Haiti

  Gaillard also heard about how Ouiliyanm once hung two brothers he suspected of being Cacos from a tree and lit a large fire under them, killing one and leaving the other burned all over his body. And in yet another incident, Ouiliyanm reportedly carried an elderly notary from the town to his police station in front of several witnesses, beat him nearly unconscious, then buried him alive in the courtyard. These stories were gathered by Gaillard in the early 1980s, and they might have been refracted through the more recent forms of terror that Haitians had experienced under the Duvalier dictatorship. Indeed, they were so dramatic that Gaillard himself wondered if they were all true. But he was deeply impressed by the way that, more than six decades later, Ouiliyamn’s “terrifying shadow” still haunted the towns where he had ruled.68

  When such abuses came to light, some high-ranking marines blamed them on Haitians and their culture. Questioned by the U.S. Senate about executions carried out under his command, for instance, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Williams cited Haitian history to provide a justification. “For the unauthorized killing of prisoners,” he declared, “there is an uninterrupted series of precedents running back to that established by the Cacique Coanabo in 1492.” Coanabo was a chieftain ruling in the area where Columbus arrived that year, and he seems to have killed the Spaniards whom Columbus had left behind to create a small settlement on the island. Similarly, Williams argued that Haitian soldiers recruited into the Gendarmerie brought callous brutality with them. “Our greatest problem in the organization of the Gendarmerie was the gendarme,” Williams explained. The recruits were “utterly indifferent to the value of human life,” he said; they were “prone to make the most of police authority, and very liable to exceed it.” In fact, Williams told the Senate, it was the United States that had worked to civilize the gendarmes, to limit the brutality of the Haitians by punishing those who overstepped their bounds.69

  Several years later, U.S. Marine Brigadier General Ivan W. Miller also claimed that any violence during the occupation had been made necessary by the culture of Haiti. “You have to remember that what we consider brutality among people in the United States is different from what they considered brutality,” Miller explained. “Those people, particularly at the time there, their idea of brutality was entirely different from ours. They had no conception of kindness or helping people.” John Russell, the high commissioner of the U.S. occupation for most of its duration, concurred, writing in 1929 that the “Haitian mentality only recognizes force, and appeal to reason and logic is unthinkable.” Such arguments were apparently persuasive: even when military reports and a Senate inquiry turned up evidence of a wide range of abuses by marines, the perpetrators were almost never punished.70

  These convenient justifications for the violence that U.S. soldiers perpetrated on Haitians ignored the ways in which structural changes brought about by the occupation facilitated the abuse. The Haitian army officers who had commanded Haiti’s towns and rural districts throughout the nineteenth century had exercised tremendous power and could easily have acted as local despots; but the dispersed nature of the Haitian state had forced them to cultivate support among local populations. The lack of a powerful central government, and the frequency of insurrection, had provided villagers with opportunities to get rid of commanders who overstepped their bounds. That changed dramatically during the occupation, for the new Gendarmerie units had the firm support of the entire U.S. military command. The marine officers who commanded the gendarmes reported directly to their superiors in Port-au-Prince, and the local populations largely lost the mechanisms through which they had held the military leaders accountable. The change was a key part of a larger transformation in twentieth-century Haiti: what had been a highly regionalized economic and political order became firmly, and effectively, centralized. The authority of governors and merchants who had depended on the economies of local ports faded, superseded by the power that emanated from Port-au-Prince. The capital, whose influence had previously been counterbalanced by that of other towns and regions, increasingly became the exclusive center of economic and political activity, and in time a magnet for migrants from throughout the country.71

  The Gendarmerie established by the marines was one of the few institutions created during occupation that actually outlasted it. Renamed the Garde d’Haïti in 1928, it became a powerful political force, the basis for a centralized military that would continue to shape Haitian life long after the Americans departed. But at its root, the Gendarmerie was an army created with one overarching goal: to crush internal resistance to the U.S. occupation. “It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen,” writes the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and the Gendarmerie, like the new Haitian army that emerged from it after the occupation, “indeed never fought anyone but Haitians.”72

  * * *

  The first major task carried out by the Gendarmerie confirmed what many Haitians had long asserted: if white outsiders got control of the country, they would turn the people back into slaves. Within a year of the arrival of the marines, Haitian men found themselves taken from their homes, sometimes tied together in coffles, and put to forced labor.

  It was all quite logical to the occupation authorities. Haiti needed new roads: it had become clear over the course of 1915 that one of the main problems in fighting Cacos was the difficulty of accessing the rugged terrain in which they operated. Better roads would allow the marines to move troops more quickly to combat zones. Such roads, of course, could also help improve the circulation of goods within the country, helping Haitian farmers to transport agricultural products to market and encouraging outside investment. But where to get the labor for this massive task? Haitian law provided an answer: the corvée. Article 54 of the 1864 Code Rural, which remained in effect in Haiti, allowed the government to conscript men as laborers on public works projects. These laws had not been enforced since Boyer’s time, but they were still on the books.

