10 February to 26 April 1963 · Haitianspan
Students write on the walls in February and are shot in a basement
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On 10 February 1963, the day the constitution had set for elections, students spread leaflets in Port-au-Prince and wrote insults about the president on walls. About thirty students, relatives and university teachers were arrested and beaten, and several were shot after the president questioned them himself in the basement room of the palace. New taxes reached the peasantry, on rice and on the chairs they made in their own huts. In early April Colonel Lionel Honorat's conspiracy was betrayed on the day it was to move. Five of its leaders got inside the Brazilian embassy. Charles Turnier was beaten all night, shot in the morning, and left lying on the parade ground for a week. Duvalier dismissed sixty nine officers, about a third of the corps, and took the families of retired officers into Fort Dimanche as hostages. On 26 April a car pulled alongside the palace limousine at the College Bird and shot the driver and two bodyguards. The two children in the car were not fired on.
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