During the brutal years of the Duvalier dictatorship, the peasant Hermann Étienne lived and farmed in a rural section within Grand Goâve, a commune off the southern coast of Haiti. One summer day in 1963, a local chef de section, “police chief of rural section,” arrested Étienne and detained him against his will in Grand Goâve's military barracks. Rural police chefs formed the lowest rung of the national military that the United States installed years ago during its occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). In those days, U.S. forces established a military-rural police structure to demilitarize a well-armed and insurgent countryside, where peasant traditions of popular revolution previously checked the authoritarian tendencies of the Haitian state.Footnote 1 By the end of the U.S. occupation, Haitian peasants were disarmed and demobilized, exposing them to the abuse and arbitrary arrests of the U.S.-created Haitian military and its rural police chefs.Footnote 2 However, at the time of Étienne's arrest, the populist dictator François Duvalier was in power and his regime, though authoritarian, espoused a pro-peasant ideology that promised political equality and fair justice for peasants ostracized by the occupation. Étienne took the regime's words seriously and sent a letter of complaint to the chief general of the Haitian army describing his treatment by one of Goâve's abusive chefs. The letter drew from Duvalier's pro-peasant populist discourse, urging the military to keep up with its words.
“You know better than I that the Duvalieriste Revolution was made in the Interest of the mass peasantry,” Étienne wrote on 28 August 1963. “This revolution continues and will continue until something good happens for the eternally crushed of the backcountry.” Étienne was pointing out that rural police abuse against peasants was antithetical to Duvalier's pro-peasant populism. And yet: “Monsieur le Général voila, how peasants of this place are treated.” Étienne demanded “an inquiry to render Justice to those to whom Justice is due.” He closed his letter with the mark of loyalty to the regime: “Hermann Étienne, Duvalieriste Cultivateur.” Justice was delayed for several months. Yet, after various peasants from Goâve made similar complaints to military headquarters, the local rural police chef was eventually discharged from the military.Footnote 3 Étienne's letter and the efforts of others in his locality reveal the grievances of the Haitian peasantry by the mid-twentieth century: they were vulnerable to the notorious impunity of the Haitian military and rural police.Footnote 4
Pushed to the margins of power by the military-rural police force, Étienne and other peasants supported the Duvalier regime with the expectation that they would finally be reintegrated into national politics. Elected president in 1957, Duvalier initially pursued a populist program that he coined justice sociale, which involved irrigation expansion and land redistribution, to win the hearts and minds of the rural masses.Footnote 5 By 1960, in response to U.S. suspension of aid that subsidized justice sociale and U.S. covert support for military coups, Duvalier built a peasant-based militia.Footnote 6 Guarding the regime from mounting opposition, Duvalier's militia was eventually branded Volontaire de la Sécurité Nationale (VSN) whose members were officially known as milicien (Haitian Kreyòl: milisyen). Though the militia had been strategically created to defend its political position, the Duvalier regime portrayed its making as an act to restore the militarized political order that previously offered peasants social status and access to political power.
Before the occupation, peasants were embroiled in the Haitian economy of militarism and revolution that limited state power and created social mobility.Footnote 7 The 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution not only achieved the abolition of slavery and national independence but also produced a nation of revolutionary war veterans.Footnote 8 Early Haitian governments further militarized the population, conscripting all adult men into the national guard to protect the nation against European re-enslavement and recolonization.Footnote 9 These early governments also adopted and enforced French colonial codes such as vagrancy and anti-African religious laws.Footnote 10 Trained as soldiers, however, freed black people formed insurgent organizations and launched popular revolutions. The frequency of revolutions precluded the Haitian state from imposing, in any sustained way, post-emancipation laws that initially targeted the freedom of former slaves and, by the mid-nineteenth century, their peasant descendants.Footnote 11 Peasant revolutionary forces often seized control of the state; appointed insurgent peasants to military officer positions; and distributed among themselves mid-sized land estates (of approximately six to nineteen hectares). Therefore, every cycle of popular revolutions deposited sediments of rural officers and landed wealth––recurring revolutions dropped one layer atop the other, building a dense corps of peasant generals.Footnote 12 Before the 1915 invasion by U.S. Marines, peasants benefitted from the economy of militarism and revolution that established a culture of egalitarianism and social mobility in the Haitian countryside.Footnote 13
Nevertheless, after landing in Haiti, U.S. forces in February 1916 abolished the vast peasant-based military and rural police (a nationwide soldiery that rotated citizens into a standing army that fluctuated between twenty thousand and fifty thousand soldiers) and established a smaller professional force of about five thousand soldiers.Footnote 14 With the support of air raids, U.S. forces and the new Haitian army combatted a large yet scattered revolutionary force of some forty to eighty thousand peasants.Footnote 15 By 1921, U.S. forces had defeated peasant insurgents and successfully disarmed and demilitarized the Haitian countryside.Footnote 16 Furthermore, they reinvigorated and systematically enforced dormant codes that reactivated a post-emancipation crisis. In the 1920s, U.S. forces also created a new rural police force and recruited a fresh cadre of police chefs to assist the military in establishing control in the countryside.Footnote 17 After withdrawing its troops from Haiti in 1934, the United States left behind a new Haitian army that continuously enforced post-emancipation laws and buttressed the authority of predatory courts and tax agents. Disarmed and disempowered throughout the post-occupation period (1934–1957), the peasantry was lured into Duvalier's militia that presented itself as a return to a rural militarized order and a restoration of freedom in the countryside.Footnote 18
“Excellency, the gun that Sothonax gave us to defend our liberty and that the American occupation had taken away from us, without fear you have given back to us,” the militia commander M. L. Nicoleau boasted to Duvalier during a parade in August 1960. Sothonax was a radical French commissioner who helped armed rebel slaves during the Haitian Revolution, while reportedly saying, “Here is your liberty: he who takes this away from you will try to make you slaves again.”Footnote 19 U.S. suppression of peasant revolutions and the systematic enforcement of previously inactive post-emancipation laws regenerated a crisis of freedom that disenfranchised the rural masses. Thus, like the popular support for the dictatorships of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Fidel Castro in Cuba, peasant enthusiasm for Duvalier's militia emerged out of a “historical terrain” upon which a prolonged contest for freedom was thwarted by U.S. imperialism.Footnote 20
To be sure, the idea of arming the civilian population was part of an age-old political concept across space and time, an idea whose proponents encompassed a gamut of political thinkers including Machiavelli, Jefferson, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Malcom X, and the Black Panthers.Footnote 21 In Haiti, however, Duvalier tapped into peasant nostalgia for militarism and its relationship to freedom by purportedly returning “guns” to the Haitian countryside.Footnote 22 This brand of freedom came with a price. Nicoleau assured Duvalier that the guns of the militia “will not be turned against you. We will exclusively use it to defend the ideals of the Duvalieriste Revolution.”Footnote 23 Membership in the militia eventually placed peasants in a morally ambiguous position, requiring them to violently defend the position of the regime in exchange for state recognition of their rights and for access to political power.