  In August 1916, invoking the corvée regulations, U.S. marines began using rural residents as road-building crews. On paper, the corvée was presented as a relatively humane institution. The men were to be paid, fed, and only made to work in the vicinity of their homes. Many in the U.S. administration considered it an effective and appropriate way of supplying labor needs for the development of infrastructure in the country. When Roosevelt traveled to the north of Haiti in early 1917, he encountered a group of corvée laborers who appeared quite happy to see the American visitors. Indeed, the hundred or so “natives” even presented a short performance, singing and dancing in honor of the august guests from the United States. Of course, the vision of the corvée as a harmless and even salutary arrangement was partly due to the Americans’ assumptions about the place of blacks in their own society. On his trip to Haiti, Roosevelt was accompanied by John A. McIlhenny, a friend from New Orleans. At one luncheon that the Americans attended with President Dartiguenave and members of his cabinet, McIlhenny found himself unable to eat, staring intently at the Haitian minister of agriculture seated across from him. “I couldn’t help saying to myself that that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes,” McIlhenny later admitted.73

  Among the marines who oversaw the system, a few did have misgivings. Colonel Waller, the Virginian who openly expressed racist views about Haitians, said that he personally disliked the use of corvée labor. As he testified at the U.S. Senate a few years later, it did not seem to be “the proper way or the economical way of getting the work done,” and it also struck him as “rather un-American.” But the orders were coming from above, so Waller followed them and “made no effort to have it stopped.” When Haitian officials tried to resist the corvée, meanwhile, they had little success. In 1917, a Haitian town council objected to the use of local residents, but the marines arrested the mayor and forced him, under armed guard, to round up the workers. After being released, the mayor traveled to Port-au-Prince to complain about the actions of the marines, but to no
avail.74

  The corvée as it was actually practiced involved tremendous abuse, which echoed the historical horrors of colonial slavery. Dantès Bellegarde, who served as minister of agriculture in 1918 and energetically denounced the corvée, declared that it reminded him of the “terrible epoch of the colony” of Saint-Domingue. Laborers who tried to escape from what Bellegarde called “concentration camps” were frequently shot. Questioned about such shootings by the U.S. Senate in 1921, an officer admitted that they did occur, though he declared that the total number of laborers who died this way was only “a hundred or less.” A Baptist missionary who had witnessed the corvée testified that he saw numerous bodies around the construction sites of laborers he believed had been executed by gendarmes. He estimated that more Haitians had “met their deaths through the corvée thus illegally practiced” than “were killed in open conflict with the Cacos.”75

  The “recruitment” of laborers was deeply traumatic for local residents. Sometimes it was done through brute force: a Haitian man testified in the Senate that one day in 1917 a “white man” and several others had come to his house to claim his son for the corvée. They struck the boy on the head and, as he was bleeding, dragged him away. The man never saw his son again. At other times, marines delegated the task of gathering laborers to the Haitian gendarmes, though this hardly improved the procedure. As one Haitian recalled, the U.S. soldiers would simply order, “bring me men,” and “had no interest in how the orders were carried out.” A victim of the corvée system described how the gendarmes came to his house early one morning and told him that he was under arrest. He was taken out to the road, where a group of other men were already tied up together, and added to the convoy. He was never told why he was arrested, because there was no reason, except that men were needed to build the roads. The Baptist missionary who testified in the Senate in 1921 declared that had seen many Haitians, including preachers and parishioners from his church, “roped tightly and cruelly together, and driven like slaves.”76

  Many men fled into the woods to avoid capture, making it increasingly difficult for the gendarmes to find laborers. One Haitian man, a local administrator at the time of the occupation, later recalled how a group of gendarmes took advantage of a wake to collect workers. Hearing the sound of singing, they stormed in, finding a group of men and women dressing a body for burial. They held their guns on the assembled party, tied up the men—including the carpenters who were building the coffin—and carried them away. The women, left behind, buried the corpse directly in the dirt.77

  Though most corvée laborers worked building roads, they were also put to other tasks. One man recounted watching a marine overseeing the work of prisoners who were picking up dung in the streets of Hinche, an inland town along the border with the Dominican Republic. “It was his manner that struck me,” the man recalled. Riding a mule, the marine poked the prisoners with a stick, and prodded his mule to walk so close to them that its hooves tore their skin as they worked. The men cried out, cowed by the threats of the marine, while the townspeople had little choice but to look on, “terrified.” Other marine officers were noted for their own forms of sadistic treatment. One of Roger Gaillard’s interviewees claimed that he had watched an officer delivering the meager salaries of the workers through a form of highly choreographed torture. The officer lined up the laborers, placed their money on the ground a few steps in front of them, and stood there with a large attack dog. As the workers stepped forward to get their money, he let the dog lunge forward to growl and bite at them. Gaillard also heard accounts of recalcitrant workers being punished with a treatment that came to be known as the baton-lamnò, the baton of death. A marine would take the hat off a worker, throw it on the ground, and order him to pick it up. As the man did so, the marine would strike him forcefully on the back of the neck.78

