1911, March–July: (Leconte and Desiderio Arias: The Dominican Connection and Simon’s Collapse): Leconte had bribed his way out of the German consulate in Mar…

1911, March–July: (Leconte and Desiderio Arias: The Dominican Connection and Simon’s Collapse): Leconte had bribed his way out of the German consulate in March and was now allied with General Desiderio Arias, the Dominican frontier bushwhacker whose 1916 rebellion would later precipitate the American occupation of Santo Domingo. Thus supported, Leconte hovered at Capotillo while the president chartered a merchantman to haul troops north. To fill his ranks, the délégué Simon turned south, but the day was past when his paysans would chant the old refrain celebrating him as their lamp and themselves as his butterflies — now the old president had only traditional methods of recruitment, forcibly seizing men from their homes at night, from the fields, on the road, or wherever they could be found, thrusting them into corrals, and sorting out the young men every few days to be shipped to Port-au-Prince as soldiers while the older men were fined according to presumed financial condition. As Bellegarde wrote, these regiments melted away like ice in the sun. Simon let himself be hemmed in at Fort Liberté with a garrison that a U.S. naval officer described as ragged mendicants and half-starved wretches in a hostile North. After narrow escapes, he made his way back to the capital by sea, arriving only in time to upset well-advanced plans to prevent his return. The Zamor brothers, making use of Dominican byways, had swooped into Lascahobas and thence the Artibonite, and at the Cap on July 20, as soon as Simon was out of the North, General Vilbrun Guillaume — who from his cousin the late president sometimes took the surname Sam — declared for his fellow Consolidard, Leconte. The convergence of these figures — Leconte, Arias, the Zamors, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam — around the collapse of Simon’s regime constituted, in James’s materialist reading, the gathering of the very forces that would, within four years, precipitate the American occupation: each name that appears in the revolution of 1911 would reappear in the catastrophe of 1915, as if the structural logic of Haitian politics were compressing all its contradictions into a single accelerating sequence leading inexorably toward foreign intervention.