The dictator François Duvalier deployed the militia to curb the powers of the U.S.-created Haitian military and to violently repress political opposition during his rule between 1957 and 1971. With the help of the militia, his regime consolidated political power and governed brutally for decades. Traumatized by state terror, portions of the Haitian populace secretly gave the militia its notorious name: tonton makout (Fr.: tonton macoute). Drawn from popular myth, the term refers to a straw-sack carrying old peasant man who abducted wayward children from unsuspecting parents, which is a fitting name given that some Haitians heard of makout peasants whisking away friends, relatives, and neighbors who were never seen again. Tonton makout tactics of terror made the Duvalier dictatorship one of the most violent in Caribbean history. Still, very little is known about the makout militia that can be gleaned from primary evidence.
In search of a makout history, I traveled throughout the far reaches of the mountainous Haitian countryside. Upon arriving at faraway destinations, I often confronted the reality that many primary materials no longer existed or were damaged beyond the point of legibility. Still, after visiting as many local institutions in each geographical zone as traveling would permit, I collected, often in piecemeal fashion, police reports, court transcripts, government correspondences, and peasant letters that had been preserved. I also hiked up mountains and interrupted peasants, who labored from sunup to sundown in their small gardens, to ask them to share memories, which some spoke about nostalgically and others simply wanted to forget. In the end, I managed to collect a dense evidentiary base comprised of oral histories and rural archival materials from multiple social and institutional provenances. These archival materials and human voices unveil the everyday characteristics of Duvalier's notorious yet, until now, obscure militia.Footnote 24
In particular, I found that peasants formed the bulk of the tonton makout militia and that their service was voluntary—they were not paid. This revelation provides an alternative narrative to studies that emphasize authoritarian governments that distributed material rewards to develop a social base. Most Haitian peasants (though not all, as we shall see) were driven into the dreaded makout militia because of “immaterial” motives tied to achieving freedom from the repression of the military-rural police structure. From the time of the occupation, especially, political authority in rural localities was largely concentrated in the hands of rural police chefs. After Duvalier created the militia, however, power was democratized. Or, as the elderly Adonat Touchard put it when I interviewed him: “Tout moun te chèf”; “Everyone was a chèf, then.”Footnote 25 In other words, peasants enlisted into the makout militia to renegotiate their disempowered status and, in doing so, became “chèf.” The practice of Haitian peasants calling themselves chèf originated in the nineteenth-century militaristic vernacular and inclusive order within which many peasants were generals, soldiers, and insurgents. For instance, hundreds of fighting subdivisions were led by peasants who held titles of chef de division, chef de bataillon, chef de régiment des forces insurrectionnelles, and so on. By the post-occupation period, after the demilitarization of the countryside, chèf referred only to the small and exclusive corps of soldiers and rural police officers in the U.S.-created army. Then, during the Duvalier years, everyone could reclaim the title of chèf when they joined the militia.Footnote 26 But this process of making power accessible enabled some makout peasants to pursue individual ambitions that reinforced the system of repression in the countryside.
For some peasants, becoming a makout meant, oddly enough, reenacting practices much like those of the U.S.-created police chefs. However, because of its inclusivity, the makout militia contained many peasants who also instilled into makout practices rural ethics of morality and communal interests. This helped to check the individualism of militia members and safeguard rural collective concerns.Footnote 27 For instance, makout peasants supported rural denizens in evading rapacious tax agents who were backed by the military-rural police structure. Thus, drawn as they were to different poles of power and communal notions of morality, the actions of makout peasants often vacillated between protecting and oppressing the peasantry. This made them appear to be a violent body that moved in contradictory directions. Still, with entire communities involved in militia activities, its members were obliged to contend with localized moral codes of behavior and conduct.
The moral weight of judgment often stymied the repressive tendencies of makout peasants, or at least compelled them to provide their communities with moral justification for acts of violence. In the final analysis, peasants viewed the makout militia as one of the few avenues to political power and the most effective mechanism for challenging the impunity of the rural police and the military. Many peasants enrolled in the militia, which expanded into a nationwide organization. It provided the regime with widespread “consent” as well as a vast yet hidden defensive bulwark that shielded the dictatorship from military coups and political attacks.
CREATION OF THE TONTON MAKOUT AND THE DECLINE OF THE POLICE CHEFS, THE HAITIAN MILITARY, AND THE POLITICAL OPPOSITION
From the moment of its inception, the militia encompassed a peasant majority. On 3 August 1960, Duvalier held the first militia parade, which probably marked the beginning of the organization.Footnote 28 “The militia is composed of 90 percent of men of the backcountry,” the makout Nicoleau declared at the parade.Footnote 29 Militia membership eventually grew large—certainly in the tens of thousands and conceivably hundreds of thousands. Archival research has uncovered no official registers of militia membership.Footnote 30 Perhaps the Duvalier regime itself did not know precisely how many people were enrolled. This did not prevent one Haitian ambassador from boasting in Washington, D.C. that it had in 1969 about two hundred thousand loyal members.Footnote 31 In a memoir recalling his days as a high-ranking official in the Duvalier regime, Rony Gilot counted three hundred thousand in the last few years of the dictatorship.Footnote 32
Elderly peasants told me in interviews that membership had been substantial. “All the zones were filled. All!” bellowed Marc, a peasant living in the northern rural locality of Grison-Garde.Footnote 33 Louis Nicolas, a former makout of Galman-du-Plat, remembered, “The entire population was milisyen.”Footnote 34 The former makout peasants Élie Marcelin and Ton Tatou of Camp-Louise exclaimed almost simultaneously, “We can't count this thing. It was vast. Many people.”Footnote 35 The market woman Élisianne “Nana” Jean-Gilles of Gotier recounted, “Many milisyen lived in this zone.”Footnote 36 When asked if some members of his family belonged, the peasant activist Désilien “Tonde” of Lacoma coughed out, “Woy ah [of course] there were.”Footnote 37 Capturing the inclusivity and immensity of the makout militia, one Abricots peasant remarked, “Everyone was chèf; if you weren't chèf it was because you didn't want to be.”Footnote 38 The large peasant numbers in the militia overtook the traditional power of the rural police chefs, also known as chef de section (Haitian Kreyòl: chèf seksyon).
The regime recruited thousands of peasants into the makout militia, which outnumbered the army of about five thousand soldiers and the five hundred fifty-one police chefs.Footnote 39 The vast militia violently pushed the latter from their positions of supreme authority in rural districts. “The chèf seksyon did not want to see milisyen but milisyen had all the power,” bragged the former makout Nicolas Tanis of Gotier.Footnote 40 According to Ton Tatou, “When I was a milisyen, my friend, we had power.… Whatever chèf came here, it could even be an officer that arrived, who came to do something … if their intentions were bad, beatings would fall upon them.”Footnote 41 Archival sources provide examples. In June 1962, the rural police chef Martin Lunor Metellus of rural section Brostage, located in the commune of Dondon, took affront at makout peasants arresting his brother. In retaliation, he had his brother released and arrested some “miliciens.” During a related court case, police chef Metellus scoffed, “la milice is not worth anything.” Makout peasants in Brostage were beginning to see things differently. As tensions escalated, Metellus’ brother was captured and roped by makout peasants who “almost beat him to death.” By August, the military discharged Metellus “to restore calm in the section.”Footnote 42 For the first time since the U.S. occupation, peasants could physically challenge, without facing state retribution, the supreme authority of the military-rural police structure. Eventually, the vast makout militia overwhelmed the entire military institution.
