Istwa Nou

Two of the thirteen from Jeune Haiti were taken alive. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were tortured, then driven on the morning of 12 November 1964 to the wall of the Port-au-Prince cemetery where the poet Massillon Coicou had been shot in 1908. They were tied to posts beside graves already dug and killed by a squad of nine under Colonel Franck Romain. Cameras filmed it. Duvalier had declared a public holiday, closed the shops, and had schoolchildren brought by bus to stand and watch. The film was shown again every day for a week. Afterwards the crowd walked to the National Palace and the president came out on the balcony to wave at it. The body of Captain Yvan Laraque, killed in the fighting in the south, was flown to the capital and left on a wooden chair in his underwear beside the road from the airport until it rotted. A sign across the street welcomed visitors to Haiti.

Early in 1964 army officers began passing round petitions asking that Francois Duvalier hold the presidency for life. A commission produced the text. It gave him the office for as long as he lived and the power to name his successor, and it called him the Sovereign throughout. He installed himself on 1 April and explained that a revolutionary of his kind turns up once in fifty or seventy five years. The ballots handed to voters were printed in advance with the word Oui on them. Two point eight million came back in favour. Three thousand two hundred and thirty four people found a way to vote against, and most of them were arrested for defacing a ballot. Official decrees began capitalising the pronouns that referred to him. A magazine ran a picture of Christ with a hand on Duvalier's shoulder, captioned as a statement that this was the chosen one. Paul Blanchet issued a catechism in which the five founders of Haiti were declared to be one man, and the man was the president.