1912, April–July: (The Darkening Horizon: Paulin’s Revolt, German Treachery, and the Cacos Stir): Yet as always the horizon slowly darkened.

1912, April–July: (The Darkening Horizon: Paulin’s Revolt, German Treachery, and the Cacos Stir): Yet as always the horizon slowly darkened. Jérémie and Jacmel were uneasy. In Les Cayes during April 1912, General and Senator F. P. Paulin, at the head of disgruntled Southerners, fomented a brief uprising featured by looting of the customs house. When the revolt was put down, the warehouses of a German firm yielded contraband arms and evidence of cash investments in the Paulin cause — Paulin himself made it to the German legation, where for months to follow he was given free rein to use it as his base of operation. Other old friends besides the Germans were turning on Leconte: chafed if not baffled by his new probity, the Cacos began to be heard from. Charles Zamor, now délégué militaire in the North, was their man, and his eye now rested on the Palais National. Old Nord Alexis, who knew the Cacos well, was reported to have said that once you turned the Cacos loose there would be no restraining them — there would be anarchy, pillage, and insecurity — and then, he supposedly added, some foreign army would intervene to protect life and property. Nord Alexis’s prophecy — uttered by a man who had himself risen to power through the very Caco networks he now warned against — carried the weight of structural insight rather than mere prediction: the old warlord understood that the cycle of armed factional seizure that had defined Haitian politics since 1804 was approaching a threshold beyond which the great powers, and above all the United States, would no longer tolerate the disorder that their own financial penetration had helped to produce.