Istwa Nou

Cincinnatus Leconte had returned from exile and was watching events from Cap-Haitien. On 2 February 1911 his Caco generals raised his flag at Ouanaminthe on the Dominican border, backed by Davilmar Theodore, a senator from Ennery, and by the Zamor brothers of Hinche and Cerca-la-Source. The border was chosen for a reason, since a rising there could draw Dominican help and supplies, as Sylvain Salnave's had done in the 1860s. The Cacos were peasant fighters of the northern mountains who hired themselves to whichever claimant could pay, and for the next four years they decided who held Haiti. When word reached Port-au-Prince the government took it for a Dominican declaration of war. Soldiers ran through the streets, shopkeepers slammed their shutters, buglers sounded the general call to arms and the population scattered. Haiti and its neighbour had invaded each other repeatedly since 1801, and a century of that had trained the capital to hear any noise from the east as the end of the country.

Antoine Simon crammed soldiers onto a German merchant ship and onto the warship Nord Alexis, whose name nobody had thought to change, and steamed for Gonaives to put down Leconte's rising. He led the march north himself while Joseph Jeremie crossed the mountains to Hinche and pushed into Caco country through Cerca-la-Source, Mont Organise and Valliere. Leconte took shelter in the German consulate at Cap-Haitien. The government suddenly recovered its memory of the Consolidation fraud of 1904 and issued a warrant for him as a fugitive, and the Germans refused to give him up. Simon took Fort Liberte on 7 February and let his troops loot and kill across the north, in the same week that fire swept his own Les Cayes. Jeremie burned nothing, which earned him standing with the Zamors and with the Peralte family of Hinche. One of the young Peraltes, Charlemagne, marched in his column. Eight years later Charlemagne Peralte was leading the armed resistance to the American occupation, and the Marines shot him and photographed the body.

By February 1911 Antoine Simon's government had moved to open terror. The prisons of Port-au-Prince filled with political detainees, among them pregnant women arrested because the authorities could not find their husbands or brothers. Simon said in public that he deplored what was happening. A round of executions was carried out at night in the capital and took several prominent men. On 20 February the British consul general told the American minister Henry Furniss that only foreign intervention could stop the terror, and that only intervention could save what he called the only civilised Haitians. That phrase did a great deal of work. It confined civilisation to the educated town class and left the rural majority, whose coffee paid for the entire state, outside the category, invisible even in an appeal made on their country's behalf. The powers being invited had spent eighty years taking indemnity payments, loans and concessions out of Haiti, and their credentials for rescuing it rested on wreckage they had helped to make.