The former makout peasant André Georges of Bas Limbé (Haitian Kreyòl: Enba Linbe) explained: “The real state was the Haitian army. Then, Duvalier created milisyen—milisyen was what we call tonton makout. They were the real. [Georges paused, then continued.] I mean the military was the military, but the makout commanded [power].… That is why they got more respect from Duvalier because when I was in it, when you heard we had to go to Port-au-Prince, one would see so much traffic.” The numerous makout militia countered the military's influence, supplanting its position as a power beyond challenge. “The army had no value for people,” asserted one tax agent in the commune of Bonbon. “The milisyen were above their heads and everyone else's.”Footnote 43 Although now an elderly peasant with little sustenance, who hobbled about with the support of a wooden staff, the former makout Ton Tatou, while recounting memories of the militia, roared with excitement, “I remember an army lieutenant was disrespecting folks around here and a makout commander grabbed the lieutenant by the collar and threatened him to stop. By his collar!”Footnote 44 By all accounts, the makout militia significantly diminished the authority and influence of the U.S.-created military and rural police, and Duvalier prized it because he was doggedly determined to curb the national military's influence.
Duvalier's apprehension concerning the military was not fastened only to peasant grievances, but also to his suspicion that the army was a proxy for U.S. interference. The interests of the peasantry and the Duvalier dictatorship overlapped because both endeavored to reduce the authority of the military branch (which included the rural police). Duvalier was explicit about utilizing the makout militia to counter the military's influence. Quoting a passage from a French politician, Duvalier wrote in a 1969 memoire: “‘In nations where the tradition of pronunciamientos are strong, such as Latin America, only the constitution of popular militias can prevent militaries from dominating the state.”Footnote 45 Backed by the militia and peasant loyalists, Duvalier acquired sufficient support to reorganize the U.S.-created military. In 1962, for instance, he named what was his fifth army chief in five years.Footnote 46 Duvalier purged or replaced over seventy-five officers trained in U.S. military service schools established in Haiti. In one extreme case, in 1967, nineteen military officers were court-martialed and executed.Footnote 47 By 1969, Duvalier had closed down the Haitian Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Missions, preventing officers from receiving American instruction. “Little or no training has been conducted by the Haitian armed forces since then,” a CIA report admitted that year.Footnote 48 Duvalier's neutralization of the U.S.-created Haitian military was accomplished largely thanks to makout and peasant support.
He also urged makout peasants to protect his government from attacks by the exiled political opposition. Both makout members and peasant loyalists, who were sometimes indistinguishable, fervently guarded the state against invasions by the exiled opposition. These exiled rebels, often comprised of political elites supported by the United States, underestimated the regime's influence in the countryside. During a secret meeting with U.S. State Department officials, Pradel Pierre, a Harvard and Princeton-trained Haitian administrator who worked in Haiti's Ministry of Agriculture, assured that Duvalier's rural support was tenuous. Pierre surmised: “the peasantry, which heretofore had been politically inert and detached, was becoming restive because of increasing poverty and the failure of Duvalier to fulfill his promises of a better life for the black masses.”Footnote 49 Opponents of the regime often overlooked Duvalier's influence among peasants and this perhaps explains why most rebel plots in the countryside ended disastrously. In 1962, the exiled writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, a Marxist and pro-peasant novelist, landed in northwest Haiti with plans to mobilize the local population for what he probably imagined would be the beginning of a rural-based communist revolution in Haiti, perhaps similar in success to the Cuban Revolution. In an unforeseen twist of fate, locals in the northwest reported Alexis to state authorities and he was executed.Footnote 50 Another example involved Clement Barbot, an erstwhile confidant of Duvalier, who in 1963, coordinated rebel attacks from a secret hiding place located in the plains of Croix-des-Bouquets. That July, a suspected “informant” gave away his hideout to the authorities who summarily executed him “at a rural village.”Footnote 51 Anti-Duvalier rebels repeatedly made the mistake of seeking refuge in the countryside, where, to their surprise, they often stumbled upon rural communities that were the strongholds of the makout militia and regime loyalists. These rural supporters of the dictatorship even joined state forces and helped eliminate rebel groups.
On 26 April 1963, Hector Riobé led a group of armed rebels to attack a military post in the rural commune of Kenscoff. He did so to vindicate the murder of his father, a factory owner, who was robbed and killed by a pro-Duvalier soldier. This same soldier was later spotted driving around town in a Mercedes Benz belonging to the Riobé family.Footnote 52 Angered by his father's death and the soldier's appropriation of his family's luxurious car, Riobé organized a group of rebels and launched an armed revolt in Kenscoff. According to both Haitian and U.S. reports, Kenscoff peasants aided authorities in beating back his rebel forces.
At 7:00 in the morning, a peasant woman surprised one rebel, Jean-Pierre Hudicourt, and smashed his head with a club while her husband wrestled a 22-caliber telescoped rifle from his grasp. By 10:00, more peasants joined authorities and the ensuing battle left four soldiers, four makout members, and a peasant loyalist named René Ocène injured; another makout and three other peasant loyalists died during combat. After authorities and peasants had suppressed Riobé’s rebellion, the local army general sent a private, internal report to Duvalier that described peasants’ enthusiastic contribution to the regime's victory: “The rural population in the zone of Kenscoff demonstrate a limitless devotion regarding the government of their well-liked Chef, Doctor François Duvalier.… Armed with clubs, machetes, and instruments of plowing, the peasants of Kenscoff … hunted the enemy with tenacity.”Footnote 53 Unbeknown to the political opposition, the countryside was the lion's den of the regime, concealing peasant loyalists and the makout militia that made up the core of Duvalier's social base.
