Word: tonton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...debts, superstition and disease, peasants are constantly preyed upon. Those with a bit of land are hesitant to improve it for fear of attracting the attention of covetous gros negs, who often hire corrupt lawyers to steal the land on one pretext or another. The rural police, notaries and Tonton Macoutes also seize property with a flourish of phony documents and a bag of city tricks. Even those who try to help the peasants often end up hurting them. When African swine fever hit the pig population of Haiti several years ago, Haitian authorities, under U.S. insistence, slaughtered...
...Haiti's cruelest slums, scores of quasi-government thugs known as Tonton Macoutes, wearing telltale red armbands, stormed into a crowded Sunday Mass, attacking indiscriminately with knives, shooting wildly and torching the church. The toll of the rampage: 13 worshipers slain, more than 70 wounded and a gutted church building. But the apparent object of the attack, Father Jean- Bertrand Aristide, somehow managed to escape, as he had in five previous attempts on his life...
Four weeks ago, Aristide came out of hiding to demand that the new Avril regime institute a wholesale cleanup by Oct. 17, including a total "uprooting" of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes and other vestiges of the Duvalier era. "The ball is in your court, and you are playing before a people who do not trust you," he warned Avril. Haitians were soon surprised to learn that the priest had himself been confronted with an ultimatum...
Avril vowed last week to wipe out the drug traffic. Noting that some officers discharged since the coup have been associated with narcotics, Avril said, "They had blemished the image of the armed forces." Avril has also moved to disarm the remnants of the Tonton Macoutes, the dreaded secret police during the 28-year dictatorship of Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc"), who fled in 1986. Although calling himself only an "accidental and provisional President," Avril pledged to prepare the way for an "irreversible democracy." Said he: "I am a missionary." The President obviously expects...
Paul commands the allegiance of the 700 elite troops at the Dessalines barracks, Haiti's toughest fighting unit. Without his support, the new regime might be unable to withstand a possible countercoup by deposed army officers and remnants of the Tonton Macoutes...