1946, October – 1947, May: (Estimé’s Political Maneuvers: The Rival Cabinet, the October Sacking, Lavaud’s Star, and the Redesignation of the Garde as Armée …

1946, October – 1947, May: (Estimé’s Political Maneuvers: The Rival Cabinet, the October Sacking, Lavaud’s Star, and the Redesignation of the Garde as Armée d’Haïti): Estimé’s politics amounted to a peasant populism tinged with Vincent’s antiforeignism and fierce mangeur-mulâtres black racism, yet as a self-made doctrinaire intellectual he was also a highly effective politician. Including in his first cabinet two of his most outspoken rivals — Fignolé at Education and Dr. Rigaud at Commerce — the president allowed these fiery spirits to collide and cancel each other, then in October 1946 sacked the entire cabinet, simultaneously creating new places for the deserving and shelving old foes. To pay off the Garde, Estimé gave Lavaud a well-earned promotion to général de brigade, Haiti’s first general since 1915, and quickly moved in May 1947 to obtain U.S. military assistance credits. On the other hand, in a political decision that shattered much of its mystique, Estimé on March 29 redesignated the Garde as Armée d’Haïti and on paper split off its police elements into a Rural and Urban Police — the latter a theoretical reform that failed to stick. Thereafter, in a moment of rare misjudgment, he offered Lavaud, Levelt, and Magloire distant ambassadorships in Washington, Santiago, and Paris — where incumbent Placide David had just been caught by the French in large black-market operations — but politely, the three officers declined. The structural logic of Estimé’s maneuvers — absorbing rivals into the cabinet in order to neutralize them, rewarding the military to secure its loyalty, then attempting to exile the very officers who had voluntarily surrendered power — replicated the pattern that every Haitian president since Pétion had followed: the conversion of every institution of governance into an instrument of personal survival, a pattern that the occupation had interrupted but never broken.