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Haiti François Duvalier, 1957-71
When François Duvalier came to power in 1957, the armed
forces were at their lowest point, professionally, since
1915.
Internal tension stemmed from political, generational, and
racial
divisions within the army command. The leadership of the
former
Garde d'Haïti, trained by the United States Marines, was
aging
and was slowly giving way to a younger cadre of Military
Academy
graduates from the 1940s. Duvalier hastened this process
by
retiring a group of senior officers and promoting a number
of
junior officers.
Duvalier's establishment of a parallel security
apparatus
posed the most serious challenge to the crumbling
integrity of
the armed forces. In late 1958, Duvalier reinstated, and
took
direct control of, the Presidential Guard (Garde
Présidentielle),
and he eliminated the Maison Militaire (military
household),
which had served as the presidential security unit before
the
Duvalier era. In 1959 the regime began recruiting a
civilian
militia (Milice Civile), ostensibly as an adjunct to the
Presidential Guard. Drawn initially from the capital
city's slums
and equipped with antiquated small arms found in the
basement of
the Presidential Palace, the civilian militia became the
VSN
after 1962. The VSN's control extended into the
countryside,
through a system of information, intelligence, and command
tied
directly to the Presidential Palace.
The armed forces yielded political power to the new
regime
and lost many of their institutionalized features,
developed
during the previous thirty years. Duvalier closed down the
Military Academy in 1961. A professional and elitist
institution,
the academy represented a potential source of opposition
to the
regime. Officers who attempted to resist Duvalier
forfeited their
careers. In 1963 Duvalier expelled the United States
military
mission, which he had invited to Haiti in 1959, because he
believed that military-modernization values imparted by
United
States instructors could lead to resistance to the
government's
restructuring of the armed forces.
Duvalier succeeded in overpowering the mainstream
military
establishment, but the process was painful; it required
several
abrupt attacks. For example, Duvalier eliminated, or
exiled,
anyone who opposed him. Duvalier's ruthlessness and
suspicion
caused members of his own security apparatus to turn
against him-
-most notably Clément Barbot, one of the original VSN
chiefs.
By the mid-1960s, the VSN and the army routinely
cooperated
on internal security matters, even though the two groups
were
suspicious of each other. There were occasional lapses in
the
security apparatus, however. In 1967 several bombs
exploded near
the palace, and the regime subsequently executed nineteen
officers of the Presidential Guard. In 1970 the entire
membership
of Haiti's small Coast Guard staged an abortive mutiny.
The regime referred to the VSN as a militia. This
designation
masked the organization's role as the Duvalier's
front-line
security force. The VSN acted as political cadres, secret
police,
and instruments of terror. In addition, they played a
crucial
political role for the regime: they countered the
influence of
the armed forces, historically the nation's foremost
institutional power. François Duvalier went farther than
any of
his predecessors in his efforts to reduce the ability of
the
military to influence selection of the country's leaders.
The
VSN's success in keeping the army and the rest of Haitian
society
in check created what has been described as a VSN-led
"parabureaucracy."
The VSN gained its deadly reputation partially because
its
members received no salary, even though they worked for
the
National Palace (Palais National). They made their
livings,
instead, through extortion and petty crime. Rural members
of the
VSN, who wore blue denim uniforms, had received some
training
from the army, while the plainclothed members, with their
dark
glasses, served as Haiti's criminal-investigation force
(see Public Order
, this ch.).
Data as of December 1989
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