Word: tonton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Duvalier has terrorized his 4,500,000 people into numb submission. Life expectancy is 32.6 years. Per-capita income is $70 a year. Population density is the highest in the hemisphere. Illiteracy runs 90%. "Haitians," Duvalier says quietly, "have a destiny to suffer." Duvalier's 5,000-man Tonton Macoute (Creole for bogeymen) roam the country, soaking up blood money from businessmen, torturing and murdering suspected anti-Duvalieristes-sometimes even slaughtering whole families. Early this year, one mutilated corpse lay a whole day in the Port-au-Prince sun, as a grim lesson to Haitians...
Fully half of Haiti's $28 million yearly budget goes into the pockets of Papa Doc, his Tonton Macoute, and other loyal supporters. The other half goes to government operations, which have all but shut down. Phone service is nearly dead. Lights wink on and off fitfully. Main waterfront roads are pot-holed or sometimes buried in six inches of muddy ooze. Business is grinding to a halt in the same way-partly owing to stiff taxes and partly to the emergence of a new, uneducated and sadly unprepared black elite that is replacing the bright, well-trained mulattoes...
...Papa Doc stood alone on the ballot, Bishop wrote: "The Haitians liked him so well that they elected him President for life. This was not a spurious, rigged election. He could call one tomorrow and win easily." Bishop was equally impressed by the dictator's secret police, the tonton macoute: They "comprise a personal force whose function is to keep President Duvalier acquainted with the true temper of the people...
Bogeywomen. All the while, Duvalier's reign of terror continues. Shortly after coming to power, he "organized his tonton macoute, meaning bogeymen in Creole, a vicious, plainclothes gestapo that collects taxes and blood money from merchants, tortures and murders suspected anti-Duvalierists. To help the tonton in their grisly business, there is now even a ladies' auxiliary−the fillette lalo, a group of pistol-packing molls who are just as predatory as their male counterparts...
...ways: nine governments in 20 years, the last headed by François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, 58, a onetime country physician who took office in 1957, proclaimed himself "President for life," and rules through voodoo mysticism and the strong-arm terror of his 5,000-man Tonton Macoute secret police...