1967, June – August 1: (The Dominiques Exiled, the Father Arrested, and Duvalier’s Cable: Give Me Back My Daughter and I Will Give You Back Your Father): On …

1967, June – August 1: (The Dominiques Exiled, the Father Arrested, and Duvalier’s Cable: Give Me Back My Daughter and I Will Give You Back Your Father): On Mme Duvalier’s intercession, the Dominiques and their children were allowed to depart for the sinecure of exiles — a Europe-based post as inspector of embassies. Before the aircraft carrying them was out of sight, Colonel Dominique’s chauffeur and two bodyguards were seized by TTMs and shot. Dominique’s aged father was arrested at home and died of maltreatment at Fort Dimanche. With his old ferocity, Duvalier is said to have cabled Dominique: GIVE ME BACK MY DAUGHTER AND I WILL GIVE YOU BACK YOUR FATHER. Confronting the packed embassies, Duvalier took one further step: on August 1 of the Year Ten, Haiti deepened its alienation from the hemisphere by denouncing existing treaties that provided for the right of asylum. It mattered not — Duvalier cared no more for the OAS or Latin American opinion than he had for the Church. He had already flouted the OAS charter by assuming the life presidency; in 1967, when the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights again asked for information on political atrocities and prisoners, Duvalier and his macoute foreign minister again ignored them. The cable to Dominique — a father held hostage for a daughter’s return, the logic of the family deployed as the logic of the state — distilled the Duvalierist political order to its essence: a regime in which kinship was simultaneously the basis of power and the instrument of coercion, where every bond of blood or marriage became a lever of control, and the president who proclaimed himself father of the nation governed it with the same ruthless possessiveness with which he governed his own household.