Renouncing the aid, however, allowed the incipient
dictator to
portray himself as a principled and lonely opponent of
domination
by a great power. Duvalier continued to receive
multilateral
contributions. After Kennedy's death in November 1963,
pressure
on Duvalier eased, and the United States adopted a policy
of
grudging acceptance of the Haitian regime because of the
country's strategic location near communist Cuba
(see Foreign Relations
, ch. 9).
A more tense and confrontational situation developed in
April
1963 between Duvalier and Dominican Republic president
Juan Bosch
Gaviño. Duvalier and Bosch were confirmed adversaries; the
Dominican president provided asylum and direct support to
Haitian
exiles who plotted against the Duvalier regime. Duvalier
ordered
the Presidential Guard to occupy the Dominican chancery in
Pétionville in an effort to apprehend an army officer
believed to
have been involved in an unsuccessful attempt to kidnap
the
dictator's son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, and daughter, Simone
Duvalier. The Dominican Republic reacted with outrage and
indignation. Bosch publicly threatened to invade Haiti,
and he
ordered army units to the frontier. Although observers
throughout
the world anticipated military action that would lead to
Duvalier's downfall, they saw events turn in the Haitian
tyrant's
favor. Dominican military commanders, who found Bosch's
political
leanings too far to the left, expressed little support for
an
invasion of Haiti. Bosch, because he could not count on
his
military, decided to let go of his dream to overthrow the
neighboring dictatorship. Instead, he allowed the matter
to be
settled by emissaries of the Organization of American
States
(OAS).
Resistant to both domestic and foreign challenges,
Duvalier
entrenched his rule through terror (an estimated 30,000
Haitians
were killed for political reasons during his tenure),
emigration
(which removed the more activist elements of the
population along
with thousands of purely economic migrants), and limited
patronage. At the time of his death in 1971, François
Duvalier
designated his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, as Haiti's new
leader.
To the Haitian elite, who still dominated the economy, the
continuation of Duvalierism without "Papa Doc" offered
financial
gain and a possibility for recapturing some of the
political
influence lost under the dictatorship.
Data as of December 1989
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