Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Pappa Doc and Baby Doc: Dictators of Haiti

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Robert is joined again by Propaganda to continue to discuss Pappa Doc and Baby Doc. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back! Well, we never left in a lot of ways, because I never leave you, my listeners. And neither does Prop. We're always there in your hearts, sometimes in your home, you know, waiting behind the mirrors, watching you. What? Take a lot to take me away from you. Something that a hundred men on Mars could ever do.

Or a men on Mars? I don't know, what's the lyric? Minnermore, right? I bless the rains down in Africa. I don't know why I always thought, I just let y'all into my childhood. That's something that a hundred men on Mars could never do. I don't know the damn Earth. You can't get me out of here.

You can't get me out of this house, Marshal. Love it, love it. You know what else I love? Jason, Petty, aka Prop, host of Hood Politics. I love dictators. And as we start this episode, our friend Papa Doc, Francois Duvalier, has made himself into a dictator, you know? Not the rapper.

The election that made him president was questionable, but not more questionable than the average election in Haiti. But the whole forming your own secret military police force thing in order to murder your enemies. That's some dictator shit, you know? Yeah, it's kind of annoying. You've gone full tater. Yes.

Duvalier knew that the only force, that the military was the only force in Haiti capable of overthrowing his regime. So as much as he dedicated the Tonton to the Tonton Makut to purging his political rivals and journalists, he also set it towards investigating the top command of the army. He was careful with this information. Rather than use it to carry out public purges, he instead engaged in frequent shake-ups of the high command.

Prematurely retiring officers he thought might be willing to coup him. At the same time, he gradually cut the military budget. Trimming its numbers to make it something, into something his Tonton Makut could deal with. He also ordered all of the military's heavy armaments stored on the grounds of the presidential palace where he could keep an eye on it. Which is not a dumb move.

Like, yeah, we're going to keep all the big guns in my house. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess. I mean, I would feel better if all of our military's big weapons were kept in my basement. Because at least I know where they are. I know where they are, you know? I'm not going to use them for evil, often.

But I... All the time. All the time. Not constantly. I'm going to take vacation days and shit. In 1958, before the Tonton Makut were formally organized, but obviously you've got Clement Barbeau, he's starting to like gear stuff up. They haven't just earned their name yet.

The new president used its predecessors to crack down as the first threat to his reign, which was the labor union movement in Haiti. He canceled that year's May Day rally, he had the leader of the local union arrested, and he started sending out his men to beat and torture laborer organizers. When the Tonton Makut came into being,

Duvalier set them after this task with gusto, and by 1960, the Haitian labor union movement was completely dead. Now, the men who were selected to join the Tonton Makut were people with no real other options for success in Haitian society. As one write-up by Charles River editors noted, quote, ex-soldiers were recruited alongside criminals, street thugs,

and sundry opportunists of every stripe, and the entire contingent was then armed and occasionally paid and given license to extort. Now, that last bit is crucial. They usually weren't paid, and when they were, they were not paid well. That was not a downside. That actually increased their loyalty,

because in addition to not paying them, they said, you're basically, you can do anything. We're not going to pay you, but you have the authority of the president. You can break whatever fucking laws you want to break. Yeah, that's interesting. The tie between, that's interesting. The tie between being like,

well, if we paid you, then that would mean that we're kind of responsible for your choices. If we don't pay you, it's like, well, I mean, we don't pay them, they do what they want. It also makes them more dependent on the regime, because if you're, if the Tantan Makuta, like a normal police agency, right, and you have a salary,

then they could support someone else taking power, right? Like someone else could take power, then they're just like, oh, well, they were just cops doing their jobs, and they can keep being cops doing their jobs under the new regime. If they make their money by extorting people and taking bribes and like committing crimes,

and they're only allowed to do that because the regime is friendly to them, then they have no legitimate place in society outside of the regime. And they're also, they're committing all these crimes, so they know that if the regime loses power, people are gonna come at me because they're pissed, you know? Yes.

Yeah. So their comfort is entirely tied to the fact that the regime allows them to operate as a mafia. These guys are basically a mafia, right? They're a mafia slash FBI, which is different from the regular FBI because their badges aren't as nice. Now, the Tonton uniform, such as it was,

consisted of dark sunglasses, straw hats, blue denim shirts, and in many cases, machetes. They were allowed to disregard what passed for Haitian civil rights protections, but they were not accountable to any branch of law enforcement, or anyone at all but Papa Doc. By 1960, there were thousands of Tonton mccutes. Now, I think they topped out like 9,000s.

There's a lot of these guys. It takes a lot. Yeah, it takes a lot. Now, the problem with creating a secret police slash militia force like this is that you're going to need someone to run them. And the first pick is obviously Clement Barbeau. Of course.

