Istwa Nou

Poor women, peasants and working women in the towns took the worst of the road building and the injuries that came with it. Surveillance reached everyone. Ghislaine Charlier remembered an atmosphere of watching that ran through every layer of Haitian social life while she was growing up. Robert Cabeche, the man who had refused to sign the protectorate alongside her grandfather Auguste Garoute, appears in American records of rebel activity, filed under his name as one of a family known to be contrary to the occupation and its gendarmerie. Households close to the Garoutes were followed in the street. Wives and children drew particular attention as likely carriers of antioccupation newspapers and pamphlets, because the occupation understood that opposition travelled through families and through women's networks as reliably as through armed bands. The Americans watched what Haitians read and repeated because in the first ten years their reputation for brutality was spreading. They went on denying the brutality while they watched for news of it.

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.

Having accepted three thousand Haitian dead as unavoidable, Admiral Knapp was asked about women and children and said no. He allowed that a woman might have been shot during an action while in the company of a band, and called such cases accidents of the campaign, without intent behind them. He had heard of no case at all in which a child was killed. The records his own service produced say otherwise. Marines treated women close to the cacos as an equal threat and beat and killed them deliberately, and distance from the fighting protected nobody, since women were attacked on the roads, in the markets and inside their own houses whatever their politics. Estrea Jean Gilles, Eleanor Charles and Adirenng Senatus were injured and killed by American troops, and under Knapp's account of the occupation their deaths were inevitable and impossible at the same time. Officers wrote down the wounds. The same officers declined to answer for them in public. A file recording an injury and a testimony denying it are two halves of one policy.