1914, January 28 – February 8: (The Zamor Betrayal: Théodore Ambushed at Gonaïves and Haiti’s First Military Rail Movement): With Michel Oreste out of the wa…

1914, January 28 – February 8: (The Zamor Betrayal: Théodore Ambushed at Gonaïves and Haiti’s First Military Rail Movement): With Michel Oreste out of the way, the Zamors and Davilmar Théodore, seemingly in close harmony, prepared to move south from their strongholds in the North. As an earnest of good feeling, Théodore entrusted the Zamors with a war chest to raise additional forces on an inland route of march via Hinche and Mirebalais. When Théodore approached Gonaïves the next day, he was astonished to find the Zamors already there — to heighten his surprise, he was greeted by a volley. What had happened, as Leech reported, was that with the treachery, bad faith, and self-interest that characterized the political class, the Zamor brothers had devoted Théodore’s funds to their own purposes, and Théodore on arrival at Gonaïves found himself face to face with an opposing army under command of Oreste Zamor. Interrupted by pillage and followed by fire, battle now joined — Haitians were inexpert marksmen, Leech observed, and generally seemed to fire in the air, and when the tide of battle turned the defeated combatants were apt to range themselves on the side of the presumed victor, a custom followed at Gonaïves. Théodore and a few followers straggled south from Gonaïves, whose flames could be seen from St. Marc. Completing Haiti’s first mass military rail movement, Oreste Zamor debarked his men from trains on February 7 and next day the army entered Port-au-Prince. John Allen saw the scene: a more nondescript collection could hardly be imagined — Zamor rode a small native horse with a number of bedraggled soldiers in tattered clothes, mostly without uniforms, strung behind, some with guns, some with swords, others with pistols, and several hundred trailers, men and women, and the usual accompaniment of burros, dogs, and roosters. The betrayal of Théodore at Gonaïves — an ally ambushed with his own war chest by the very faction he had trusted — enacted in miniature the structural logic that James identified at the heart of Haitian factional politics: in a system where the state existed solely as an instrument of extraction, alliances were by definition temporary, loyalty was transactional, and the war chest itself — like the presidency it was meant to purchase — functioned as a commodity whose possessor owed nothing to the investor once possession had been achieved.