There’s a reason the History Channel has produced hundreds of documentaries about Hitler but only a few about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bad guys (and gals) are eternally fascinating. Behind the Bastards dives in past the Cliffs Notes of the worst humans in history and exposes the bizarre realities of their lives. Listeners will learn about the young adult novels that helped Hitler form his monstrous ideology, the founder of Blackwater’s insane quest to build his own Air Force, the bizarre lives of the sons and daughters of dictators and Saddam Hussein’s side career as a trashy romance novelist.
Thu, 15 Jul 2021 10:00
Robert is joined again by Propaganda to continue to discuss Pappa Doc and Baby Doc.
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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, 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, so not to take me away from you? Something that 100 men on Mars could ever do for a man on Mars? I don't know. What's the lyric? Men are more right. I bless the rains down in Africa. Wow, I started. But I just. I'm just letting y'all into my childhood. That's something that 100 men on Mars could never do. I don't know. Thank you, marchants. Get Me Out of here. Get Me Out of this house, Martins. Love it, love it. You know what else I love? Jason Petty and Rebellion, 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 the the election in 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 dictatorship, you know, it's kind of the way you've, you've, you've gone full tater. So 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 Taunton to the Taunton Macoute to purging his political rivals and journalists, he also said it towards investigating the top command of the army. He was careful with this information rather than use it to carry out public purchase. He instead engaged in frequent shakeups of the high command prematurely. Retiring officers, he thought, might be willing to cool him. At the same time, he gradually cut the military budget, trimming its numbers to make it something his into something his Taunton macoute could deal with. He also ordered all his out of the military's heavy armament, 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, yeah, I guess, I mean, I would feel better. I mean, all of our militaries, big. But weapons were kept in in my basement because at least I know where they are. I know where they are, you know? Yeah, I'm not gonna use them for evil often, but I. All the time, all the time. Not constantly. Like I'm going to take vacation days and **** she in 1958, before the Taunton Macoute were formally organized. But obviously you've got Clement Barbeau he's starting to like, gear stuff up. They haven't, just haven't earned their name yet. The new president used his its predecessors to crack down on what he saw as the first threat to his reign, which was the Labor union movement in Haiti. He cancelled that year's Mayday rally, he had the leader of the local union arrested, and he started sending out his men to beat and torture. Abler organizers, when the Taunton Macoute 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 Taunton Macoute 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, St 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 they they, in addition to not paying them, they said you're basically like, you can do anything. Like is like, we're not going to pay you, but you, you you have the authority of the president. You can break whatever ******* laws you want to break. Yeah, that's yeah, that's interesting. That the tie between. That's interesting. Yeah. The tie between being like, well, if we paid you. Yeah. 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 they do what they want. It also makes them more dependent on the regime, because if you're, if the Taunton macoute are 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. Yeah. And they're also, they're committing all these crimes, so they know that if the regime loses power, people are going to come at me because they're ****** you know? Wow. 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 Taunton 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 Taunton macoutes. Now, I think they topped out like 9 thousands. There's a lot of these guys. It takes a lot. Yeah, 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 if the first pick is obviously Clement Barbeau, the 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. Too many were granted asylum in foreign embassies. His rivals in the election fled the country, but Taunton executioners, furious that one of the losing candidates, Clement Jumelle, had escaped, tracked down two of his brothers and gunned them down as they surrendered. Hands up opposition newspapers were bombed by Tanton hooligans. During the first year of Duvalier's Revolution, editors and publishers of seven leading periodicals were jailed and most of them were tortured. Missus Yvonne Rempel, director of the anti Duvalier fortnightly Lescol, was beaten unconscious before her children. Been 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, good dog, man. Now I just. I just hate this so much. Yeah, it's it's real bad. It's real bad now. If you've never orchestrated a repressive regime that murders huge numbers of people, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You might be surprised to learn that this ****** people off. People don't like it when you do that, actually. It's historically unpopular call. And a lot of these exiled politicians who, like, escape with their families get killed. And a lot of citizens who, like, leave because they were like, oh, this isn't gonna go anywhere. Well, they don't want to just, like, leave Haiti and be like, well, I guess an ******** in charge now, right? They they try to overthrow the regime. And so they 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 the first side note as an American, how often governments get overthrown by attempted to be overthrown, like 30 guys. Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Like happens all the time. Yeah. We are not in support of this coup, so it doesn't have it 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 setting 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 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 Duvalier ISM. 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 **** ** his regime. Pull it off? Yeah, he's very worried about this and it actually by some accounts comes pretty close to to taking him out, but thankfully. Prop. Thankfully. Ohh Papa Doc has a friend. Ohh no and that friend. Is the United States government, particularly the United States Army? We have, yeah, 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, some mean guys are here and America's. Like, don't worry buddy, we've got the Marine Corps and 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 Heinel 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 Taunton Macoute 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. Heinel'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 could serve out his full term in office, and maybe a little longer than that if everything works out. Play that. OK, got it, got it. Are you get the feeling heinel feels bad about this later? It 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. **** it. We're the state department. We don't give a ****. As far as Papa Doc went, his regime weathers the rebellion right. It's it's a rough point for for a while, but they they get through with the help of the US 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 of the United States of America was there to help again. We flew in teams, medical teams from Guantanamo Bay and Washington DC to operate on the dictator's heart and save his life. Why he pulled through so bad at like. We just Haiti, baby. Consistently inconsistent. Yeah, we're going to we're going to overthrow a dictator. Yeah, we overthrow dictatorships* go to the bottom. This dictators we don't like. That's the dip, you know, I'm saying, but there's some dictators that like, yo, he, he tater and kind of like I like his. Why are we so extra for somebody? Like, why? Effort somewhere that's needed, fam. Like America. Yep, good times. They would argue we are working for America is their argument. Yeah. Yeah. And and I mean, they are, I guess. I don't know. Whatever. So Duvalier survives this ******* heart attack, and during his recovery, he's able to properly, unable to, but, like, so he's like, ****** ** for a while and he can't be a dictator when you're when you're sick? Well, no, because power false. Is #2 man commit Barbeau. The guy who murdered people like Clement Barbeau. Has gets the nickname the muffler because of how good he is at silencing people. Good God, so he's not a nice guy. There is the muffler. That nickname is so hard, but like horrible like that is it's very hard yeah it is. It is like I'd be want to be. I'd want to be called the yeah you don't get that nickname unless you're like a scary son of and this guy will be talking about him more is terrifying. So by all accounts, Barbeau does a good job of holding on to power if we Duvalier. 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 ****** ** plotting against him. Because, again, Duvalier grows up through, like, a dozen Goonies, so yeah, he doesn't even wait to see if that's the case. He just immediately throws Barbeau in prison for 16 months. You barbeau. It's like you like, come on. Come on, bro. Are you serious? No. OK, of course I was plotting your murder, but yeah, but prove it. Now, back in the saddle, Duvalier 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 Duvalier 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 Duvalier's name on it, and 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 they're also weren't other options. Yeah, yeah, they go to multiple choice, is the answer a. That's it. That's the test, yeah. If you write anything but a we are shooting you. Yeah. 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, man, I'm just saying that's what they said. Ain't that right? That's what John 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 strong men 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 US 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 in past his term limit, but. We didn't like how blatant it was, right? She should make it obvious, fam. We were all so frustrated that that same year, he took some of that $50 million and used it to make a utopia named after himself. He called it Duvalier Ville because dictators are not subtle people, and it was a town built as a monument to himself. Yeah, 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 the finances 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 shaped 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. From the Chicago Tribune quote. We don't have water, we don't have schools, we don't that we don't have to pay for and we don't have a hospital, said petite for wilburt. What we have are buildings with the name of the President's family. As one enters Duvalier Ville, 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 lay a few square blocks of one story. Cinder block 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 Duvall. Mayville, the 35 year old Wilbert said, ruing the lack of jobs. The main complaint from the desperately poor people here is about the lack of fresh water. The nearest source is 7 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 of 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 7 Sundays is yeah, like, yeah, because we got no ******* jobs. Yeah, it's we got 7 