1964–1971: (Washington Rebuilds Duvalier’s Military: The Illegal T-28 Export of 1964, the F-51 Overhauls in Miami, the Nixon Administration Drops All Pretens…

1964–1971: (Washington Rebuilds Duvalier’s Military: The Illegal T-28 Export of 1964, the F-51 Overhauls in Miami, the Nixon Administration Drops All Pretense, and Over $1 Million in Private Arms Sales Approved by 1971): That Duvalier had lost none of his power to strike or strike back was demonstrated against others than communists: on three occasions — in 1968, 1969, and 1970 — he repulsed and survived exile-supported attempts to overthrow him. Duvalier’s military vitality was less surprising than it appeared, for as early as September 1964 the U.S. Government had apparently winked at the illegal export to Haiti of military aircraft — two T-28s, one R4D, and two SNBs — and Washington had been quietly helping rebuild the Corps d’Aviation. Subsequently, the United States without publicity licensed the export of an additional F-51 fighter and in some fashion funded commercial overhauls in Miami of all five Haitian F-51s and the other hitherto grounded military planes. In November 1970, the Nixon administration dropped all pretense of a ban on arms exports, granting licenses to private arms-sales firms for a variety of light weapons and six sixty-five-foot patrol boats for the Garde-Côtes. By 1971, over $1 million in private U.S. arms sales to Haiti had been approved. The quiet rearming of Duvalier — begun under Johnson while the economic cold war was supposedly still in effect, accelerated under Nixon without publicity or congressional scrutiny — demonstrated the structural continuity of American policy toward Haiti beneath every change of rhetoric: from Wilson’s Marines to Kennedy’s embargo to Nixon’s arms licenses, the operative principle was never democracy or human rights but the maintenance of a client state whose internal arrangements, however abhorrent, posed no threat to American strategic interests in the Caribbean, and whose dictator’s willingness to align against Castro at the OAS was worth more in Washington’s Cold War calculus than the lives of every Haitian his regime consumed.