  In Hinche, the local commander targeted a particular neighborhood on the outskirts of town that he believed harbored “bandits” from the surrounding countryside. He put the neighborhood’s residents to work constructing a new garrison for the Gendarmerie. They were neither paid nor fed. “Were those men prisoners?” a U.S. senator later asked a marine involved in overseeing the construction in Hinche. “They were not prisoners, but they were kept in a compound there,” he responded. “Were they detained in the compound against their will?” the senator asked again. The marine’s reply was equivocal. “They had no other place to sleep, probably … They were detained in the town. They were not allowed to leave the town.”79

  From the Haitian perspective, the situation was much less ambiguous. When Gaillard asked one man why he used the term “slavery” to describe the corvée, he answered succintly: “One: the work isn’t paid. Two: you worked with your back in the sun, wearing nothing but pants. Three: they only sent you home when you were sick. Four: You didn’t eat enough, just corn and beans. Five: You slept in a prison or at the construction site. Six: When you tried to run away, they killed you. Isn’t that slavery?”80

  Some Haitians decided that if the corvée was a new form of slavery, it deserved the same response given by their ancestors: revolt. The marines, who had turned to the corvée partly because they’d hoped that new roads would solidify their military control over Haiti, eventually found that they had in fact incited a new round of war through their use of the practice. In October 1917, a group of armed men stormed into Hinche, planning to attack the commanding U.S. officer in the town and free the prisoners held there. They were soon beaten back by the marines and gendarmes, but the local commander suspected that they had not acted on their own. He ordered the arrest of several prominent men in the town he thought were behind the attack, including members of the family of Charlemagne Péralte—the Haitian officer who had refused to let American troops into Léogâne. Péralte’s home was burned and his brother’s residence pillaged by gendarmes, with the furniture, art, silver, and porcelain carried off to furnish the houses of the marines. The looting was seared into the memory of Péralte’s niece, who six decades later could still recite the precise inventory of what was taken, including her mother’s jewelry and a treasured phonograph. Péralte and his brother, meanwhile, were sent to Le Cap, where they were convicted of having supported the attack on Hinche and condemned to forced labor. Charlemagne Péralte, former commanding officer in the Haitian army, began spending his days in a prisoner’s uniform, sweeping the streets of Le Cap.81

  * * *

  “Haiti is a beautiful country,” U.S. Admiral Caperton told a Haitian journalist in February 1916. “She can be proud of her ancestors who destroyed slavery and conquered a glorious independence.” Caperton effused that there were many Haitians whom he was “happy and proud to count as friends.” “The peasant class is docile, amiable and naturally happy,” he went on. All that was needed for the country to flourish was for Haitians to create a “good government” for themselves. Once that was done, Caperton imagined, there would be “many more beautiful fields of sugarcane, vast plantations growing coffee, cotton, and fruit, and everywhere a happy, satisfied population.” With “peace and order” spreading throughout Haiti, the government could “build schools everywhere in the magnificent land, so that all Haitians can elevate themselves mentally.” This would lead to a flourishing of culture, an era of “great engineers, poets, artists.” In the end, “everyone will be able to exercise their talents; everyone will be proud of being Haitian, and will thank God.”82

  But while the U.S. occupation authorities proclaimed that their only goal was “good government” for Haiti, they also wanted to make sure that the Haitian government was compatible with American economic interests and friendly to foreign investment. The 1916 convention, by giving the United States control over customs revenues and the state budget and establishing the Gendarmerie as a new police force, had already gone partway to fulfilling that desire. But Haiti’s constitution still contained a provision that U.S. politicians, bankers, and corporate leaders saw as a barrier to their plans: the ban on foreign
ownership of property. Erasing this ban would be no simple matter. Back in 1867, a Haitian writer had called it the “Holy Grail” of the country’s liberty, and the provision was still tremendously popular half a century later.83

  The U.S. authorities, and President Dartiguenave, were astute enough to realize they would face serious opposition if they tried to simply amend the constitution to allow foreign property ownership—especially in the Senate, which had been so reluctant to ratify the 1915 convention. So Dartiguenave tried to outmaneuver the opposition by dissolving the Senate and creating an assembly from the more tractable Chamber of Deputies. When senators protested the move, continuing to hold meetings (which were broken up by U.S. troops), the president took a gamble, calling for elections in January 1917. Dartiguenave hoped to secure a more supportive set of deputies, but the move backfired. A group of charismatic leaders who opposed the occupation swept the first round of balloting, winning a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and putting themselves on track to gain a majority in the Senate as well.84

  The opposition to Dartiguenave became even more intense after he made a controversial deal with U.S. authorities. The 1916 convention had given total control of Haiti’s financial affairs to the U.S. for a period of ten years. But now the U.S. government told Dartiguenave that this time frame was too short. American bankers were willing to give Haiti a loan of $30 million (the equivalent of roughly $500 million today), but they needed reassurance that the money would be paid back responsibly. In order to provide that guarantee, the U.S. needed to extend its financial control for another decade, through 1934. Sténio Vincent, Haiti’s interior minister, vociferously resisted the proposal, but Dartiguenave signed the agreement. In disgust, Vincent resigned from the government, joined the opposition, and campaigned successfully for a seat in the Senate. Suddenly, Dartiguenave found himself in a precarious position: the election had given him a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies firmly in the hands of antioccupation activists, among them a defector from his own cabinet.85