Sundays. Also, you imagine somebody asking you, hey, so. How's that city named after you complete that? Livable? It is ****** you let me tell you. Do not go there. It's terrible. Like, yeah, but but but I built the city. No, you didn't. You didn't build it. Yeah, I just named it and then ****** it up. Yeah. Yeah. So that same year, 1962, when constructions kicking off for Duvalier, Ville Clement Barbeau, who gets out of prison, you know, is now out of prison after 16 month, begins plotting to remove Duvalier from office. And it's like if I if I wasn't, I wasn't. Yeah, yeah. Now, Barbeau was a frightening man 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 DACA letter that made the meaning of this attack very clear. Just target practice. Basically. I was I was just preparing to ******* kill you people. I just wanted to check out if my guns were working, so I killed the kids. Bodyguards? Yeah. Hey, I didn't miss. I didn't miss. Yeah, yeah. Weeks later, Barbosa men attacked the schoolhouse filled with Duvalier supporters who were waiting for their chance to come out and cheer the dictator on. They've been packed into the schoolhouse as part of like, he was having a March through town, right? Yeah, they've been forced in there, and Barbeau decides to ruin this photo op and just machine guns. The school Kill 7 people and the knowledge that Duvalier supporters could be. Although, again, these people didn't have the choice to support Duvalier. 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 Duvalier wrists 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 to Valier not to drink his coffee. It was poisoned, said Barbeau. The race. Hey, homie. Guy is. Yeah. Hey, God, he do it. This is a siop fan. Like, hey, homie, how you shouldn't drink that coffee. Like what? Because I ******* poisoned it. I poisoned you? Like, oh, you just gonna tell me about it? I mean, yeah, go ahead and skip it then. Like, what is this guy who he gags? What are the the only? Here's the thing. You're only saving grace in being under a dictatorship. Like that is knowing that if you just support the dictator, you can't get touched. And what, this dude is just ruined. That security that, like, Oh no, you can still get touched. He is ******* **** 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 **** 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 into a black dog and escape it will, yeah. So Duvalier, being the kind of dude he is, orders every black dog. Haiti shot on site like a wired. Oh, he's a black dog. OK, got it? Yeah, ******** now you know who won't? Order dogs assassinated. I said won't, I said won't. We won't. Yes, Sophie will not. And neither will the products and services that support this podcast. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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That's better helpp.com/behind. Betterhelp from behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment. We can't save chimps, forests or anything else, and that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, 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 kept you in on Papa docs kind of paranoid in this. 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 1960. Well, that whatever Kennedy's elected in 1961 and that changes U.S. policy towards Haiti. Was Kennedy does not like Haiti and it becomes U.S. policy. US had supported Papa Doc prior to this. It becomes Kennedy's policy to force Papa Dock out of power. So he sets the CIA to this task. The CIA, because they're never quite as smart as 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. Where a scope that Duvalier read. That's the CIA's plan. They're like, that's ****** with this *******. I mean, they also try to arm dissidents and stuff, but, like, like, they were gonna rewrite his horoscope. Yo, this that. **** him up. Yeah, this is the time, buddy. Exploding cigar. Like, OK, so, I mean, could you imagine being on the pitch team during this time? Like, yo ****. What about horoscopes? Yeah. OK, guys, hear me out. Hear me out. The man reads a horoscope everyday. What if we just tell? What if we just. Yeah, dog. Yeah, yeah. What's the sign? We had an idea, yeah. I have not come across details and what they wrote for his horoscopes, but this was not the only time the CA 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, 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 Papa Doc, I just thought that was funny. Expire right before President wants this guy out of office. What do we do? Horoscopes. Yeah. I don't know. That's a good day's. What? Yeah. At least nobody dies. We should have to go to. You have to go there. Yeah. We are so busy killing people in Guatemala. Let's just try the horoscope thing with why not that. Yeah. So I don't know. We'll see. My guess is they were probably trying to make him like feel like death was coming for him and he should probably be in exile. It doesn't work anyway. Back to barbell. In July of 1963, Barbeau's Luck runs out. He had decided to gather all of his supporters and launched an attack on the dictator. But someone tipped the attack off to Duvalier and he sent a swarm of Taunton macoute to Barbeau's hiding place in a sugar cane field. And they just like the whole field on fire when barbone has men tried to escape their machine gun to death, and famously. Papa Doc has his head cut off, put on ice and delivered to the palace. Yeah, 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 Duvall Urist and are never heard from again. By the time the whole sordid business is over, however, the regime found itself in a relatively solid position. The greatest threat to Papa Doc'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. And ******* in Papa doctors bunch of ****** ** **** towards Haiti. There's a lot of like, yeah, like, I'm not putting it on the