The Dominican Republic's President Juan Bosch warned that Duvalier's political strength was generated through popular support. Reflecting on U.S. covert backing for anti-Duvalier rebel groups exiled in his country, which bordered Haiti, Bosch remarked in the 1960s, “It was very stupid to use our country in order to overthrow Duvalier because he had popular support. That is why it was not easy to overthrow him.”Footnote 54 And yet, the United States and the exiled opposition continued to envision utilizing peasants to overthrow the regime. To be sure, there were exceptional cases in which the complexities of local communities enabled rebel plots to generate support among some peasants, but these plots, at best, resulted in internecine conflict in the countryside. In 1964, after receiving training in the Dominican Republic, a group of exiled rebels entered the southeast border town of Thiotte and found support among some peasants. On 3 July, the chief of the army demanded that the local captain provide “the nature of aid received by the rural population.”Footnote 55 After rebels raided the store of the local merchant Bernadotte family and redistributed their merchandise among peasants in the nearby rural localities of Mapou and Citadelle, Haitian officials began to suspect that the rebels were successfully gathering stronger local support.Footnote 56
Because events increasingly appeared favorable to the rebels, the regime turned to “les VSN et Civil Duvalieriste” of the southeast region and relied on its local network of loyalists to repress the rebels and their peasant sympathizers.Footnote 57 Internal violence broke out in Thiotte that resulted in a massacre. On 6 July 1964, the local military captain sent Duvalier a translated, coded message: “Habitant peasants [of] the Mapou and Citadelle zone sympathize and aid. Requesting authorization to raze these two localities.”Footnote 58 The authorities, made up of soldiers, makout members, and peasant loyalists, joined to suppress the movement. How many were killed remains unknown, but the incident came to be known as the Thiotte Massacre and served to terrify peasants who sympathized with the political opposition.Footnote 59 Whether they were proponents or opponents of the Duvalier regime, peasants were bound up in the political conflicts of the Duvalier period.
In the summer of 1964, peasants contributed to the resilience of a rebel attack in the southwest peninsula. Belonging to the peninsula's urban elite families in Jérémie and backed by the CIA, a group of thirteen exiled rebels christened themselves Jeune Haïti and landed in the region's mountainous countryside. Jeune Haïti's rebellion lasted two months and twenty days, surpassing the duration of most rebel campaigns against the dictatorship. One U.S. State Department official found the endurance of the rebellion suspicious and reported, “The fact that such a very small band of rebels succeeded in withstanding government efforts to destroy them for almost three months seems to be prima facie evidence that they were not operating in a hostile milieu.” For this U.S. official, the truth was in the silence of the regime's propaganda machine.Footnote 60
The Haitian government released a public communiqué regarding details of the rebel attack and, contrary to the regime's custom of propaganda, it said, “There were no reports of rebels having been killed or wounded by the peasants themselves.”Footnote 61 Eventually, local authorities, the makout militia, and peasant loyalists repressed Jeune Haïti, and a massacre followed that killed members of urban elite families of Jérémie in a most cruel fashion. Events surrounding the Jeune Haïti attack showed the world the virulence of makout terror. To others, the attack also exposed that the militia was an unpaid, ill-equipped force.
MALHEUREUX PEASANTS EXCHANGING IMMATERIALISM FOR POLITICAL POWER
The makout/VSN militia was made up of rural, unpaid volunteers and lacked military equipment, even though they helped provide national security. Evaluating militia performance during the Jeune Haïti attack, one U.S. foreign officer, entirely unimpressed, reported, “The VSN in the south showed again that they were ineffective as a fighting force against an armed aggressive enemy. From all reports they were poorly-armed, poorly-led, poorly disciplined and without adequate logistic support.” The report emphasized that members of the makout militia feared the “danger of getting shot plus hardship of being in the field without adequate supplies.”Footnote 62
Peasants bore the costs of militia uniforms, arms, and, in rare cases, unofficial membership fees. Communities sometimes came together to gather cash for a fellow peasant to be inducted into the militia. But makout peasants rarely received material rewards from the state. “The way they suffered, do you know they were never paid,” Floreine Desir interjected mockingly, during an interview with her husband and former makout, Georges. She continued, “When summoned to Port-au-Prince, they had to spend their own money … every night they would guard the homes of powerful people (gwo moun) staring blankly without any coins in their pockets.” Georges smirked and somberly admitted: “We were not even paid one gouden [the lowest-denomination coin]; our service wasn't paid for, we marched … on patrol. Ask me what we were looking out for? I hear we are looking out for rebels. Where are the rebels? Who really knows? You're walking around breaking your body all night.”Footnote 63 With little revenue, the regime bartered political power and privileges in exchange for makout loyalty.
The reward behind joining the makout militia involved state recognition of rights and personhood. Previously separated from political life in the occupation period, peasants who enlisted into the makout militia received political affirmation from high-ranking state officials in the Duvalier years. The former makout Père Camille of Ravine-du-Roche recalled, “Milisyen were not paid, none were. But when one was a milisyen, one was greatly valued (gran valè); even if you were the minister of justice, you had to value milisyen.”Footnote 64 Georges concurred:
There were places one [a makout] would go, some people came and greeted you, including big state officials [gwo leta] who [called out to makout peasants], “My brother, my brother.” What was that? We weren't supposed to rub with those folks, because [before] they would call you a peasant [abitan payzan] who lives in the woods. How else were we going to find people in Port-au-Prince, to find people in Okap [Cap-Haïtien] who wanted to rub with us [if we were not members in the militia]? Now you're spending so many days in militia headquarters, they need you so much that you can't return home—do you think if we had stayed as abitan in the wild woods we could have survived? Now we're rubbing with [powerful] people, becoming enlightened [eklere]. If someone wrongs you, you know where to go to defend yourself, you're not a maroon [mawon] anymore. You're not scared.”Footnote 65
Makout peasants experienced, quite literally, the center of political power. Some, for example, saw the capital for the very first time while participating in militia parades near the National Palace.Footnote 66 Makout membership increased peasants’ sense of self in a political system that had previously marginalized them.
Observing this reality in 1964, one U.S. foreign officer telegrammed: “Militia organized by Duvalier regime should also be mentioned for possible political effect on rural population. Militia units formed at local level throughout the country to protect ‘Duvalierist revolution’ have tended to give some individuals some sense of participation in national life which could have longer-term political effects.…”Footnote 67 Makout peasants constituted an immense corps of undersupplied and unpaid peasant bodies that fortified the dictatorship's position. Recognizing that his regime stood on their backs, Duvalier described the militia as the “permanence of his revolution.”Footnote 68 Makout “consent” and defense helped Duvalier stay in power for more than a decade. The longevity of the regime depended on an immaterialist arrangement: giving peasants power and political status in exchange for their loyalty.
Their access to political recognition and privileges came at a moral cost: when peasants decided to become makout this put them in a morally ambiguous position that sometimes called for committing murderous political actions in exchange for a freer life. Grappling with the dilemmas of militia membership, some correspondents urged the position that if peasants did not join the makout then they would have no political freedom. “You couldn't remain a ‘hello’ [civilian] because when you were a ‘hello,’ you were nothing,” former makout Élie Marcelin explained.Footnote 69 The military-rural police structure, in particular, buttressed legal codes that outlawed African-derived religious practices, independent labor, and freedom of mobility in the Haitian countryside.
