The cacos call the gendarmes worthless and then try to recruit them

The gendarmerie was the Haitian police force raised, paid and officered by the Americans, and the cacos in the hills had a settled view of the men who joined it. A public letter of 1920 from caco leaders said that most Haitians in the gendarmerie were men without conscience, worthless and doing worthless work, and that anyone with a conscience would refuse to fight the resistance. The phrase they returned to was bad Haitians. A gendarme was judged by what he understood about his own position. The same leaders wanted those men. General Theophil and Petit Severe dressed as women to get into the gendarmerie camps and talk to them, a disguise that says something about how loose identity had become under occupation. Petit Severe claimed afterwards to have recruited practically every gendarme in the north, with the plan already agreed: hit the small stations first, take in whichever gendarmes would come, then move on the larger towns where the white officers were posted.

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

The women knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. The first day brought in one hundred American dollars. Between October 1920 and February 1921 Haitian women financed the Union Patriotique's delegation to the United States, and the campaign reached all sixty-one committees the organisation had in the country, with women serving as the main fundraisers and the administrators in each of them. They were instructed to give two or three days a week to soliciting from families in their own neighbourhoods, and they spent weeks inside other people's houses. That is where the second thing happened. Sitting in those rooms, the collectors heard what the occupation had done to the women who lived in them, wrote it down, and carried the accounts back to the membership and outward across the region. The material became the centre of the delegation's report in 1921, reached American newspapers, and was printed years later in the book Occupied Haiti. A fundraising round had produced the first archive of the occupation's violence against women.

By the early 1920s the American military declared the caco wars won. The proof it offered was Charlemagne Peralte, the caco leader and intellectual, captured and killed in 1919, his naked body arranged to resemble a crucifixion and photographed, the photograph then circulated through a country that knew exactly what image was being used against it. Reports of continued killing kept reaching Washington and the Senate opened investigations. In 1920 Admiral H. S. Knapp, who had served in Haiti and said he had studied conditions there thoroughly, was asked whether some three thousand Haitian men, women and children had been shot since 1915 by troops under American command. He answered that it was very possible three thousand Haitian men in all had been killed, and that the operations were necessary to restore order and a respect for human life and property. The life and property in danger, on his account, were endangered by Haitians. The killing of people in their own country went into the record as the price of governing them.