The president trusts him. He'd done a good job. And he did a good job of setting up this regime of terror. From the New York Times, quote, and his crackdown on potential troublemakers, notably those who had opposed his election or stood as a threat to any possible coup, many were granted asylum in foreign embassies.

His rivals in the election fled the country, but Tonton executioners, furious that one of the losing candidates, Clement Jumel, had escaped, tracked down two of his brothers and gunned them down as they surrendered, hands up. Opposition newspapers were bombed by Tonton hooligans during the first year of Duvalier's revolution. Editors and publishers of seven leading periodicals were jailed, and most of them were tortured.

Mrs. Yvonne Rimpel, director of the anti-Duvalier Fortnightly Le Scalle, was beaten unconscious before her children and taken by a dozen Tontons to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince where they tortured and raped her and left her dying. So pretty bad dudes. Yeah, man. Yeah. God, dog, man.

Now, I just hate this so much. Yeah, it's real bad. It's real bad. Now, if you've never orchestrated a repressive regime that murders huge numbers of people. Yes, I have. Yeah. You might be surprised to learn that this pisses people off.

People don't like it when you do that, actually. It's a historically unpopular call. And a lot of these exiled politicians who escape, but their families get killed, and a lot of citizens who leave because they're like, oh, this isn't going to go anywhere. Well, they don't want to just leave Haiti and be like, well, I guess an asshole's in charge now. Right?

Yeah. They try to overthrow the regime. And so they start raising these kind of exile militias that will periodically enter the country to try to take over. And these guys aren't generally trying to do like, they're not like whole armies. They're small groups that are trying to come in and like raise the people up.

And because it's not, there's not a lot of soldiers in the Haitian army. You don't need to like make a whole war thing. You know, you just have to take out the right people. It's also a side note as an American, how often governments get overthrown. Or attempted to be overthrown. By 30 guys, yeah. Yeah.

Happens all the time. Happens all the time. Yeah. We're not in support of this coup. So it doesn't succeed. The first of these exile militias attacks Haiti in 1959. It's a group of 30 men. They land on the Haitian North Coast after sitting sail from Cuba.

And obviously these guys are backed by the Cuban government, right? We do the same thing all throughout Latin America. In this case, the Cuban government gives some guys heavy weapons. And they see some initial success. They take over an army post. They start to recruit and hand out guns to nearby villagers. And in pretty short order, 200 people have joined them. Now, while this happens, like as these exiles are starting to form their military,

Haitian exiles in Venezuela start broadcasting appeals to their countrymen, like sending out radio broadcasts that reach Haiti to aid the insurgents. Now, 200 men, not a huge force. But after two years of devalierism, the army is extremely weak. And the dictator was hesitant to give them the weapons they would need to turn back this invasion. Because then they might use the weapons on him. So he's in a bad position, right? 200 guys properly organized and equipped

could actually fuck up his regime. He could pull it off. Yeah. He's very worried about this. And it actually, by some accounts, comes pretty close to taking him out. But thankfully, Prop, thankfully, Papadok has a friend. Oh, no.

And that friend is the United States government, particularly the United States Army. We have a military mission in Haiti. And we had a good relationship with Duvalier because he was anti-communist. And he wasn't anti-communist because he cared about anything particularly. He was anti-communist because that gets you US support, right? Now, Duvalier basically is like, hey, America, some mean guys are here. And America is like, don't worry, buddy, we've got the Marine Corps in planes.

And they kill all these rebels pretty quick. Well, some of them flee. But yeah, they kill a bunch of dudes. Now, the commander of the US mission in Haiti was a colonel named Robert Heinle. And he was well aware of how terrible the regime he was propping up was. At one point, his 12-year-old son was arrested by the Tonton Mecute because he expressed sympathy for a group of starving peasants. So the guy who's massacring these revolutionaries knows that he's helping the bad guys.

But it's his job. Heinle's orders from the State Department were very clear. He later recalled what he was told by a State Department official when he took the gig. Quote, Colonel, the most important way you can support our objectives in Haiti is to help keep Duvalier in power so he can serve out his full term in office. And maybe a little longer than that if everything works out. What? Don't say that out loud, fam. OK. Word. Got it. Got it.

You get the feeling Heinle feels bad about this later? He didn't stop him from being the, you know, didn't stop Smedley, you know, at the same time. Although, anyway. Maybe a little bit longer. Maybe a little bit longer than his term. Fuck it. We're the State Department. We don't give a shit. As far as Papa Doc went, his regime weathers the rebellion, right?

It's a rough point for a while, but they get through with the help of the U.S. But he has a lot of stress because people are trying to overthrow him. And all of this stress causes him to have a heart attack, which he nearly dies from. Thankfully, his good buddy, the United States of America, was there to help again. We flew in medical teams from Guantanamo Bay in Washington, D.C. To operate on the dictator's heart and save his life. Why are we so bad at, like... We just hate him, baby.

