The President’s Bogeymen

ICE agents as bogeymen

This is a column about ICE, but not about its illegal arrests, immanent expansion, or new detention center in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz. This is about the uncanny terror ICE agents engender in the people they threaten with arrest, their families, friends, co-workers, and employers. Fear of ICE has cleared whole sections of major cities, emptied farms, factories, and playing fields, and barricaded families inside their homes. 

ICE casualties are not found only among the thousands arrested, detained or deported. Simply knowing that people are being abducted based on how they look, their accent, where they live or travel, and what they say or write, reduces everyone’s freedom. “Am I safe?” is a question associated with childhood, but now it’s asked by millions of U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike. Masked ICE agents are like the bogeymen of childish nightmare; except they are real. Their comportment and appearance, stage-managed for maximum fear, is modeled on other, state-sponsored bogies, most notably the Tonton Macoute in Haiti, unleashed by President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in the late 1950s and ‘60s, and revived today under a different name.  

A brief history of the bogeyman

I don’t know where I first heard about the bogeyman, but it must have been as a young child. (The New York City sub-species is spelled and pronounced “boogeyman” with the double-o and long vowel sound.) If I misbehaved, he would snatch and eat me. I can’t imagine my gentle parents introducing me to the idea, but whoever did, it was effective – I was a fearful and well-behaved little boy. It’s possible my Yiddish-speaking grandparents reinforced playground talk about the bogeyman by telling me about Dybbuks, demons according to Jewish folklore, who can take possession of a body or soul. My Bubbe and Zayde always had a mezuzah (an oblong box enclosing a parchment with Torah verses), on the threshold of their apartment to prevent the entrance of an evil spirit. Like many Jewish families, we did too. 

My fear of the bogeyman was crystalized by repeated warnings from parents, siblings, and teachers not to “accept gifts from strangers,” “take rides with strangers,” or “walk down dark alleys”; those were traps set by the bogeyman. A widely distributed public service film of the day “Say No to Strangers” (1963), dramatized these three lessons, plus a fourth “the policeman is your friend.” The 10-minute film was intended for children from kindergarten to second grade. I’m sure I saw it and was traumatized, like millions of other kids. Could a kindly man with a puppy on a park bench, a young woman in a fancy white car, and an urban alleyway really pose such dangers?  (I already knew – in the New York City of Serpico — that cops were best kept at arm’s length.)

Every nation has its bogeymen. There’s the Baba Yaga of Slavic Europe (like the Dybbuk of the shtetls, except female), the Butzemann in Germany, and the Oni in Japan. The Tokolosh from Nguni (Zulu and  Xhosa) mythology, attacks adults and children in their sleep, sometimes killing them, or else causes illness, poverty, and other calamities. Among Quechua-speaking Indians of the South American Andes, pishtacos, formerly demonic avatars of an all-powerful Catholic Church, are now considered incarnations of extractive capitalism. They seize and kill Indians and render their fat for rocket fuel or steal their organs for transplant. 

In Spain and Portugal, as well as Latin America, the Coco or el Cuco, is a monster (in Brazil an alligator) who seizes children in their sleep and kidnaps or eats them. They are the subject of stories rhymes, songs and an important work of art. Francisco Goya depicted one in an etching and aquatint titled “Que viene el Coco” (“Here comes the bogeyman”) from 1799. It’s plate three in his portfolio of 80 prints titled Los Caprichos and shows a hooded figure at right facing or approaching a seated woman and two cowering children at left. The woman’s expression however, is not one of fear but love, modeled upon Charles Le Brun’s engraving of “l’amour simple” found in his Conférence sur l’expressions generale… of 1713, known to every practicing artist of the day. (There’s also a Spanish version of the Conférence from 1800.) Here the bogeyman is no beast, however; he’s the woman’s lover, wearing fashionable shoes with pointed toes. His form casts her head in shadow while his eyes extend what we assume to be a lascivious gaze. 

Goya’s etching is a critique of bad education and bad morals. The artist himself, or one of his friends, (perhaps the celebrated playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín), provided a commentary on the print: “Deplorable abuse of a child’s early education. Making the child more afraid of the bogeyman than his own father and making him fear what does not exist.” As is common with Goya – see for example plate 52 — “Lo que puede un Sastre!” (“What a tailor can do!”) — the image elides the familiar and the sinister. In both prints, the phantom is exposed as unremarkable (in one case a man, and in the other a stunted tree) but nevertheless terrifying. That duality – ordinary yet exceptional, familiar yet frightful — is the bogeyman’s special power; he appears in broad daylight but is nevertheless nightmarish. It’s also the basis of the fear generated by ICE. Agents usually dress as average men – some wear blue jeans — and drive unmarked cars or vans, but when they spot you on the street, at a bus stop, or in a parking lot, they don their Zorro masks and dark glasses, leap out of their vehicles, and spirit you away. Violence erupts amid the banality of the everyday. 

