1818-03-29: (Pétion Dies in Office and Is Succeeded by Boyer, the End of a Presidency That Had Distributed Land to the Peasants, Armed Bolívar’s Revolution, …

1818-03-29: (Pétion Dies in Office and Is Succeeded by Boyer, the End of a Presidency That Had Distributed Land to the Peasants, Armed Bolívar’s Revolution, and Established the Pattern of Mulatto Political Control in Southern Haiti): On March 29, 1818, Alexandre Pétion died in office. His 1816 constitution had made him president for life and granted him the right to choose his successor, and Jean Pierre Boyer, his longtime political ally, assumed the presidency of southern Haiti without contest. Pétion’s legacy was contradictory: he had distributed plantation land to peasants, a humane policy that collapsed export agriculture and government revenue, and he had armed Bolívar’s revolution with Haitian weapons, a geopolitical act whose significance Latin American historiography would spend two centuries minimizing. The suburb of Pétionville, established in 1831 in the hills above Port-au-Prince, was named in his honor and would eventually become one of the wealthiest areas in the country, a bitter irony for a leader who had championed the interests of the poor.