Between 1911 and 1915, a series of political assassinations and forced exiles saw the presidency of Haiti change six times. Various revolutionary armies carried out this series of coups. Each was formed by cacos, or peasant brigands from the mountains of the north, along the porous Dominican border, who were enlisted by rival political factions under the promises of money, which would be paid after a successful revolution, and the opportunity to plunder.

In 1919, a new caco uprising began, led by Charlemagne Péralte, vowing to‘drive the invaders into the sea and free Haiti.’The Cacos attacked Port-au-Prince in October, but were driven back with heavy casualties. Afterwards, a Creole-speaking American Gendarmerie officer infiltrated Péralte’s camp, killing him and photographing his corpse in an attempt to demoralize the rebels. Leadership of the rebellion passed to Benoît Batraville, a Caco chieftain from Artibonite. His death in 1920 marked the end of hostilities. During Senate hearings in 1921, the commandant of the Marine Corps reported that, in the twenty months of active resistance, 2 250 Haitians had been killed. However, in a report to the Secretary of the Navy he reported the death toll as being 3 250. Haitian historians have estimated the true number was much higher; one suggested, "the total number of battle victims and casualties of repression and consequences of the war might have reached, by the end of the pacification period, four or five times that – somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 persons."

Source: Wikipedia, published under the GNU FDL. Retrieved 2014-03-08