1971 to 1975 · Haitianspan
Duvalierism settles into middle age with four hundred prisoners
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By the mid-1970s Duvalierism had become an institution with a stake in its own survival. Its enforcers had grown grey and prosperous. For the sake of foreign visitors the regime behaved, and the machinery kept running. Madame Max Adolphe put militia members to work planting trees at weekends and still ordered beatings when she wanted them. In the countryside the section chiefs ruled as before; nobody near Gonaives believed anything had loosened while Zacharie Delva was in place. Between Fort Dimanche, the Dessalines barracks and the Port-au-Prince police station, about four hundred political prisoners were held in conditions meant to kill them slowly, by tuberculosis, hunger or madness. Interrogations happened at the barracks or at the downtown station known as the Cafeteria, away from the palace. One macoute, Luc Desir, taped his sessions and played them back in quiet moments. A diplomat called the president a pleasant young man surrounded by hyenas. He took no pleasure in the cruelty and he stopped none of it.
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