A young man holds out in a cave while his mother is used as a shield

Clement Barbot, Duvalier's collaborator turned enemy, was caught and killed outside Port-au-Prince on 14 July 1963. Late on the night of the sixteenth, while the celebration over Barbot's corpse was still winding down, Hector Riobe drove his home armoured vehicle through the empty streets, and the truck overheated on the hill to Petionville because he had welded a steel plate across the radiator. The fight that followed at his cave position lasted three days. On the afternoon of Friday 19 July the cave went silent, and the soldiers, suspecting a trick, would not approach. The next day the police brought Riobe's mother, put her on a horse and made her ride up to the cave calling her son's name while they followed behind her, using her as a human shield. There was no answer. Greene later said Riobe was one of the models for the young idealist Philipot.

Maurice Dartigue had been Haiti's minister of education, agriculture and labour. President Elie Lescot was overthrown in 1946, Dartigue went into exile in the United States and settled in New York that same year. He began a career at the United Nations, first as a senior education specialist in the trusteeship department, then from 1956 at UNESCO, where he supervised the Major Latin American Project. He was made chief of the Africa Division in 1962. From that desk he hired hundreds of Haitians as professional and technical experts for newly independent African states, Benin, Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria among them, and he ran teacher training programmes on the continent until he retired in 1971. His papers hold letters from Haitians looking for work outside Haiti and correspondence with presidents Paul Magloire and Francois Duvalier about sending Haitian professionals to Africa. A man pushed out of his own government spent the next quarter century arranging the departure of others.

The Algerian war entered its worst phase in 1956 with bombings in Algiers and a French army doubled to around half a million men. Ahmed Ben Bella, who had escaped from prison, organised the FLN abroad and kept the weapons moving, with Nasser's Egypt as the important ally. The fighting in Algiers through 1956 and 1957 was savage on both sides. Negotiations failed, and French settlers made their own attempts to seize the colonial administration. De Gaulle's offensives at the end of the decade destroyed a great deal and settled nothing, while opposition to the war grew inside France. In 1960 the United Nations recognised Algeria's right to self determination. After more failed talks and more atrocities the French withdrew in July 1962 and independence was recognised. Up to a million European settlers left with the administration, having lost about ten thousand dead. Algerian dead numbered a million or more. Frantz Fanon wrote Les Damnes de la Terre out of this war.

The militia that had been operating around Francois Duvalier since 1958 was formalised by a presidential order dated 7 November 1962 and published in the official gazette Le Moniteur on Thursday 15 November. The body was named the Volunteers of National Security. Its members wore blue and were drawn from the poor classes, and Haitians called them the tontons macoutes. The corps included women, some of them in senior rank. Its declared purpose was the security of the nation. Its working purpose was to reach into every quarter and every rural section on behalf of one man. Every source of power in the country was brought under the same arrangement. The cabinet was submissive, the administration was macoutised, rank conferred no authority of its own, and whatever power an individual held came from his personal and direct relation to the chief of state. The legislature and the courts were placed in the same position.