A birthday gift in the shape of the first caco attack on Hinche

Michel makes the coincidence of dates the hinge of his narrative. The tenth of October 1917 was Peralte's thirty-second birthday, and that evening, he writes, brought a particular gift, because during the night the cacos made their first attack on the town of Hinche. He treats the raid as the opening of a duel to the death between Haiti's heroes and the occupying army rather than as an isolated act of banditry. The attack was repulsed, partly for want of preparation, but the occupiers and their local auxiliaries felt the heat of the engagement and set about finding who was responsible. Michel notes the setting that made the central plateau suitable ground: the population there had not been disarmed as coastal regions had been, and the forced labour system was applied with particular severity.

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

The treaty provided for five American services in Haiti: financial adviser, customs receivership, public works, public health and gendarmerie. The gendarmerie came first. The Haitian army was dissolved, and on 1 February 1916 the Gendarmerie d'Haïti took over policing the whole country with 1,500 men. French speaking American officers held the senior posts, while Marine sergeants and navy hospital corpsmen were made junior officers. The first commandant was Smedley Butler, whom Dartiguenave commissioned a général de division; Butler later said the rank made him chief of police. Recruits were easy to find, many of them former Cacos, because the pay arrived on time and the rations were decent. By June 1916 the force numbered 2,553 under 115 Americans. Medical examinations found malaria, yaws or syphilis in 95 percent of recruits and intestinal parasites in 85 percent. An American writing in 1919 noted that a Marine serving as a gendarmerie officer judged the civil and criminal cases of his district, paid out all national government money there, ran its schools and controlled its mayor and council.

When the occupation began planning roads into Caco country in 1916, a Haitian cabinet minister showed the Americans the Code Rural. Geffrard's corvée had been sitting in it since 1863: the people of each section were to maintain the highways running through their land, and the police were to enforce it. Smedley Butler was happy to enforce it. From July 1916 gendarmes notified peasants named by the magistrats communaux and the chef seksyon that they could pay a tax or work three days. Nobody had money, so they worked. They were supposed to be fed, housed and entertained with bamboches, which the Americans described as Voodoo dances. Butler drove Dartiguenave out to the work sites in the presidential Ford most weeks so the president could share the rice and peas and explain that this was for Haiti. In 1915 there were three miles of road outside the towns fit for a car. By March 1918 the corvée had built or rebuilt 470 miles at 205 dollars a mile. The route from Port-au-Prince to the Cap opened on 1 January 1918 and took the presidential Ford fourteen hours.