For example, military soldiers and police arrested civilian peasants as vagrants or vagabonds if they were caught not farming on weekdays. Vagabondage had been a dormant, post-emancipation offense until it was revived during the U.S. occupation. It essentially criminalized peasant mobility. From the occupation period until the early years of the Duvalier dictatorship, the weekly movements of peasants violated the law. “Long ago everyone worked … during the week; young men did not promenade except on Saturdays and Sundays or else the state would arrest you,” explained one peasant in Grison-Garde.Footnote 70 In the stunningly beautiful commune of Le Borgne on the northwest coast, rare court records display prosecutions of peasants as vagabonds, as well as their protests.Footnote 71 Caught in the grasp of the state, Borgne peasants drew on a political vernacular that was associated with pro-peasant discourses that had been bolstered by the Duvalier regime. Some Borgne peasants invoked their status as “malheureux” (unfortunate, or disempowered), a discursive usage that stretches back to the nineteenth century but was renewed with vigor beginning in the post-occupation period to the Duvalier years.Footnote 72
On 30 November 1961, in Borgne's court of peace that adjudicated petty crimes, the peasant Exilus Saintilma replied to charges of vagabondage, “I'm not a vagabond, I'm a malheureux searching for work to earn my daily bread.” Some peasants accused of vagabondage invoked the language of injustice and class exploitation in their defense. Sully Pierre, arrested for the offence that same year, proclaimed in court, “There is something that is hard to understand about this country. The very big crush the very little.”Footnote 73 While harvesting coffee beans, Exantus Georges in November 1961 was arrested in his garden and charged with vagabondage, and when the judge asked him why he was so charged, he replied, “If arrested as such, it is because of pure injustice.” In the polysemous discourse typical of spoken Haitian Kreyòl, others alluded to the problem of exchanging political loyalism for rights. Dieugrand Garçontil told the judge in his vagabondage case, “In this country, everything is a mystery. One must understand how to live, in order to live to be in good relations with the people in this country and … it is my bad luck that has brought me here.”Footnote 74 Only loyalty to the regime and, especially, membership in the militia allowed peasants “to live” independent of state predation and repression. Indeed, despite their pleas, Saintilma, Pierre, Georges, and Garçontil, as ordinary peasants, were tried as vagabonds and sent to prison for convict labor, but their true crime was their audacity in moving freely as they pleased. Ultimately, in 1963, Duvalier struck vagabondage from the rural laws, which eventually ended the practice of police chefs picking up and prosecuting peasants.Footnote 75 Still, peasants faced other forms of repression that were legacies of U.S. intervention.
For instance, they struggled to avoid state predations via the tax bureau that was established during the occupation. In the nineteenth century, the Haitian state extracted taxes indirectly from the insurgent peasantry.Footnote 76 In 1924, after peasants were disarmed, the occupation government created an internal national tax bureau, Administration Générale des Contributions, which taxed peasants directly and maintained local offices throughout the provinces.Footnote 77 Each local office (Fr.: impôts locatif) was staffed with a single tax officer (préposé) and a tiny army of underling collectors (percepteurs). Tax agents utilized their own ties to rural communities to discover which taxes had not been paid, and then dispatched the military and rural police to arrests evaders. Although this system was nowhere near efficient and taxes were often successfully evaded, tax préposés, percepteurs, and the military-rural police structure maintained a menacing presence in the countryside that impinged on peasants’ sense of economic opportunity, social justice, and freedom.
The taxation system targeted the rural economy, peasant African-derived religions, and leisure activities to generate state revenue that rarely circulated back to peasants. In the southwestern peninsula of Grand’ Anse, peasants dubbed tax collectors gwo woch, or “a huge rock,” which alluded to how the rigid taxation system weighed on the moral economy of the Haitian countryside.Footnote 78 For example, tax préposés tailed rural women vending crops in public market places. In underdeveloped mountain areas, peasant women tried to sell their agricultural products free of taxation, and some organized clandestine markets for this purpose. Somehow, though, word of their evasions would still reach local préposés.
In the charming commune of Acul-du-Nord, tax records show how peasants were menaced by a predatory system backed by the force of rural police chefs and military soldiers. Because women who marketed regularly engaged in public commercial activities, they were most vulnerable to everyday forms of state coercion, especially regarding taxation. The stealthy market women in Acul were unable to escape the notice of a hawkish tax préposé who, on 10 February 1961, reported to the local military sergeant: “I have been told that a plurality of vendors has taken the pleasure to organize illicit markets in the rural section under your command, which, in fact, decreases revenues. In this case, I ask you to send the Agents of Police on Market days at these places, who, where appropriate, will make arrangements against them, so as to cause them to divorce themselves from their methods which harm the interests of the State.”Footnote 79
Living in the mountainous rural section of Macary, Louisiane and her sister (who agreed to talk but not to provide her name) recalled their arduous walks to vend crops in the commune of Jacmel, a journey and task that required a full day of physical exertion. Describing the cruel toll that marketing labor took on their bodies, Louisiane stated, “When you take this route all the way to Jacmel, when you return, you're not a person anymore.” The journey to market taxed their bodies, then tax agents set to work on their purses. They usually had to pay for a ticket de marche (Haitian Kreyòl: kat), a ticket that stated the tax due based upon the size of the merchandise, and a separate kat for parking mules or other beasts at the market place. “They [tax agents] used to make us miserable. Everywhere we turned we had to pay kat: if you were with your mule they would pass their hand over it and demand you pay for it. If you moved ahead [into the market] they asked you to pay; if you moved further in they asked you to pay again.” Louisiane's sister interjected, however: “We fought them, they made us pay too much. We would fight them en route and say, ‘We're not paying at all.’”Footnote 80 As men were arrested for their mobility, so women were taxed for their mobile economic activities.
Rural people's freedom of leisure and religious practice, too, were menaced by tax agents and the military-rural police structure. Gageure, or cockfighting, a leisure activity in the countryside, was systematically taxed during the occupation. Prior to U.S. invasion, gageure had been outlawed, but the ban was difficult to enforce due to the armed rural population. After the withdrawal of U.S. forces, hosts of untaxed gageure games were subjected to arrests and imprisonment. On 10 March 1961, Acul's tax préposé ordered the military to arrest Émile Abraham of Bas Acul because he had organized a gageure without registering the game for taxation.Footnote 81 The same thing occurred with other untaxed leisure activities in Acul. In 4 October 1961, the irritated Acul préposé wrote to the local army corporal: “It has come to my attention that certain delinquent taxpayers have taken to reunions of games, of spectacle public [rural parties and Vodou ceremonies], all of them parties in the rural Sections under your command.” The préposé ordered the corporal to suppress the activities of these tax evaders, who were causing a “problem for the interest of the state.”Footnote 82
It is noteworthy that the state taxed ceremonies associated with the popular African-derived religion of Vodou, but not those rooted in European traditions such as Catholicism and Protestantism. In theory, Vodou ceremonies were illegal even under the Duvalier dictatorship, but in practice authorities sanctioned Vodou ceremonies so long as the devotees paid the spectacle public, which was the standard tax on festive events. Put simply, only untaxed Vodou ceremonies were prohibited. Some peasants held secret Vodou ceremonies, but in doing so they risked state retribution.
