Word: tontons
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...ruins, pot-holed with foot-deep craters ... The country's once flourishing tourist trade has dwindled from $5,000,000 in the 1958-59 season to less than $500,000 ... 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 [and] 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...
Roger Lafontant, former chief of Baby Doc Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes, has added a strange new chapter to Haiti's political scene by running for President in the Dec. 16 elections. He enters the race with an unusual handicap: a warrant for his arrest was issued in July for crimes he allegedly committed with the Macoutes. Haiti's attorney general is reminding citizens that anyone who shelters the strongman is subject to prosecution. With typical swagger, Lafontant opposes the presence of outside observers at the elections, and officials fear his campaign will serve as a beachhead for the return...
...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...