When he took over the leadership of Haiti in 1971, "Baby Doc" Duvalier also became head of the feared paramilitary force that his father created in 1959. Known as the "Tonton Macoutes," which is the name of a Haitian Creole mythological character who kidnaps children and eats them for breakfast, the denim-wearing and machete-wielding private militia was mostly comprised of uneducated fanatics fiercely local to Papa Doc and Baby Doc.
Vodou leaders were also members, giving what came to be called the Militia of National Security Volunteers (known as MVSN, for its French acronym) an almost-religious aura. Opponents were killed in the night and their bodies were often placed on public display. "The Duvaliers are estimated to have ordered the deaths of between twenty and thirty thousand Haitian civilians," Human Rights Watch said in a statement this week.
Employing vodou leaders and illiterate peasants was integral to the Duvalier's method of overseeing the torture and murder of political opponents and robbed public funds, biographer Elizabeth Abbott writes in Foreign Policy. “Duvalier's genius lay in how he designed their hierarchical structure, chose their (usually humble) social origins, and included priests (voodoon and Christian) and rural section chiefs who ruled their fiefdoms with iron fists and reported personally to him any subversive activity or even thought.”
Even after Baby Doc fled in 1986 and the Tonton Macoutes disbanded, citizens remained on guard. The following year, as The Christian Science Monitor noted during its election coverage at the time, thousands of peasant supporters of presidential candidate Louis Dejoie II chanted: "Tonton Macoutes can throw stones; we don't care. When Louis comes, the earth will tremble."