Caribbean Beat — January/February 2019 (#155)

on this day
When the
bogeyman
is real
Sixty years ago, Haitian dictator “Papa
Doc” Duvalier set up a paramilitary force
to deal with political opposition of any
kind. The Tontons Macoutes were
named for a terrifying bogeyman of
Haitian folklore, James Ferguson writes,
but the terror and violence they inflicted
on ordinary people was all too real
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
Of all the sinister characters who
inhabit the dark fictional world
of British novelist Graham
Greene, Captain Concasseur of
The Comedians, the novel set in
François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s
Haiti, is perhaps the most forbidding. With a name
that in French means “crusher” or “grinder,” he is
a sadistic secret policeman whose trademark dark
glasses make him terrifyingly inscrutable. In one
memorable scene in the novel, he and his fellow thugs
hold up the funeral cortege of ex-Minister Philipot, an
opponent of Papa Doc who has committed suicide,
smash the hearse’s windows and whisk away vehicle,
coffin, and corpse in front of his horrified widow.
A flight of Greene’s morbid imagination? Well,
no. The scene in question was based on a real
event that took place on 12 April, 1959, when the
funeral of Clément Jumelle in Port-au-Prince was
unceremoniously hijacked on the orders of the
recently elected president, Papa Doc. Jumelle had
been impudent enough to stand against Duvalier
in the presidential elections of September 1957
and, worse, to condemn the outcome as rigged.
Rumour had it that Papa Doc intended to use
Jumelle’s remains in some sort of vodou ritual
— but such rumours were primarily intended to
terrorise ordinary people.
At the heart of Duvalier’s reign of terror were
the Tontons Macoutes, a paramilitary force chillingly
exemplified by Greene’s Concasseur. The
Macoutes originated in the early months of 1959,
sixty years ago, when Duvalier had recently
survived an attempted coup d’état carried out
by senior Haitian military officers and American
mercenaries. The president was well aware that
the army had always been the supreme political
arbiter in Haiti, and was determined not to suffer
the fate of many of his predecessors, who were
overthrown, assassinated, or exiled.
The military, for their part, had at first thought that the seemingly mildmannered,
soft-spoken country doctor who was elected in 1957 would be their
pawn and that business would continue as usual. Many of them refused to join
in the attempted coup, which was easily crushed. But this complacency was
profoundly misguided, as Papa Doc used the revolt as a pretext to purge the
army and remove the threat of further dissent. As officers were imprisoned
or banished and lower ranks simply dismissed, the creation of a paramilitary
counterweight gathered impetus. The notoriously unpredictable national
military was to be held in check by Papa Doc’s own militia.
To be a Tonton Macoute was to be given free rein to bully, extort, assault,
and even murder. Many members, particularly in the countryside, were
wealthier peasants and landowners who already commanded fear and
respect in their communities. In the capital and towns, recruits were often
criminals. The organisation was a strange mix of naked self-interest, expressed
in corruption, theft, and protection money, but also unwavering loyalty to
Duvalier and pitiless repression of dissidence. One of Papa Doc’s henchmen,
Luckner Cambronne, headed the Macoutes during the 1960s while also operating
a business that exported Haitian blood plasma to the United States, earning
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