Consistently inconsistent. Yeah. We're going to overthrow a dictator. Yeah. We overthrow dictatorships. Asterisk. Go to the bottom. Dictators we don't like.

That's the dip. You know what I'm saying? But there's some dictators that like, yo, he tatering kind of. I like his tatering. Why are we so extra for somebody? Like why effort somewhere that's needed, fam? Like America. Yeah.

So far. Yep. Good times. They would argue we are working for America. Is their argument. Yeah. And I mean, they are, I guess. I don't know.

Whatever. So, Devalier survives this fucking heart attack. And during his recovery, he's able to properly unable to... He's like fucked up for a while. And he can't be a dictator when you're sick. Well, no, because power falls to his number two man. Yeah, I was like, wait. Clement Barbo, the guy who murdered people.

Like Clement Barbo gets the nickname, the muffler, because of how good he is at silencing people. Good God. So he's not a nice guy. Oh man. His name is the muffler. That nickname is so hard, but like horrible. Like that.

It's very hard. Yeah, it is. I'd be one of you. I'd want to be called the muffler. Yeah, you don't get that nickname unless you're like a scary son of a... And this guy, we'll be talking about him more, is terrifying. So by all accounts, Barbo does a good job of holding onto power for Devalier. But the problem is that if your boss is a paranoid psychopath,

they're not great at trust. So Papa Doc recovers and he takes back power, but he decides the chances are better than zero that his trusted aide had spent the time while he was fucked up plotting against him. Because again, Devalier grows up through like a dozen goons. There's a million goons. Yeah. He doesn't even wait to see if that's the case.

He just immediately throws Barbo in prison for 16 months. No. You Barbo, it's like, you're like... Come on. Come on, bro. Are you serious? No. Okay, of course I was plotting your murder, but...

But, come on. At least prove it. Yo, say it. Now back in the saddle, Devalier decided that his next job was to get rid of the pesky term limits that the Haitian Constitution, which he had written, called for. His first term was set to end in 1963. So he got together with his attorney general and had him put together a surprise early election. Francois Devalier was the only person allowed to run for president.

His party was the only party allowed to field candidates. So Haitian voters basically got a slip of paper with Devalier's name on it, whatever they might want to do, he was going to get reelected, which he was by a margin of 13 million votes. Again, he didn't get all those votes, but there also weren't other options. Yeah. He got a multiple choice. Is the answer A?

That's it. That's the test. If you write anything but A, we are shooting you. Yeah. So when he was told that he had won by such a totally legitimate margin, he is said to have declared as a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the voice of the people. Well, if they want me that bad, I'm just saying that's what they said.

Ain't that right? That's what y'all said. That's what they said. They voted for me. What you want me to say? Who am I? I love it. Now this frustrated the United States who preferred the strongman that they backed

to put in a little bit more effort into hiding their naked authoritarianism. Earlier that year, we'd given Duvalier $50 million in economic and military aid to help prop the regime up because rampant corruption had hollowed out the government's ability to do any of the most basic tasks of governing. And the U.S. was frustrated that Duvalier had taken $50 million and then made such a naked power grab. Again, we had no problem with this guy staying and passed his term limit. Yeah, of course.

But we didn't like how blatant it was, right? She's making it obvious, fam. We were also frustrated that that same year, he took some of that $50 million and used it to make a utopia named after himself. Oh, my God. He called it Duvalierville because dictators are not subtle people. And it was a town built as a monument to himself. Or creative.

Yeah, not that creative either. He selected an existing village named Cabaret as the location for his new project. Construction started in 1961 and continued for several years. To finance his model city, he instituted heavy taxes on sugar, rice, and cooking oil. He docked the salaries of government workers and he forced them to buy bonds and lottery tickets. Foreign businessmen were shaked down for contributions. Construction included a water treatment plant, which never successfully treated any water.

It had a giant Greek-style theater from what I've been able to find was mostly used to store chickens. I found a write-up about the village in 1986, which shows where the project was 24 years after the start of construction. It's a tribute. Quote, we don't have water. We don't have schools that we don't have to pay for and we don't have a hospital. Said Petit Wilbert, what we have are buildings with the name of the president's family.

As one enters Duvalierville, a town of 10,000 people, there is a large and now defaced neon sign with a light spelling out the name Francois Duvalier. Just beyond the sign lie a few square blocks of one-story cinderblock houses, chickens, goats, and the semi-clothed children wander amid the crumbling sidewalks that are the only paved streets in this town. We have seven Sundays in Duvalierville, the 35-year-old Wilbert said, ruining the lack of jobs. The main complaint from the desperately poor people here is about the lack of fresh water.