On 27 May 1962, an Acul préposé discovered that an unauthorized Vodou ceremony was planned at “habitation [locality] ‘Guilmaçou’” and he wrote to the local corporal, “Presently, I request you to please put at my disposal the ministry of public law enforcement under your command: a soldier, a chef de section, and an auxiliary police force to put a stop to the spectacle public consisting of prayers, dancing, et cetera, whose host was not authorized by the tax office.”Footnote 83 With the support of the army, tax agents extracted money from peasants, stalking their economy and undermining their sense of freedom. The police state's predatory practices in the countryside compelled many peasants to join the makout militia.
MALHEUREUX PEASANTS, MAKOUT PWOTEKSYON, AND THE REMAKING OF SOLIDARITY
One peasant referred to such makout peasants as malere pè presyon, or “malheureux fearful of pressure.”Footnote 84 Indeed, peasants had long seen themselves as malheureux, but after enlistment in the militia, they became “chèf” during the Duvalier years to shelter themselves from state predation and repression. In the rice-growing section of Bokozel, along the Artibonite Valley, one makout, for example, carved the acronym of the militia, VSN, into a wooden plank and nailed the sign to the front gate of his family's lakou, or compound. This VSN sign served to warn lurking state agents that relatives and friends living inside his lakou were under makout pwoteksyon, or “protection.”Footnote 85 Other makout peasants extended their pwoteksyon to incorporate their entire communities.
Covering peasants under makout protection created tensions between the militia and state agents. For instance, in the rural section of Soufrière, the makout militia urged peasants to evade taxes. On 7 September 1964, the local préposé decried: “Miliciens … of this region enjoy inculcating peasants with the spirit of embezzlement.… They lead them to understand that the Government of the Republic henceforth cancels the collection of taxes, notably [taxes on] Spectacle Public, card games, slaughterhouse fees, et cetera.” The tax officer acknowledged that the makout militia was encouraging resistance to what peasants already had a propensity to act against: “This disturbance has left the wrong feelings in the minds [l'esprit] of the peasants, since it is [already] the manner in which they move voluntarily.” Makout peasants utilized their status to defend Soufrière from state predation and to fight against the regime's local tentacles. “This has paralyzed the submission of Funds,” bemoaned the préposé.Footnote 86
Relations were often tense between makout peasants and local state agents who harassed peasants for taxes. One former makout shared the following story:
My aunt was arrested because she put coffee on the ground [in violation of laws on coffee preparation]. I wasn't present during the incident that day. When the state agronomist went up to my rural section of Laurent and had her arrested, neither I nor the other stronger ones [i.e., more influential makout peasants] were there. A jakoma [fresh militia recruit], who you know, who was not yet strong but still was a chèf, was told that the state had arrested my aunt. He dropped his farming and ran to where she was, and he yelled out to her to stop and return. She replied that she could not because she was under arrest, but he cried out again to her to return. And she did. He instructed her to take back the coffee and she took back the coffee. And he told her to go back home and eat. And she did. The agronomist and the rural police just stood there and couldn't do anything because the tonton makout had priòyite [priority].Footnote 87
Makout peasants often showed solidarity with kin and friends who were caught in the police state's grasp. They were themselves members of peasant communities and maintained solidarity with those who farmed and sold their harvests to earn a living.
The notion of travay tè, or “work the land,” did not merely describe farm labor but also an ideology that forged community ties. For some peasants, travay tè bound Haitians together so tightly that it became commensurate with nationalism. “I am Haitian, I work the land,” explained Immacula Honarat of Anse-à-Foleur.Footnote 88 Haiti was predominantly a nation of peasants, so travay tè was not simply a marker that distinguished their economic class (and that would be inaccurate), but also a way of seeing the world that created local solidarity. This solidarity led to a collective understanding that local makout peasants behaved differently from urban members of the makout militia.
One rural denizen in Abricots, in the southwestern peninsula, expressed the idea that local members of the militia “didn't do harm; it was milisyen in Port-au-Prince that did harm. You can't harm peasants, you will always pay for it.”Footnote 89 Indeed, local solidarities sometimes ran so deep that they divided makout members according to notions of spatial difference. One week in March 1963, for example, an argument broke out in the province of Gonaïves between the local militia and makout urbanites from Port-au-Prince. One U.S. official reported what followed: “The argument led to the shooting of one of the Gonaïves militia by the group from Port-au-Prince and subsequently to their own deaths at the hands of a mob.”Footnote 90 In defense of the local militia, the locals killed makout members from the capital.
Sometimes local makout solidarities trumped the interests of the central government. In June 1964, Duvalier held a constitutional referendum that would make him “President for Life.” Although the referendum has been associated with fraud, intimidation, and irregularities, primary sources suggest that rural denizens and makout peasants on the northern offshore island of La Torture threatened to sabotage it due to a conflict they had with an army officer named Charles Lefère. On the 1 July, the army commander Henri Namphy telegrammed Duvalier the following rushed message: “[the] unworthy behavior of officer Charles Lefère in Latorture [sic] constantly in shock with the VSN and population following the report already sent. New incidents [occurred during] five days of elections and this week with VSN who refused any collaboration, and with good reason. Solicit your Excellency's removal of this officer for collective security [of] La Torture.”Footnote 91
This telegram does not tell us what exactly sparked tensions, but it indicates that local solidarities brought together makout peasants and ordinary peasants to confront the officer Lefère. The conflict almost jeopardized Duvalier's local efforts to be reelected to the presidency for life. He eventually succeeded on a national level, but he had to coexist with locally based makout peasants whose activities often obstructed his regime's interests. M akout peasants were concerned with not just national politics but also their own localities.
The local sensibilities of makout peasants were grounded in collective notions of morality that had been constantly reworked over time. In addition to making occasional trips to the capital and taking part in weekly local militia meetings, marches, patrols, and training, many makout peasants had to toil just to eke out an existence (chèche lavi) from the land. Farming and selling their harvests were subject to uncertainties created by both natural and human forces. One way in which peasants prepared for natural disasters was by cultivating fellowship with kin, friends, neighbors, local elites, and supernatural forces. The peasant culture of interdependency created collective practices and techniques that could mitigate the ferocity of the unpredictable—hurricanes, sickness, crop failures, and simple bad luck. To deal with more predictable, human problems such as local state repression, ordinary peasants in the Duvalier era entered the makout militia to defend their communities against the military-rural police structure and tax agents.
For example, makout peasants helped market women resist the abusive taxation that disrupted their capacity to share what they had earned with needy relatives and friends, who were bound together in the countryside's precarious moral economy. Makout peasants argued that their relatives and others covered under their idea of pwoteksyon should not be taxed at the marketplace. They developed the idea that their unpaid, voluntary service to the regime should exempt them from taxation.
