Word: tonton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most of Duvalier's Latin American neighbors were outraged, but helpless so long as Duvalier and his bloody, graft-ridden regime held power, with the help of his cocky Tonton Macoute hoodlums. The neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, had threatened to invade Haiti unless Duvalier granted safe-conduct to 23 refugees who had taken asylum at the Dominican embassy in Port-au-Prince. Duvalier obligingly granted safe-conduct to 20 of the 23, and Dominican President Juan Bosch pulled back some of his troops from the border...
...vengeance, everyone waited to see whether the dictator who calls himself "Papa Doc" would fall, and in falling bring on another of the blood baths that have marked the small Negro republic's history. In his white Port-au-Prince palace. Duvalier clung to power, guarded by his Tonton Macoute hoodlums. There was sporadic fighting between Duvalier's men and the emboldened opposition, and dark rumors of many deaths. Diplomatically, the arguments turned on the safety of 103 Haitians who had taken asylum at Latin American embassies in the capital, and had not been permitted safe conduct...
...harder to ignore Duvalier. A noise bomb exploded in front of the U.S. embassy; the wife of a U.S. Marine sergeant was hauled into a police station for 2½ hours of questioning; Robert Hill, embassy first secretary, was stopped and searched at gunpoint by Duvalier's Tonton Macoute, a kind of disorderly people's thuggery. Three times during the week, U.S. Ambassador Raymond L. Thurston protested to the Haitian government. Just over the horizon stood a U.S. Navy task force, and marines aboard the aircraft carrier Boxer were prepared to land, if necessary, to save the lives...
...presidency in 1957, Duvalier, a onetime backwoods physician who ministered to the poor, promised to change everything. Instead, he slapped on stiff new taxes and tolls, siphoned off graft to his cronies. To hold down the opposition, Duvalier set up a plainclothes gestapo of 5,000 men, called Tonton Macoute, or bogeymen, and in 1960 added a militia that now numbers 13,000. The two operate in chilling tandem, handling everything from shakedowns of merchants to the assassination of suspected anti-Duvalierists. Their biggest day came in 1961 when they helped Duvalier rig a phony election that extended his rule...
...million into Haiti, the small Negro Caribbean country misruled by Strongman François Duvalier. A respected back-country doctor before he went into politics, "Papa Doc,'' as he calls himself, has become a ham-fisted tyrant, illegally perpetuating himself in power. His private army of Tonton Macoutes. meaning bogeymen in Creole, crushes the opposition and shakes down businessmen. The bogeymen even insist on distributing the U.S. gifts of food and taking their cut; the U.S. refuses, and so the food sits rotting in a Port-au-Prince warehouse. All development-economic, social, political-is at a standstill...