The nearest source is seven miles away, and the residents have to pay people to bring it to them in giant jugs. The project is there. It was going to treat the water from the river, said Father Vital Mitty, the parish priest, talking about a plant the elder Duvalier started to build and never finished, but it has never worked. Father Mitty explained that work was begun in 1962, and that once the late president inaugurated his pet project, nothing more was done.

Dude, first of all, the phrase seven Sundays is brilliant. Yeah, yeah, because we got no fucking jobs. We got seven Sundays. Also, if you imagine somebody asking you, hey, so how's that city named after you completely unlivable? It is fucked. Let me tell you. It's awful.

Completely unlivable. Do not go there. It's terrible. Yeah, but I built the city. No, you didn't. You didn't build the city. Yeah, I just named it and then fucked it up. Yeah.

So that same year, 1962, when constructions kicking off for Duvalierville, Clement Barbeau, who gets out of prison, you know, is now at a prison after 16 months, begins plotting to remove Duvalier from office. And it's like, if I wasn't before, now, now, now. Now, Barbeau was a frightening man, and he immediately lost his life. And he immediately launched a campaign of very effective terrorism against the regime. In April of 1963, four of Duvalier's bodyguards were shot dead while escorting his children to school.

The kids were unharmed, but Barbeau sent Papa Doc a letter that made the meaning of this attack very clear, just target practice. Basically, I was, I was just preparing to fucking kill you people. I just wanted to check out if my guns were working so I killed the kids bodyguards. Hey, man. Hey, I didn't miss. I didn't miss. Yeah.

Weeks later, Barbeau's men attacked a schoolhouse filled with Duvalier supporters who were waiting for their chance to come out and cheer the dictator on. They'd been packed into the schoolhouse as part of, like, he was having a march through town, right? Yeah. They'd been forced in there. And Barbeau decides to ruin this photo op and just machine guns the school, kill seven people.

And the knowledge that Duvalier supporters could be, although again, these people didn't have the choice to support Duvalier, right? Of course not. Yeah. The knowledge that his supporters could be massacred at a government rally shook the regime. From Time Magazine, quote, Duvalier sent militia patrols to comb Port-au-Prince's festering slums.

But Barbeau laid clever ambushes. In one fight alone, 30 loyal Duvalierists were reported killed. While Duvalier's men were out chasing him, Barbeau raided their lightly guarded barracks for arms. He even telephoned the palace one day, wanting Duvalier not to drink his coffee. It was poisoned, said Barbeau, the ring. This guy is, yeah. Hey, dog.

He doing this in a Siob fan. Yeah. Hey, homie. Hey, you shouldn't drink that coffee. Like what? Because I fucking poisoned it. I poisoned it. Yeah.

Like, oh, you just going to tell me about it? I mean, yeah. Go ahead and sip it then. Like, what a... This guy. Hey. Woo. He gags.

What are the only... Here's the thing. Grace, in being under a dictatorship like that, is knowing that if you just support the dictator, you can't get touched. What this dude is just ruining that security. Yeah. That like, oh, no, you can still get touched. He is fucking shit up.

And there's this amazing moment where he gets cornered in a building and they just machine gun the building he's in, blow it up and shit, and a black dog runs out of the building. Like he had escaped somehow, but there was a dog in there. The dog runs out and it starts this myth that Barbeau can't be killed because he has the power to change himself. He has the voodoo power to change himself into a black dog and escape at will. So, Duvalier, being the kind of dude he is, orders every black dog and Haiti shot on site. It's like a word?

Oh, he's a black dog? Okay. Got it. Yeah. Gang bang. Now, you know who won't order dogs assassinated? Sophie. I said won't.

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We're back. Uh, boy, what a great, what a great ad break we just had. So as the whole ordering all of the dogs that looked wrong shot thing might have keep you in on, Papadoc's kind of paranoid in this period. He's always been a paranoid guy and his paranoia was ratcheted up because of the CIA. So while this is all happening, Kennedy takes power in 1961, well, not whatever, Kennedy's elected in 1961. And that changes US policy towards Haiti because Kennedy does not like Haiti and it becomes

US policy, US had supported Papadoc prior to this, it becomes Kennedy's policy to force Papadoc out of power. So he sets the CIA to this task, the CIA, because they're never quite as smart as people like to think they are. The CIA decides that because he's superstitious, what they're going to do is they buy the rights to rewrite the horoscope predictions for his astrological sign in a French monthly magazine called Horoscope that Tuvalier read. That's the CIA's plan, they're like, that's fucking this fucking, I mean, they also try

to arm dissidents and stuff, but like they were going to rewrite his horoscope. Yo, this is the time. They'll fuck him up. Yeah, this is the time of the exploding cigar, you know, like, okay, so I'm mad, could you imagine being on the pitch team during this time like, yo, fuck what about horoscopes? Yeah. Okay, guys, hear me out. Hear me out.

