Istwa Nou

Near midnight on 8 June 1967 the head of the Haitian armed forces, General Gerard Constant, was woken and called to the palace with eighteen other senior officers. Duvalier kept them waiting two hours, then appeared with an escort of militiamen carrying submachine guns. The officers were put into a truck and driven to Fort Dimanche. At the rifle range they found nineteen of their own colleagues tied to stakes, ten of them from the presidential guard and most of them close to Colonel Max Dominique. Each senior officer was handed a rifle loaded with a single round and made to stand in a firing squad with a gun at his own back. The president, dressed in black, watched from the side. After the volley he had the executioners walk slowly past the bodies and look at them, then sent them home. By sunrise Haitians were climbing the walls of the Latin American embassies. Nearly two hundred had taken asylum before the month ended.

After the executions of June 1967 Colonel Max Dominique and his wife Marie-Denise, the president's favourite daughter, were allowed to leave Haiti for an invented post in Europe inspecting embassies. The president's wife had asked for it. Before the aircraft carrying them was out of sight, Dominique's driver and two bodyguards were seized and shot. His elderly father was arrested at home and died of the treatment he received at Fort Dimanche. Duvalier is reported to have cabled his son in law: give me back my daughter and I will give you back your father. With the Latin American embassies full of Haitians who had run to them for protection, the government took a further step on 1 August and renounced the treaties by which Haiti recognised the right of asylum. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked that year for information about political prisoners and killings and was ignored, as it had been every time before.