Bloodless coups, bloody assassinations and headless chooks: Haiti is a real-life novel of calamitous proportions

February 7, 1986, and the world’s press has descended on Haiti to witness the collapse of the murderous 28-year Duvalier dictatorship.

Trouble was, some of us nearly missed the historic moment because we were watching a man bite the head off a live chook.

I had arrived in the tiny troubled Caribbean nation days earlier with the rest of the international media throng to witness the death throes of the notorious regime made infamous by Graham Greene in his novel The Comedians.

But despite weeks of rioting and increased pressure from the Reagan administration, the revolution seemed to have stalled.

The inaptly titled “Baby Doc” Duvalier — so named because he succeeded his father “Papa Doc” Duvalier to the presidency when he was only 19 — was still sporadically driving through the filthy streets throwing coins to the peasants from his limousine window.

Some of the journalists finally succumbed to the lure of a local voodoo ceremony on the night of the 7^th where, as promised, a “mambo” priest performed the infamous chicken-biting ritual.

On the way home we noticed crowds of people heading to the airport, where we found the presidential motorcade now delivering dozens of pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage to the huge US military plane sitting on the tarmac.

We watched behind the cyclone fence as the plane finally took off to France where the Americans had negotiated for Baby Doc and his even more loathed wife Michele to gain asylum. 

(It was one of the few good deeds of the same Reagan administration, which was then backing other totalitarian regimes throughout Latin America.)

A few hours later, as dawn broke over the capital of Port-au-Prince, we could hear the beginnings of a slow roar as the people began to learn that they were finally free.

 Many of us were hearing it from the balcony of the famed Hotel Oloffson, which had been the setting for the Greene novel. We were even joined by colourful local celebrity Aubelin Jolicoeur, who had been the inspiration for the character of Petit Pierre in the book.

As the day wore on there was dancing on the street and joy on the people’s faces, in stark contrast to the misery and fear we had seen only days before in a country officially designated the most impoverished in the western hemisphere.

Suddenly none of us felt the menacing presence of the Tonton Macoute, Duvalier’s dreaded secret police.

But the euphoria of the crowds quickly descended into revenge as they dragged journalists to see the mansions being looted and the graves of Duvalier loyalists dug up, their bones scattered.

Days later a new president, Henri Namphy, was installed in the beautiful white wedding cake-style presidential palace amid hope of free elections and a new era of peace and prosperity.

Instead, as one expert noted yesterday, it has been “30 years of calamity after calamity” — including the natural disaster of the 2010 earthquake which killed a quarter of a million people. 

It also destroyed that magnificent presidential palace, which was an apt metaphor for the collapse of the nation’s political system.

Haiti’s first revolution was by the slaves in 1804, which led it to become the world’s first free Black republic. In 1915 the US Marines invaded the nation and occupied it for 20 years. They did so again in 1994 after the post-Duvalier leaders foundered. 

Since then, there have been plenty of coups and murders but this week’s shooting of President Jovenel Moise was, incredibly, the first actual assassination of a leader.

And once again the US is dragged into the turmoil with reports this morning that two of the assassins were Haitian-Americans. The only thing certain at the moment is that this obscure Caribbean island will continue to captivate the world’s attention with the next chapter in its tragic turbulent political history.

Janine Perrett was the US correspondent for The Australian in the mid-1980s.