1958–1959, January: (The Nationaliste Farouche Invites Back the Marines: The U.S.

1958–1959, January: (The Nationaliste Farouche Invites Back the Marines: The U.S. Military Mission, the Hitler Parallel, the Tonton Macoutes Created, and the Garde Présidentielle Restored): The performance of the army — most of which sat on its hands during the Sheriffs’ Coup — did not heighten the president’s confidence. Ostensibly to revitalize the FAd’H, Duvalier eagerly pursued negotiations for an American military mission composed of Marines. Characteristically thinking far past Kébreau, it was Duvalier who immediately discerned the political mileage to be obtained from Marines in uniform conspicuously at the side of a shaky regime — few decisions more clearly illuminated his essential Machiavellianism than that the self-proclaimed nationaliste farouche, whose writings all but canonized Pierre-Paul, Codio, Batraville, and Péralte, should immediately ask for the return of the Marines. The last thing the president really wanted was a professionally capable FAd’H led by Marine-trained officers; fundamentally anti-American beneath the surface, he deeply feared the potential impact of Haitian officers sent to the United States for training. Rather than consolidate power through alliance with the Armed Forces like Trujillo, Duvalier chose the riskier path followed by Adolf Hitler — from mid-1958 on he set about creating a paramilitary counterpoise answerable directly to the palace. Built on the Port-au-Prince cagoulards and the chef seksyon — whose appointment, until 1958 a long-standing army perquisite, had been quietly taken over as a palace function — the organization came to be called tonton macoutes or TTMs: a Duvalier activist, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred black, recognizable by sharp clothes, dark glasses, pearl-gray homburg, and pistol bulge — informer, neighborhood boss, extortioner, bully, and political pillar of the regime. Barbot was charged with creating the organization and made one of his rare mistakes by printing calling cards identifying himself as Chief of Secret Police. On December 15, 1958, Duvalier abolished the old Maison Militaire and re-established the Garde Présidentielle as his personal army within the Armed Forces, answerable only to the president — noir to a man, commanded by Major Claude Raymond, entrusted with the keys to the palace cellars where heavy weapons and most of the army’s ammunition were again being stored, and for the first time since Leconte, barracked inside the Palais itself. In January 1959 the first echelon of some seventy Marines, Navy, and Coast Guard personnel arrived in Port-au-Prince to work in what Rotberg rightly called the most impossible and contradictory of situations.