A man reads a horoscope every day, what if we just, what if we just, yeah, Doug. Yeah. What's a sign? I got an idea. Yeah. Now, I have not come across details in what they wrote for his horoscopes, but this was not the only time the CIA dabbled in astrology. In the 1950s, they created and distributed an astrological almanac in Vietnam in order

to play on fears and superstitions that were common in Northern Vietnam. They also repeatedly threw in predictions about prosperity in Southern Vietnam to try and make life there look more attractive. You may notice that didn't work. Not at all. Yeah. And I don't think it works here. I have no way of knowing if this makes him more paranoid, if like, maybe it does.

It's hard to tell with Papadok. Maybe his subscription expired. Yeah, maybe his subscription expired right before. President wants this guy out of office. What do we do? Horoscopes? Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. That's a good day's work. Yeah. At least nobody dies. We should have to go there. Yeah. We are so busy killing people in Guatemala. Let's just try the horoscope thing with Haiti.

Why not that? Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. We'll see. My guess is they were probably trying to make him feel like death was coming for him and he should probably be in exile. It doesn't work.

Anyway, back to Barbeau. In July of 1963, Barbeau's luck runs out. He had decided to gather all of his supporters and launch an attack on the dictator. But someone tipped the attack off to Duvalier and he sent a swarm of Tonton Makut to Barbeau's hiding place in a sugarcane field and they just liked the whole field on fire. When Barbeau and his men tried to escape, their machine gun to death and famously, Papadok has his head cut off, put on ice and delivered to the palace because he's that kind of dude. Yeah.

Now, the regime kills at least 50 other people during the panic over Barbeau. Dozens more are picked up on suspicion of being anti-Duvalierist and are never heard from again. By the time the whole sorted business is over, however, the regime found itself in a relatively solid position. The greatest threat to Papadok's reign was gone. There were several more invasions by groups of exiles, most of which were launched from inside the Dominican Republic, Haiti's neighbor.

Again, they don't get along. They still do. Yeah. And fucking, and Papadok does a bunch of fucked up shit towards Haiti. There's a lot of like, yeah, like I'm not putting it on the Dominican Republic. And again, overthrowing Papadok's, broadly speaking, a good thing to do because he sucks. So in order to deal with all of these like cross-border attacks from the Dominican Republic and to stop his own citizens, more of that to stop his own citizens from fleeing to the

Dominican Republic, Duvalier burns a three square mile swath of forest around the border between the two countries, creating a no man's land so his soldiers can gun down anyone trying to flee into or out of the country. One threat to his regime came from a former army officer who was also a voodoo guy and who bragged that he was immune to death. Duvalier had his men prove the officer wrong by cutting his head off, putting it in a bucket of ice and sending it to the presidential palace. He did this a few times.

In 1964, Duvalier ditched all pretense and made himself president for life. He had a group of army officers circulate a petition demanding that he do this. Then he had his legislature replace the constitution that he'd written years before with one that legalized lifelong presidency. Then he had another referendum where he was again the sole candidate. He was inaugurated president for life on June 22, 1964. From that point on, a lot of professionals in Haiti, people with marketable skills like running a country started to flee for literally anywhere else because they're like, yes, doesn't

seem like it's headed in a good direction. This guy's already lasted longer than the other previous leaders. This is not going to end anywhere while we should get the fuck out. The fact that everyone who knows how to do anything leaves means that the health care and educational systems collapse entirely. School just stops being a thing from it because there's not fucking teachers. Duvalier confiscated peasant land holdings and increased taxes on the poor, siphoning off about $500 million in taxes and foreign aid to his personal fortune.

Malnutrition and famine became endemic. His Tonton Makut grew larger and killed more people every year, beating and torturing not just dissidents, but any person individual Tontons took a dislike to. As the regime wore on, so did the repression. From the New York Times, quote, After 16-agers painted a down with Duvalier sign on the Port-au-Prince wall and were executed without trial, President Duvalier ordered that all youth organizations, even the Boy Scouts, be disbanded.

He deported clergymen who criticized his rule, earning his own excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. He ignored Rome, however, and continued to attend mass, carrying a rifle and flanked by six to 10 bodyguards. Which is a flex. How you gonna tell me what God I serve? I'm going to church today, you see these brothers with these weapons? Tell the dude with the sticks back here that I can't have communion.

Yeah, send those Swiss motherfuckers with the hallbirds into Haiti, see how they do. Send them down, come around the hood. Hey, hey, hey, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hey, you shut the fuck up. All right, pastor, go ahead, continue, continue. Even Duvalier's strong-willed favorite daughter, Marie Denise, fell victim to his wrath when she insisted on marrying a Lieutenant Colonel Max Dominique, a handsome black. Despite his public stance that Haiti belonged to the blacks, Papadoc had married a mulatto and made it no secret that he wanted his children to follow his example.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. After their marriage in 1967, President Duvalier got them out of his sight by appointing Colonel Dominique Ambassador to Spain. Hours after the Dominiques had left, Papadoc rounded up 19 of their army officer friends and, after accusing them of plotting against him, personally led the firing squad that executed them.

