1967, June 8: (The Midnight Execution: Nineteen Officers Bound to Stakes, the Firing Squad of Their Own Comrades, Bawon Samdi in Black Standing to One Side, …

1967, June 8: (The Midnight Execution: Nineteen Officers Bound to Stakes, the Firing Squad of Their Own Comrades, Bawon Samdi in Black Standing to One Side, and the Rush for the Embassies): Near midnight on June 8, 1967, a messenger roused the FAd’H chief General Gérard Constant from heavy slumber. With eighteen other senior officers, including Colonel Dominique, the general was summoned to the Palais, where characteristically Duvalier let them wait two hours. Then, in the deep of night, with a phalanx of macoutes brandishing submachine guns, Duvalier appeared. Without explanation the officers were herded into a truck which under escort jolted across town to Fort Dimanche. When the convoy halted beside the butts of the rifle range, the officers realized with mingled horror and relief the purpose of their summons: bound to nineteen stakes stood nineteen brother officers — ten from the Garde Présidentielle, each an intimate of Dominique’s. Off to one side, Bawon Samdi incarnate, stood the black-clad president. With a macoute’s submachine gun pressed to each man’s back, the nineteen senior officers were handed rifles loaded with one round and formed, under the macabre glare of headlights, into a firing squad — each man facing an old friend. On Duvalier’s high-pitched command, the officers raised their rifles and leveled them. On the president’s word, a volley shattered the night. Then Duvalier had the executioners file slowly past each crumpled figure for a long final look and sent them back to bed. Few slept soundly. By sunrise there was a rush for the Latin American embassies — at least eighty-seven, some said one hundred and eight, Haitians took asylum that day; before the month ended, nearly two hundred had sought refuge, including three Haitian ambassadors who defected abroad. Among the refugees was the grand inquisitor Jean Tassy, who thoughtfully took into the Brazilian embassy twenty relatives and a complete set of secret-police dossiers along with Duvalier’s meticulously kept execution records, all of which eventually reached the files of the CIA. Those not fortunate enough to reach embassies included the macoute Ministers of Interior and Justice, who were never again seen after entering Fort Dimanche, and the rags-to-riches banker Clémard-Joseph Charles, eventually released penniless after turning over signed blank checks on each of his Swiss accounts.