Istwa Nou

After the gold went to New York, and after the Banque Nationale and the foreign merchants refused the newsprint gourdes, the Haitian government moved against the bank. On 23 December 1914 it took away the Banque's contract to handle the treasury. On the twenty eighth an investigating magistrate walked in with a warrant and a file of soldiers behind him. Desrue, the French assistant manager, saw what was coming, heaved the main vault door shut, threw the tumblers, spun the dial, then turned around and politely asked the magistrate what he could do for him. The cash drawers and lock boxes yielded 66,910 dollars in gold, and that is what the state carried out. Behind the sealed door lay 400,000 dollars, the remainder of the currency retirement fund. The manager reckoned it would take five or six days of work to open it. With the bank paralysed, Haitian public finance stopped, and on 29 January 1915 the republic announced default on its foreign debt.

Davilmar Theodore, short of money and short of allies, could not refuse Vilbrun Guillaume the post of military delegate for the north and northwest. Cap Haitien was full of unpaid Cacos drifting back from the capital and attaching themselves to the Zamorist faction, now led by Bussy Zamor and by Charlemagne Peralte, Charles Zamor's brother in law. On 15 January 1915 Guillaume called the leading citizens of the Cap together, announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, and told them a Caco army was approaching and the government had given him nothing to stop it with. The morning paper reported that the Capois had unanimously entrusted their fate to him. The Caco general Metellus appeared the same day at Barriere-Bouteille with a thousand men and several cannon. He paraded them in front of the cathedral, went inside, marched around the town and looted nothing. On the nineteenth his guns fired a seventeen gun salute, and Guillaume declared himself head of the executive power.