Sheesh. Yeah. And that's why Wyclef Jean left and started the Fugees. I'm just kidding. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. That's exactly what happened. That's how the Fugees started, was him, he was there in Haiti during this, and his mama

was like, yo, we got to go. Yeah, this is not going to end well. Yeah. Yeah. That's where he met Lauryn Hill, and that's why we have the Fugees. Wow. Incredible. So something good came out of the regime?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we got the Shakira song with Wyclef, oh, baby, we'm just like this. Yeah. We didn't get any good hip-hop acts out of Hitler. Can we wait a second? That was excellent. Was that spot on?

You know the trick for Shakira is you have to, she's kind of Kermit. It's kind of Kermit, but you have to do it on key, and then you got Shakira's voice. I just wanted to give thought some shine because I appreciate that. Thank you. I don't know if I could do it again because it was so off the head. Yeah. Anyway. All right.

So Devollier spent much of the mid to late 60s engaging in an escalating war with the Catholic Church. Clare G, he could not bribe or threaten would be arrested. He exiled several bishops, a Papal Nuncio, and numerous priests. He confiscated church property. And in 1966, he succeeded in bringing the Vatican to the negotiating table. The end result was an accord that allowed him to nationalize the Catholic Church of Haiti, effectively making him the head of Haitian Catholicism.

He was given the power to name bishops and archbishops, albeit with the approval of the Holy See. Let me tell you something. When you start traveling hoods and you know Haitian thugs, Haitian gangsters, and just this like these people are afraid of nothing. And now like understanding the sort of the cultural meal meal you where like even the dictator was like, okay, first of all, we over through our oppressors, then we over through every politic or every colonial force.

And now we done told the Catholic Church what we going to do, you know what I'm saying? You think you're going to serve some cocaine on my block like that that this is making all that makes sense to like some of the hoods in Miami would like these like way like the Haitians do out there. Are you just like stated, there's some people that you like stay the hell out they way, you know, and it is known you stay out the Haitians, just stay out they way, let them do what they doing. And I'm seeing now, even at the government level, you should just stay the hell out they

way. Yeah, and it's, you know, it is a mark of the level of skill and how frightening this guy is. Yeah. And he's able to get he gets the Catholic Church, like the church seeds some of their sovereignty. And the Catholic Church is like, yeah, you know, they're there is there is hard as it gets pretty much with this sort of this is a millennial long. Yeah.

Regime here. They've kept the shit going a while and they're like, all right, like we we we've got a we've got a bow to you some. OK, we don't want no parts of this. All right, go ahead, do what you want to do. So yeah, now, unfortunately, well, fortunately, I guess, people die. And yes, by the late 1960s, he's old, he's in bad health. He tries to kind of burnish his image at the end by putting out a bunch of propaganda about

like how cool the Duval year is revolution and yeah, he tries to actually tie himself to like Mao and other great revolutionaries, even though he'd spent his like life as an anti-communist. It's weird. Yeah. One of the things he does is he adapts the Lord's prayer so that Haitians can pray to him. Wow.

And the adaptation goes, our doc who art in the National Palace for Life, how load be thy name by present and future generations that will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti-patriots who spit every day on our country. Let them succumb to temptation and under the weight of their venom, deliver them not from evil. He took the most wholesome part, the most wholesome part, the most redeeming part of

the whole thing. It was like, oh man, you know what, how, you know, your kingdom, give us this day our daily bread, you know, forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. Like the one part you could say is like, this is pretty good. You know, just this idea of radical forgiveness. He's like, and don't you ever in your life forgive these people. Dog, whore. So Duvalier's propagandists put out a book, you know, but anyway, they do a bunch of trying

to tie him like make him into this great revolutionary leader. That's kind of his last big flex in 1970. He suffers a horrible heart attack and like most men who suffer their second big heart attack after 13 years of suppressing rebellions, Papa Doc starts thinking about his mortality. He decides he wants to be succeeded by his only son, Jean Claude, a 19 year old giant who up until that point has mostly been a party kid. Papa Doc had his legislature changed the constitution again, which sort of begs the question of why he bothered having a constitution in the first place.

The second constitution that he'd written in 64 had stipulated that the president for life had to be 40 years old. He changed this. He holds another referendum and asked people to vote yay or nay on this question. Even Dr. Francois Duvalier has chosen citizen Jean Claude Duvalier to succeed him to the presidency for life of the Republic. Does this choice answer your aspirations and your desires? Obviously.

