Istwa Nou

The army had sat still while eight men held its headquarters, and Duvalier drew the obvious conclusion. He pressed the United States for a military mission of Marines, officially to rebuild the armed forces. His own books had honoured Charlemagne Peralte and the other men who fought the American occupation of 1915 to 1934, which made the request useful twice over: Marines in uniform beside a shaky government are a photograph, and a strong professional officer corps trained in the United States was the last thing he wanted. He built a counterweight instead. Starting in mid 1958 the hooded gangs of Port-au-Prince and the rural section chiefs, whose appointment he quietly took away from the army, were assembled into the force everyone came to call the tonton macoutes, recognisable by dark glasses, a grey homburg and the bulge of a pistol. Barbot organised it and printed himself calling cards reading chief of secret police. On 15 December 1958 Duvalier revived the Garde Presidentielle as his own regiment, black to a man, holding the keys to the cellars where the ammunition was stored, quartered inside the palace. Seventy Americans arrived in January.

It took four hours to organise the counterattack. Barbot, Chauvet, General Flambert, two ministers and the president himself crossed the parade ground at the head of a crowd of soldiers and party men firing in every direction. Grenades went in through the barracks windows and one of them killed Pasquet, who had played centre forward for the army football team. Five more died in the next room. Arthur Payne was shot where he lay on a mattress. The skipper of the boat had his legs broken. Perpignand got out, was run down hiding in a chicken coop, and he and the last American were stabbed, shot, trampled and dragged naked through the streets to the palace to be shown to Duvalier, then left in the sun until the police collected them for the morgue. Haitians recognised the ritual. A crowd had done the same to President Guillaume Sam in 1915, and the Americans had used that afternoon as their reason for occupying the country for nineteen years.