Tonton Macoute

The closest parallel I can think of to Trump’s ICE agents is Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s dreaded civilian militia, the Tonton Macoute. In 1957, after a long U.S. military occupation (1915-1934) and succession of U.S. backed coups, Duvalier was elected president. Initially popular, he promised to reduce the power of the mulatto elite, bring prosperity to the Black masses, and spur a renaissance in Creole language and culture. The Vodou religion, derided as superstitious nonsense by Francophone Catholics, would now be cherished. However, what arose from Duvalier’s initiatives was a form of cultural nationalism closer to fascism than democracy. True to his word, a new Black elite, led by Duvalier and his family, reduced mulatto supremacy. But Duvalier also attacked trade unions, teachers, journalists, Catholic priests, intellectuals, and the U.S. State Department, even though the latter supported his election. By claiming to be a bulwark against communism, Duvalier maintained American trust and financial backing. (It was briefly withdrawn under the Kennedy administration.)  

In 1959, Duvalier established a civilian militia, the Milice Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (Militia of National Security Volunteers). The MVSN crushed dissent, extorted money, and protected Duvalier from the uniformed military, which he distrusted. Informally called Cagoulards (hooded men), they soon gained the name Tonton Macoute,  Creole for “Uncle Gunnysack,” a rural bogeyman who kidnaps and punishes misbehaving children and then eats them for breakfast. The Macoute dressed in straw hats, blue denim shirts and dark glasses, wore sidearms, and generally carried machetes, in deference to the warrior-god Ogun from Yoruba and Vodou religion.  They were loyal to Duvalier but sometimes banded together to resist his tax collectors or other agents. Peasant-based Macoutes attacked, robbed, extorted or just settled scores with fellow peasants; urban Macoutes did the same with impoverished city dwellers. 

The Macoute operated brazenly. They might pursue, beat, and kill someone in broad daylight and then display the mutilated body for all to see. A respected government official, teacher or doctor one day, might be a body in a ditch the next. By funding the Macoute – often with stolen or embezzled funds – Duvalier created a smoldering war of all against all that continued beyond his death in 1971, the flight of his son and successor Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier to Paris in 1986 (aboard a U.S. Air Force jet), and the formal break-up of the MVSN.  The Macoute would be reconstituted under different names in the decades to come.

The role of the U.S. government in this century long debacle was paramount. It dispatched troops in 1915 to prevent a popular uprising and then maintained a two decade long military occupation. It trained a new Haitian army and gendarmerie, enabling the eventual recruitment of Tonton Macoute from their ranks.  It supported both Duvaliers for their supposed anti-communism, funding  the rise of what the anthropologist Paul Farmer called “the political economy of brutality.”  After the death of Papa Doc in 1971, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye to the corruption and cruelty of Baby Doc. In 1982, Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani (in his pre-mayoral days) protected the Macoute and their successors from civil suits and any other form of legal accounting. The U.S. government at that time, also assisted the Haitian Army in its repression of popular democratic forces, and in 1991 overthrew the newly elected president and former Salesian priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (It would do so again in 2004.) In 1993, Counterpunch reported that Ron Brown, former Chair of the Democratic National Committee had been a lobbyist and confidante for Baby Doc and used his new position as Bill Clinton’s Commerce Secretary to continue to undermine Aristide and Haitian democracy. 

The story of the succeeding 30 years is no prettier, with a U.S. sanctioned coup in 2004, a reconstitution of Macoute-style death squads, a botched U.N. intervention, and still more coups and gang violence. In 2023, gangs began to coordinate their activity under the aegis of the Viv Ansanm alliance, but that has done little if anything to reduce overall levels of violence. Haiti is currently a miasma of chaos, with kidnappings, arson, murders, poverty, homelessness, and hunger. The Haitian diaspora in the U.S. — some 520,000 strong —  was denied Temporary Protective Status by Department of Homeland Security  Secretary Kristi Noem, but that order was recently blocked by a judge. The Haitians clearly have no safe place to return to, but the U.S. Supreme Court, is likely to vacate the lower court’s order and allow their deportation.

The Comedians

Though there has never been a proper accounting, the Tonton Macoute are thought to be responsible for some 60,000 killings, and un-numbered rapes, assaults, and acts of extortion.  Despite that uncertainty, Haiti and the Macoute have been the subject of searing analyses, including Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti (1994), and Rolf Trouillot’s Haiti: State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (2000); and one great novel, Graham Greene’s The Comedians (1966). The two former books address the disjunction between a militarized state and peasant nation, and the long-term impact upon Haiti of American military and economic domination. The novel discloses the fraught boundary between white visitors or expats and black natives in a state governed by terror. 

The title of Greene’s novel describes its three main characters, the British narrator and hotelier Brown, the naïve American vegetarian Smith and wife, and the Anglo-Indian businessman and crook Jones. The names Brown, Smith and Jones sound like criminal aliases, recalling film noir, a genre Greene did so much to foster. But each figure is so helpless that together they comprise a parody of the genre, thus the title. Even the Tonton Macoute, as violent as they are, reveal themselves to be comic in their recklessness and flamboyance. What’s most remarkable about the book, however, is the way it weaves an ill-fated love story and tale of petty corruption through an urban landscape of fear and menace. Conversations are both banal and terrifying:

‘Shooting?’ Mr. Smith enquired. ‘Is there shooting?’ He looked at his wife where she sat crouched under the travelling rug (she was not warm enough even in the stuffy cabin) with a trace of anxiety. ‘Why shooting?’