Yeah. Yeah. Papa Doc gets his way. And two months later in February 1971, Papa Doc Duvalier dies. An estimated 40,000 Haitians had died under his rule from a mix of starvation, malnutrition and murder. And we're going to give the story, not shorter story, of Jean Claude Duvalier. But first, you know who didn't kill 40,000 people?

The products and services that's. That's right. Hell yeah. That's right. That's right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse with like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your

podcasts. All right, we're back. So Jean-Claude Duvalier did not really want to be president for life. Prior to taking power, he'd spent most of his time living in the palace. He never really left the capital. He was not very smart. He seems to have known this. He was not very power hungry.

He suggested his sister Marie Denise take the job, but his father said no. On the day he was sworn into office, Jean-Claude missed his own coronation because he was too high on Valium because he was stressed out. I love it. Yeah. I love it. He's like, man, I'm just rich. I don't want to work.

I just want to be rich. I'm just rich. I don't want to work. Hey, you do it. Yeah. Man, look, my sister, she loves all this. I'm not great at history, but I know enough to know that it's hard to be the president of Haiti.

Yeah, what you're going through is hard. You stressed out all the time, killing everybody. You don't seem miserable. You seem miserable. I don't want this. So the one sign that he might have some steel in him had come in 1967, when Jean-Claude was 15. His father had flown into a rage at his mother and started hitting her, and Jean-Claude had

shoved Papadoc into a room and locked him there for three hours. That said, the story was not widely known, and most foreign pundits assumed he was going to lose power pretty quickly. But of course, that's not how it went. He surprised the people who thought that he was going to be out quickly. He put on a friendlier mask to the international community, while his family, namely his sister and his mom, were the power behind the throne. Meanwhile, like, well, they were continuing to do pretty brutal shit.

He opens the palace to journalists. He starts paying off the country's debts. He modernizes. He supports a quickie divorce law that makes Haiti a tourist mecca. You can get divorced in 24 hours, so people start going there to divorce tourism. And he gets good at cleaning up prisons like right before international observers visit. So he starts to make a play for, no, I'm going to modernize. I'm going to fix a lot of this shit that's wrong.

We're going to fix this stuff. We're going to clean up Haiti. Devalier also opened the country to foreign business, an economic liberalization he called Jean-Claudeism. This mostly meant giving U.S. businesses a lot of tax breaks and shit and letting them take advantage of cheap labor and letting them use the Tonton mccutes to crack it down on any unions that tried to form. Damn, Jean-Claude, sorry.

So all of this makes the U.S. government really happy. Oh, you're going to crack out on unions again. You're going to let businesses in. For the first couple of years of his rule, foreign aid increased to Haiti by more than 800%. Now, obviously, as I said, his mom and his sister are the real power, and they're kind of at odds with each other. His mom is a traditionalist.

She wants to do things the way that dad had done things. His sister is more, actually, does want to seem to want to modernize at least some things. The two fight all the time. Baby Doc mostly spends his time playing with fast cars and partying. In 1975, another horrible famine hits the country. Baby Doc begs the U.S. for aid. The United States obliges, and all those cash and food shipments go directly into the hands of his powerful supporters.

This was discovered immediately. Congressmen started yelling about Haitian corruption until Baby Doc arrested a handful of people. But this did not stop the famine or make Haiti less corrupt, and in 76, Haitian refugees start flooding into the United States. A lot of these guys die. It's a really horrible trip. There's a lot of gruesome pictures of it, and people get outraged.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter takes office, and he's like, we're going to change things. We're going to tie aid to you actually improving human rights conditions. This creates a problem for Baby Doc, so he has to push through a bunch of cosmetic reforms to try to trick Jimmy Carter. Not the hardest things anyone's ever done. He arrests a few taunt on McCut. Very few international observers are truly fooled, but more aid is allowed to enter the country.

I think Carter's hope was that, OK, they did a couple of things. We'll send in more aid. Maybe they'll change more. But before anything could really change, Ronald Reagan gets elected, and he did not give a fuck about whether or not Haiti got more democratic. Baby Doc is smart enough to know, OK, Ronald Reagan's in. I'm going to start talking about how bad communism is. He actually holds a champagne party when Reagan gets elected because he knows it's going to

make shit easier. Reagan's like anti-communist. Here's a fuckload of money. This is actually now now seriously speaking. This is actually the the milieu that made the Fugees and why they're called the Fugees. It's short for refugees and it's because of this. Yeah. And by 1980, Haiti is completely dependent on foreign aid and the greatest recipient

of foreign aid is the Duvalier family. More than two thirds of the country's development budget, which was about $81 million, came from foreign governments, namely the U.S., Canada, West Germany and the United Kingdom. And obviously, this is incredibly, incredibly corrupt. He's channeling a bunch of IMF money into his his his accounts, too. There's constant like issues and constant international anger over the fact that he's just stealing all of this aid money that he gets. But nothing is actually done about it.

