Word: tontons
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...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...
Haitians call Duvalier's private bully boys the Tonton Macoutes, which means "bogeymen" in Creole. They are paid as much as $30 a month (high pay by Haitian standards), plus whatever they can extort from merchants and businessmen. When Duvalier wants to hold a rally, the Macoutes use their muscle to organize the crowds, commandeer trucks to carry the rooters to the appointed place. When Duvalier wants the opposition squashed, the Macoutes do the job. Three weeks ago, one of the "vagrant law officers" halted a bus near the village of Gressier, 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince...
...Tonton Macoute, estimated to number 5,000, take care of individual oppositionists. Uncounted hundreds have been hauled off to Fort Dimanche, outside Port-au-Prince; some have been blinded by the beatings, some deafened, some killed. Newspaper Editor Madame Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel was kidnaped from her home by Tonton Macoutes. She was taken to a local lovers' lane in St. Martin woods, beaten, raped, and mutilated. Says a foreign diplomat: "Duvalier's real contribution to Haitian history is government by gang. He is the king of the bogeymen...