One former makout of Limbé explained: “People used to pay a kat. It could be any little item brought to the market; a kat had to be paid.… Like me, I'm a chèf and I send my wife to the market, but we don't have much, and we have to pay a tax.… We said this could not go on. ‘I am not paid and the little that I have is going to be taxed.’ No. We revolted. This could not continue.”Footnote 92 The archives hold many cases of makout peasants defending market women from taxation. In 1963, rural police officers in the border town Thomassique spotted a group of “contrebandier,” or market women, moving untaxed merchandise of Dominican provenance between the rural sections of Savanna Mulâtre and Nolaquite. “Among them were two miliciens,” one rural police chef reported, “who after seeing the police, began fighting the two police agents … while the contrebandiers fled the scene.”Footnote 93
One Sunday morning in 1965, Sainte Heureuse Daniel left her parents’ home in a rural section of Dondon to transport freshly harvested cabbage to the city of Cap-Haitien. She was stopped on her path by an unofficial tax agent who claimed to have orders to destroy bad [piques] cabbage. When she protested, the agent threatened that she would lose either her life or her cabbage. He destroyed the cabbage, and she complained to three “miliciens,” who then arrested the tax agent.Footnote 94 He was jailed and forced to repay the value of the cabbage as well as the fees that she had paid to the police to hold him in custody until the trial.
Makout efforts to evade taxes spurred revolts and violent conflicts with state agents. These forms of violence were part of the makout terror but employed against the state. In 1966, market women in Gonaïves refused to pay market fees to a tax officer and local makout militia members rushed to their defense. This anti-tax action evolved into a popular revolt by both market women and the makout militia. In retaliation, Duvalier sent his presidential guard to Gonaïves to suppress the revolt and reorganize the local militia.Footnote 95 In 1967, Telius Audalus, accompanied by the makout Estasse Joseph, whose feminine name suggests a woman, stabbed an officer attempting to collect taxes in Soufrière's market. The makout Joseph was arrested and jailed but, according to Acul tax officials, was then released on the order of the local “chef de la milice” without being tried.Footnote 96 On 7 April 1969, the prefect of Mirebalais reported “Brunevil Dulormé V.S.N.” and “Tardieu Clermont V.S.N.” to Duvalier as residents in habitation Tizeau of Cazale, who participated in a rebellion that originated partly in local resistance to market and irrigation taxes. The regime dispatched makout militia members from another region to help squash the rebellion, which led to the 1969 Peasant Massacre.Footnote 97 Some market women enlisted in the militia to avoid dependence on makout men and to enjoy privileges that included evading market taxes.Footnote 98 In sum, makout peasants adopted local moral precepts as a means to resist the taxation that encumbered the rural moral economy. All were peasants who shared common ideas of economics, labor, and justice. They also extended ideas of peasant solidarity to include agricultural workers in labor conflicts with powerful foreign industrialists operating in Haiti.
In fact, many agricultural labor unions were pro-Duvalier organizationsFootnote 99 and others converted into makout lodges while continuing to advocate for labor rights. Labor unions, particularly in the northern zones and especially in the northeast, were absorbed into the makout militia.Footnote 100 “One of the interesting features of Duvalierism in northeastern Haiti,” a U.S. foreign officer reported to Washington in the 1960s, “is the complete control of the principal labor federation in that area by the Civil Militia, President Duvalier's para-military band of political activists.” Before the occupation period, northeast Haiti had been a hotbed of rural insurgency. After U.S. forces stamped out traditions of revolution in the region, American businessmen established sisal plantations there and recruited American officers to manage them.Footnote 101 In the Duvalier years, peasants joined makout militia/labor unions and led two major labor strikes against U.S. planters in the northeast.
During one union-makout strike in May 1962, the makout and prefect Berthelus Pierre taunted U.S. managers of the Dauphin Plantation in Fort Liberté: “You are not so powerful, you couldn't even get Castro out of Cuba.” One makout participant in the strike, upon hearing a U.S. manager concede to union demands for holiday pay, but only under certain conditions, interrupted to proclaim, “They would always get this holiday pay under any condition as Dr. Duvalier would be president forever.” The makout-union won the strike, a victory that strengthened local support for the militia and the regime. U.S. officials reported, “As a result of the labor factory in the disputes provoked … the militia-union leaders and President Duvalier have enjoyed a wave of popularity among the plantation employees.”Footnote 102 These revolts against and conflicts with political and economic elites usually occurred independently of regime directives. Makout peasants often acted autonomously and extended protection to members of their communities. These practices of pwoteksyon derived, in part, from concepts of peasant solidarity, social justice, and freedom that had long governed social interactions in the countryside. That said, makout peasants also pursued a range of practices that tested peasant moral philosophies.
MAKOUT POLITICS OF TERROR AND COMMUNAL SOLIDARITY
M akout peasants straddled a line between protecting communal interests and exercising power for personal ambitions. Some obtained power by taking advantage of political notions of spatial difference. From the rural habitation of Galman-du-Plat, the makout Nicolas traveled to enlist in the VSN militia in the nearest major city, Cap-Haïtien, where the region's political power was most concentrated. He reasoned, “I entered the militia in the city to be chèf over all the milisyen in the backcountry.”Footnote 103 Some makout peasants achieved the position of chèf by supporting the militarized police state that preyed on peasants. The former makout Camille remembered that he and fellow members of the local militia worked together with their local police chef, Hèlvé Jean.Footnote 104 Others saved rural police officers from being disciplined by their military superiors. For instance, the former makout Nicolas successfully ordered army soldiers to release two jailed rural police agents from the military prison in Quartier Morin.Footnote 105
Other makout peasants emulated the practices of the military-rural police structure, becoming oppressors themselves. For example, some extorted fellow peasants to enrich themselves much like state agents did. After Duvalier reinforced codes against tree cutting, one makout peasant of Gotier, a deforested area, admitted that he charged peasants a fee to continue felling trees for charcoal to sell in urban centers.Footnote 106 The former makout Coeur Aimable of Limbé remembers that some members of the militia charged peasants a fee for retrieving captured farm animals from the rural police, rather than freely helping fellow peasants out of a jam with the authorities.Footnote 107
Other makout peasants employed their authority to settle personal scores. In December 1961, the “milicien” Antoine Duvivier took the seamstress Noémie Homère to court in Borgne for “gravely insulting” him during a dispute over rumors. Duvivier told the judge, “The last injurious words she launched at me [was that] if it were not for my role as milicien, we would be at serious odds [avoir de mailles à partir]…. But in my kindness, I judged it good to formulate my complaint in front of the law.” He chose to avenge his harmed ego through institutional means rather than the overt violence associated with the makout militia. The accused Homère was fined four gourdes and sentenced to a month in prison.Footnote 108 Though he apparently killed no one, Duvivier employed other tactics that were forceful, intimidating, and punitive. These sorts of actions reflected the personal ambitions of some makout peasants at the expense of local solidarities. Though those solidarities were grounded in a powerful ideology that unified peasants, they did not prevent all makout peasants from turning their tactics of terror against people that they lived near or knew intimately. It appears that these acts of terror were rarely random but were instead linked to interpersonal tensions.