Dominican Republic. And again, overthrowing Papa Docs, 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 than that, to stop his own citizens from fleeing to the Dominican Republic, Duvalier Burns A3 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. That dog man. In 1964, Duvalier ditched all pretense and made himself president for life. He had a group of army officers circulated a petition demanding that he do this. Then he had his legislature replaced the constitution that he'd written years before with one that legalized lifelong. Residency. Then he had another referendum where he was again the sole candidate. He was inaugurated president for life on June 22nd, 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 us. Doesn't seem like it's headed in a good direction. This guy's already lasted longer than any of the other previous leaders. Shouldn't work. This is not going gonna end anywhere. While we should get the **** out, the fact that everyone who knows how to do anything leaves means that the healthcare and educational systems collapse entirely. School just stops being a thing from because there's not ******* teachers Duvalier confiscated. Doesn't 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 Taunton Macoute 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 six teenagers 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 6 to 10 bodyguards. You will tell me how you gonna tell me what God I serve. I'm going to church today. The brothers with these weapons? Yeah. Tell the dude with the sticks back here that I can't have communion. Yeah, send those Swiss ************* with the halberds into Haiti. See how they do. Yeah, send them down. Come round the hood. Hey, hey, hey. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, you shut the **** **. Alright, Pastor, Pastor, go ahead and continue. Continue. Even Duvalier, 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, Papa Doc had married a mulatto and made it no secret that he wanted his children to follow his example. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, of course. After their marriage in 1967, President Duvalier got the manifest sight by appointing Colonel Dominique Ambassador to Spain. Hours after the Dominiques had left, Papa Doc 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. And I'm just. Yeah, I think so. That's exactly what happened. That's how the Fuji started. Was him. He was there in Haiti during this and his Mama was like, yo, we gotta go. Yeah. This is not gonna end well. Yeah. Yeah. That's where he met Lauren Hill. And that's why we have the beaches. So something good came out of the regime. Yeah, we got, we got. Why we got the Shakira song with Wyclef. Yeah, we didn't get any good hip hop acts out of Hitler. No, wait a second. That was excellent. Spot on. You know, the trick for Shakira is you have to kind. She's kind of Kermit. Yeah, it's kind of Kermit the frog. Yeah. But you have to do it on key. And then you got security. I just wanted to give that some shine because. OK. 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 Duvalier spent much of the mid to late 60s engaging in an escalating war with the Catholic Church. Clergy he could not bribe or threaten would be arrested. He exiled several bishops of 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. So let me tell you something, when you start traveling hoods and you like know like, like Haitian like Haitian thugs like Haitian gangsters and justice like. These people are afraid of nothing and and now like understanding the sort of the cultural new meal you where like even the dictator was like OK, first of all we overthrew our oppressors. Then we overthrew every political or every colonial force and now we don't told the Catholic Church what we going to do. You understand 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 them hoods in Miami. Like these, like way like the patients do out there, are you just like stated, there's some people that you like stay the hell out their way, you know? And it is known you stay out there. Haitians just stay out that way. Let them do what they're doing. And I'm seeing now, even at the government level, you should just stay the hell out that way. Yeah. And it's, you know, it is a mark of the level of skill and how frightening this guy is that he's able to get. He gets the Catholic Church to like the seeds some of their sovereignty and the Catholic Church is like yeah you know they're there is there is a hard as it gets pretty much with this this is a millennial long. Yeah. Regime here. They've kept this **** going a while and they're like, yeah right. Like we we we've got a we've. That bow to you some. OK. We don't want no parts of this job. Go ahead. Do what you want to do. So yeah. Now. Unfortunately. Well, fortunately, I guess people die. And 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 Earist revolution. And 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. One of the things he does is he adapts the Lord's Prayer so that Haitians can pray to him. And the adaptation goes our doc who art in the National Palace for Life, hallowed be thy name. By present and future generations there 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 spent 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 of the most wholesome part, the most redeeming part of the whole thing 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 hard. So Duvalier's propagandists put out a book, you know? But anyway, they 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. Change the Constitution again, which sort of begs the question of why he bothered having a constitution in the 1st place. Yeah, 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. Citizen Doctor 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. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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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. It. Yeah, I love it. He's like, man, I'm just rich. I don't want. I just want to be rich. I'm just rich. Don't wanna 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. What you going through is hard. You stressed out all the time, killing everybody. He's dense, seemed miserable, seen misery. I want this. Yeah. So the one sign that he might have some steel in him had come in 1967 when John Claude. 15 his father had flown into a rage at his mother and started hitting her and John Claude had shoved Papa Doc 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 ****. He opens the palace to journalists. He starts paying off the country's debts. He modernizes. He supports a quickie divorce. Thought 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, like, make a play for no, I'm gonna modernize. I'm gonna fix a lot of the **** that's wrong. We're gonna fix this stuff. We're gonna clean up. Haiti's Duvalier also opened the country to foreign business, an economic liberalization. He called Jean Claude ISM. This mostly meant giving US businesses a lot of tax breaks and **** and letting them take advantage of cheap labor and letting them use the Taunton macoutes to crack it down on any unions that tried to form and damn. John Claude anyway, sorry. So all of this makes the US government really happy. Oh, you're gonna crack out on unions again? You gotta 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 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 and other horrible famine hits the country. Baby Doc begs the US 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. Congressman 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. You know, we're we're going to tie aid to you actually improving human rights conditions. This creates a problem for baby docs. So he has to push through a bunch of cosmetic. Forms to try to trick Jimmy Carter. Not the hardest things anyone's ever done, no. He arrests a few Taunton macoute 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 **** about whether or not Haiti got more Democratic. Yeah, baby. Doc is smart enough to know, OK, Ronald Reagan's. And I'm going to start talking about how bad communism is. You actually holds a champagne party when Reagan gets elected because he knows it's gonna make **** easier. Reagan's like anti communist. Here's a ******** of money. Yeah. Yeah. And this is actually a now. Now, seriously speaking, this is actually the the meal you that made The Fugees and why they're called The Fugees. It's short for refugees. And it's because of this. Yeah. And and by 1980, Haiti is completely dependent on foreign aid. And the greatest recipient of foreign aid is the Duvalier family. More than 2/3 of the country's development budget. Which was about. $81 million came from foreign governments, namely the US, 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 Cambronne, who was the lover of baby Doe's mother, Simone. He made a fortune exporting the literal blood of Haitian citizens, often gathered by force by the Taunton Macoute. The nation exported 5 tons of blood plasma per month under Luckner. He bought it for $5 a pint and sold it for $35 to US 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 off and 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, dammit. Michelle, the first, 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 and now your body shaming. Well, he doesn't kill her, he just forces her out. 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 insecure. Many were starving. Clearing away the bodies of starved dead was a regular task for city employees in the capital. Civil rests began to bubble 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's liberation theology as 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 Taunton Macoute, but this leads to international condemnation. And the US 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. Orders one of his voodoo sorcerers to lay a spell on the presidential bed so that the next occupant 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 $400.00 for the babies. 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 US transport aircraft. We helped them. Lead to France, where they rent a villa near cans 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 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 tail. That's not at all. Yeah. That is harsh. So hard. Yeah. Wow. Well, I have that. That feel, that feeling of dulling death, that you always feel at the end of these pods. Yeah, that's our goal. That's the goal. The dulling death. Hmm. Yeah, you can find me a prop hiphop.com. I support the hood politics pod. Yes. Also get get props book is delightful and aesthetically beautiful. Yeah, yeah, terrible book. Umm. And I don't know get a get, get get. Don't get a Haiti. Enough people have taken Haiti. Yes. Let them just try to do something. Yeah, I mean, give them, I don't know, fighting chance here, aid and ****. But yeah, whatever. I don't know if that didn't work out great either, so whatever. I don't know what to do. Don't have ****** with Haiti for centuries. Yeah, ideally ****** with Haiti. Build a time machine and leave him alone. Yeah. Well, that's the end of the episode. I have a book. You can find it in a trbook.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. I don't care. Bye. Hey everybody, initially I was going to plug the go fund me 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, hand out cold drinks to do things to help people get their temperature down. I wanna 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. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff, you should know you will. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.