The term kleptocracy is actually first coined by a Canadian government report on graft in the Duvalier regime. That's where we get the word. The whole government, including numerous state owned companies, existed as an extension of the Duvalier family bank account. Now one of the chief movers of the Haitian economy was a guy named Luckner Cambrone, who was the lover of Baby Doc's mother, Simone. He made a fortune exporting the literal blood of Haitian citizens, often gathered by force

by the Tonton Makut. The nation exported five tons of blood plasma per month under Luckner. He bought it for $5 a pint and sold it for $35 to U.S. firms like Dow Chemical. So a bunch of U.S. companies profited off of the literal stolen blood of the Haitian people. Sometimes they were paid. Often people were just paid to make sure there was access to blood. He also sold cadavers for medical research, literally selling the corpses of his people because they've been robbed so thoroughly.

As his time in office wore on, Papa or Baby Doc grew bolder. He became more brutal. He eventually kicks his mom out of power because he marries a woman named Michelle and she doesn't like his mom. There's a whole thing. Yeah. Damn it, Michelle. The new first lady hates that her husband's fat.

She puts him on a crash diet and threatens staff who feed him that by saying that they'll wish they'd never been born. Killed your mother-in-law. Yeah. And now you're body-shaming. Well, he doesn't kill her. He just forces her out. No, I'm just saying.

Yeah. Yeah. And so by the start of Reagan's second term, Haiti was and had been for some time the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The average life expectancy was 48 years old. For every teacher on the government payroll, there were 189 soldiers. For every secondary school, there were 35 prisons. A majority of the population was food and secure.

Many were starving. Clearing away the bodies of starved dead was a regular task for city employees in the capital. Civil rest began to burble up in 1985, quickly growing into a significant movement. The Catholic Church gets some credit for this because the Pope actually gives a brief speech where he critiques the government. Liberation theology is a part of this, right? We see this in a lot of the rest of Latin America. So it's a number of things and a student revolt breaks out.

And students are initially shot dead by the Tantan Makut, but this leads to international condemnation and the U.S. cuts off aid, which is what kind of spell helps spell the end of the regime because they're totally dependent on aid. On the night of February 5th, 1986, Baby Doc flees the country. Before he leaves the palace, he orders one of his voodoo sorcerers to lay a spell on the presidential bed so that the next document would die there. A perhaps legendary story goes that the sorcerer called for two unbaptized newborns to be sacrificed for the ritual.

The hospital charged $400 for the babies. Wow. Again, whether or not this is true, it's definitely true. What's definitely true is that two days after Baby Doc fled, they hitched a ride along with all of their cash, jewelry, antiques, and artwork from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, courtesy of a U.S. transport aircraft. We help them flee to France, where they rent a villa near Kans from the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

So that's great. Now the bad news is, the really sad part of the story is that Michelle and Jean-Claude's marriage doesn't last. The couple divorced in 1989. He starts to run out of money by 2003, and he was said to be living with a mistress in a one bedroom apartment in Paris by 2003. In 2011, he returns to Haiti, claiming he wants to help rebuild after an earthquake, but probably just trying to get around Swiss banking regulations designed to stop dictators

from using money they'd stolen. He gets arrested. But for whatever reason, he's kept in a hotel in the mountains above Port-au-Prince rather than actually going to prison, where he dies of a heart attack in 2014 at the age of 63. So Papa Doc and Baby Doc, that's the tale. That's the tale. Yeah. That is harsh.

So harsh. Yeah. Wow. Well, I have that feeling of doling death that you always feel at the end of these pods. Yeah. That's our goal. That's the goal. The doling death.

You can find me at prophipop.com. Support the hood politics pod. Yes. Also, Get Props Book is delightful and aesthetically beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. Get Props. Beautiful book.

And I don't know, don't get a Haiti. Enough people have taken Haiti. Let them just try to do something more. Yeah. I mean, give them, I don't know, fighting chance here. Aiden shit. But yeah, whatever. I don't know.

It's not great either. So whatever. I don't know what to do. Don't have fucked with Haiti for centuries. Yeah. Ideally, don't have fucked with Haiti for centuries. Build a time machine and lead them alone. Yeah.

Well, that's the end of the episode. I have a book. You can find it at atrbook.com and a podcast format after the revolution. And that's it. That's the end of the episode. Go home. Kiss a cat. Or don't.

If you're allergic to cats. Yeah. Whatever. Kiss something. Bye. Hey, everybody. Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book after the revolution, which you can find at atrbook.com.

But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem. Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate set up cooling stations, and out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem. So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at Free Fridge Salem and send

them a couple of bucks, they could really use it. Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out. It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot. People still need this. So please Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do.

So one more time, the Venmo is at Free Fridge Salem. Thanks. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.