M akout terror manifested in various ways according to the nature of the specific conflict. In 1964, Borgne officials tasked the peasant Cherenfant Chérélus with the responsibility of eliminating unfenced pigs that were roaming about town.Footnote 109 When he killed a pig owned by a person with ties to the militia, he was confronted by makout peasants and a fight broke out. On 5 November, Chérélus was dragged into court and accused of assaulting local “miliciens.” But he asserted that he had merely defended himself against a merciless attack by his “milicien” accusers, which lasted until the militia commander was notified and called off the beating. “If it weren't for the intervention of Dieudonné François Commander of the VSN,” sighed Chérélus, “I would have been found dead.”Footnote 110
Other makout conflicts with ordinary peasants were related to disagreements regarding customary practices of sharecropping. In May 1965, the makout Vilius Samour was supposedly bewildered when he discovered on his 3.15-acre farm Ephrénor Fénelon harvesting malanga (a root resembling taro). Samour later testified in court that Fénelon was previously entitled to half of its harvest (a half-and-half sharecropping arrangement called demwatye, or de moitié), but that these terms had expired by the time of harvest season. The makout Samour arrested Fénelon and had him jailed. In court, Fénelon acknowledged that, indeed, his sharecropping term had expired, but he argued that he had planted the malanga before the expiration of his terms and sickness had delayed his reaping of what he had sowed. Thus, Fénelon had a legitimate reason, at least within the scope of peasant moral codes, to harvest his crops beyond the timeframe of his agreement with Vilius.
Nevertheless, Fénelon allowed Vilius to arrest him and subject him to multiple beatings because, as he testified in court, “It is in his [Vilius’] role in Volontaire Milice Civil that he exercises against me: I found it impossible to disobey his orders.” Although Fénelon was defenseless against Vilius’ makout status, the court deviated from practices of authority that Duvalier granted the makout militia. The judge of peace, ignoring the privileges of the makout militia and probably more influenced by the moral codes of rural society, freed Fénelon and dismissed the charges.Footnote 111
In other instances, domestic disputes sparked makout terror. In October 1965, Dieusèlie Saimbert was violently disciplining her son. Her sister, Saintalès Saimbert, tried to stop her from beating him, and Dieusèlie turned her violence on her. Then, Dieusèlie's husband dragged Saintalès to the “V.S.N. Alphonse Pierre.” Saintalès later testified in court that the makout Pierre “bounded my two hands and my two feet, thrusted me unto to the ground, and administered a whipping … without concern of the wounds already caused by the mistreatment by my sister.”Footnote 112 The politics of makout terror, although powerful, did not necessarily nullify local ideologies of solidarity, but rather the two coexisted.
Makout peasants could not circumvent local rules on how to live among their neighbors. Makout peasants caught stealing crops or farm animals from ordinary peasants were arrested by fellow makout peasants. One Sunday night in February 1965, Adelka François of the habitation Cadush spotted the peasant Hélvétus Jean stealing plantains from her garden. Jean was no ordinary civilian, but a member of the militia. So, Adelka proceeded to do the following: “I left my garden to search for a volontaire in the area to arrest Jean.” That is, she sought out neighboring makout peasants to arrest their fellow for stealing. Adelka found two makout peasants to help stake out her garden that very night to see if Jean would return. He did at 4:00 in the morning. “Since the said Hélvétus Jean was a milicien,” Adelka later testified in Quartier Morin's court of peace, “his brothers Magloire and Richmond Mondésir arrested him and brought him to the VSN Bureau in Cadush.” Revealing what she meant by “his brothers,” Jean stated, “Two miliciens de Cadush proceeded with my arrest….” He was sentenced to five months in jail.Footnote 113 In Cadush, moral disdain toward stealing united members of the makout militia and ordinary peasants against alleged thieves, even when the accused were militia members.
Despite makout tensions with the population, local solidarities persisted because they grew out of the rural “moral structure” that shaped individual subjectivities and communal feelings of belonging. Worked and reworked over time, rural solidarities were more existential to peasants than the physical presence of the state. Makout peasants as state actors could not simply impose themselves on this moral structure and had to weave themselves into it. Even so, makout peasants could never receive complete moral approval because, although defending peasant interests, they were also tied to the central state that exposed them to the corrupting tendencies of power. In other words, makout peasants occupied a morally ambiguous position in which they had one foot in local communities and the other in the realm of political authority. This made ordinary peasants ambivalent about their influence.
The elderly peasant Lemanoit “Zo” Pierre explained: “They had power. They were members of the makout. Those who were not good supported state officials and big elites. Those who were malere had their own understandable reasons (gen rezon).”Footnote 114 Whereas he deemed unscrupulous those who joined the militia to reenact the power of state agents, Zo considered it acceptable for malheureux peasants to utilize their makout status to access rights. His allusion to makout ambiguity, and ordinary peasant ambivalence toward it, reflect the failure of the Duvalier regime to provide peasants with benign and less paternalistic forms of political participation. The makout militia was their only conduit to political power, one that divided their sensibilities between seeking social justice and realizing individual ambitions.
For instance, peasants enlisted in the militia to fend for their interests in everyday confrontations with state power. While involved in a court case about a dispute over a cow, one Torbeck peasant joined the militia to seek an edge in the court's ruling.Footnote 115 This might explain why, on 22 August 1969, the prosecutor in Jacmel, regarding an unspecified case, sent a memo to the judge of peace in Grand-Gosier to verify whether a certain Charles Pierre “c'est un VSN.”Footnote 116 Some makout peasants utilized their privilege to illegally squat on land owned by elites. On 3 December 1969, a tax agent complained to his superiors that an area of land belonging to Jean Dupuy, who owned a couple of holdings, was “completely occupied by miliciens.”Footnote 117 Makout peasants also utilized their privileges to evade bureaucratic red tape to obtain trade licenses. In the remote locality of Grison-Garde, Paulcius Démosthène and Lysias Alcé experienced unspecified problems processing their application to obtain an artisan patent. On 24 July 1970, Emile Auguste, the militia commander of the northern department and prefect of Cap-Haitien, came to their defense in a letter to the tax officer: “They are Miliciens, the supervisors of la Révolution Duvalieriste,” Auguste asserted. “I would appreciate if you listen and do what is possible for them.”Footnote 118 Other makout peasants demanded tax exemptions and this hampered the state's ability to accumulate revenue.
On 2 October 1970, a local tax collector in Grison-Garde complained to his superiors about the tax evasion of Dorléan Sagesse, a makout commander and wealthy rural denizen. Sagesse refused to pay state fees for holding a rural party that featured the popular musical orchestra Tropicana. He thought that his status as a volunteer for national defense deserved certain perks that included tax exemption. “I am Chef Milice, I don't get a wage, no person can make me pay for this spectacle,” sneered Sagesse.Footnote 119 He was expressing, in the most lucid of terms, the social contract between makout peasants and the Duvalier regime: free volunteer militia service in exchange for official recognition of rights, political privileges, and power. This thorny yet durable arrangement sustained Duvalier's presidency until his death in 1971 and permitted the transition of power to his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, establishing the first dynastic government in Haitian history. Supporting the longevity of the regime, makout service was done for free because the immaterial value of self-determination was immeasurable.