‘Ask Mr. Brown. He lives there.’

I said, ‘I’ve not often heard shooting. They act more silently as a rule.’

‘Who are they?’ Mr. Smith asked.

‘The Tonton Macoute,’ the purser broke in with wicked glee. ‘The President’s bogey men. They wear dark glasses and they call on their victims after dark.’

The word “shooting” is repeated four times, but it’s the term “bogey men” that we remember. It’s more frightening, indeed uncanny, because it’s something familiar from childhood. Later, Greene refers again to the bogeyman of infantile memory. In a scene in which the Macoute have stopped a hearse carrying the body of Doctor Philipot, hounded to suicide by the Macoute, Brown reflects:

Our situation reminded me of that nightmare of childhood when something in a cupboard prepares to come out. None of us was anxious to look at another and see the private nightmare reflected, so we looked instead through the glass wall of the hearse at the shining new coffin with the brass handles which was the cause of all the trouble.

The nightmare of real-life in Haiti, of course, is day lit. A few weeks ago, unknown arsonists – bogeymen — torched the historic, gingerbread Hotel Olaffson, real life basis of the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene’s novel.

The uncanny 

Fear of the bogeyman falls into a category of experience that Sigmund Freud called “the uncanny.”  In his well-known essay of that title, he says the uncanny (unheimlich) “arouses in us dread and creeping horror,” but also leads us “back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” In other words, the uncanny represents the return of the repressed. That’s the source of the peculiar dread summoned by the Tonton Macoute – they are the bogey men of childhood fears, as Greene wrote, returned to adult life.

The character of the uncanny is revealed, according to Freud, by the nature of the word itself.  “Unheimlich” is only apparently the opposite of “heimlich” which means familiar and home-like. The latter may in fact signify a secret or private place or thing, even a part of the body. A state secret may be both heimlich and unheimlich, as much as the genitals of a man or woman. The uncanny therefore, represents something well-known that becomes highly disturbing. The interior of a child’s clothing cupboard may shelter a monster or bogeyman.  The peasant living next door, dressed in a straw hat and denim shirt is a Tonton Macoute.  The man in a tee shirt and jeans, driving an ordinary car or delivery truck is an ICE agent ready to grab you. 

The same complex of ideas – heimlich/unheimlich — exists at the institutional level. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which directs ICE, was established after 9/11 and passage by Congress of the Homeland Security Act. Americans don’t typically refer to their ‘homeland.” None of the common patriotic songs or pledges – the “Star Spangled Banner,” “American the Beautiful,” the “Pledge of Allegiance”, “God Bless America” or “This Land is My Land” — include the term “homeland.” Instead, they use the words “nation,” “land” or “country” and address the natural beauty of the U.S., brotherhood, the value of immigration (see the second stanza of “America the Beautiful”), and “liberty and justice for all.”  “Homeland” instead recalls its German equivalent “heimat” which refers not to a specific geographic or political entity, but a posited ethnic or spiritual essence.  The word was widely used in Nazi Party propaganda from the 1920s to ’40s. Heimat was the blood and soil of the German volk opposed to alien or diseased elements — Jews, Slavs, Roma, queers, Bolsheviks and political dissidents. Heimat or “heimatstil” was the officially approved language of art, architecture, literature, film and even typography. 

The words heimat and heimlich share a common root and have a common progeny: “Homeland.” It suggests the presence of an unwanted other – the foreigner, the invader, the alien, the immigrant. When the Department of Homeland Security dispatches its agents – dressed like Tonton Macoute — to round up, arrest and deport people, it summons up uncanny fears and repressed memories. Nobody is safe, ICE publicity suggests, and danger lurks everywhere. 

Coda: Papa Doc and Trump 

What links Duvalier and Trump is cultural nationalism, the idea that the fundamental challenge a nation faces is cultural or ethnic.  In the case of Haiti, the task was overcoming mulatto supremacy and empowering the Black majority. In fact, cultural nationalism there quickly turned to fascism; it wasn’t Black peasants and workers that mattered, it was the leader, Francois Duvalier, his family and close followers. 

In Trump’s America, the goal is sweeping aside non-whites, immigrants, queers, feminists and the left, and reasserting the authority of conservative, usually Christian white, working-class men. (In fact, the U.S. working class have suffered loss after loss with Trump.) To achieve that goal, all institutions – legal, political, educational, cultural, and economic – will need to be beaten into submission. That effort is well underway; formerly independent colleges and universities, opposition politicians, lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, military leaders, writers and reporters have been blackmailed, bribed, extorted or threatened with arrest. 

In Haiti, the main instrument of repression was the Tanton Macoute. ICE may be the forward spear of a similar culture of violence in U.S. daily life. The only course of action is to resist the president’s bogeymen.

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