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Duvalier promoted and installed members of the black majority in the civil service and the army.<ref name="Bryan 1984"/> In July 1958, three exiled Haitian army officers and five American mercenaries [[Haitian coup attempt, July 1958|landed in Haiti]] and tried to overthrow Duvalier; all were killed.<ref name="Life081558">{{citation |mode=cs1 |date=11 August 1958 |title=A Weird, Fatal Dash into Turbulent Haiti |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ylMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA22 |magazine=Life |publisher=Time |volume=45 |issue=6 |pages=22–23 |issn=0024-3019}}</ref> Although the army and its leaders had quashed the coup attempt, the incident deepened Duvalier's distrust of the army, an important Haitian institution over which he did not have firm control. He replaced the chief-of-staff with a more reliable officer and then proceeded to create his own power base within the army by turning the Presidential Guard into an elite corps aimed at maintaining his power. After this, Duvalier dismissed the entire general staff and replaced it with officers who owed their positions, and their loyalty, to him.{{cn|date=September 2022}}
In 1959, Duvalier created a rural militia, the ''{{lang|fr|Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale}}'' ({{lang|fr|MVSN}}, {{lang-en|Militia of National Security Volunteers}})—commonly referred to as the {{nowrap|[[Tonton Macoute]]}} after a {{nowrap|Haitian Creole}} [[bogeyman]]—to extend and bolster support for the regime in the countryside. The ''Macoute'', which by 1961 was twice as big as the army, never developed into a real military force but was more than just a [[secret police]].<ref name="Tartter 2001">{{citation |date=2001 |url=https://archive.org/details/dominicanrepubli00libr/page/464 |editor-last=Metz |editor-first=Helen Chapin |title=Dominican Republic and Haiti |series=Country Studies |others=Research completed December 1999 |edition=3rd |location=Washington, D.C. |publisher=Federal Research Division, Library of Congress |isbn=978-0-8444-1044-9 |issn=1057-5294 |lccn=2001023524 |oclc=46321054 |mode=cs1 |last=Tartter |first=Jean |chapter=Haiti: National Security § The Duvalier Era, 1957–86 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/stream/dominicanrepubli00metz#page/464 |page=[https://archive.org/details/dominicanrepubli00libr/page/464 464] |quote=Although referred to as a militia, the VSN in fact became the Duvaliers' front-line security force. As of early 1986, the organization included more than 9,000 members and an informal circle of thousands more. The VSN acted as a political cadre, secret police and instrument of terror. It played a crucial political role for the regime, countering the influence of the armed forces, historically the government's primary source of power. The VSN gained its deadly reputation in part because members received no salary, although they took orders from the Presidential Palace. They made their living, instead, through extortion and petty crime. Rural members of the VSN, who wore blue denim uniforms, had received some training from the army, while the plainclothes members, identified by their trademark dark glasses, served as Haiti's criminal investigation force. }}</ref>
In the early years of his rule, Duvalier was able to take advantage of the strategic weaknesses of his powerful opponents, mostly from the mulatto elite. These weaknesses included their inability to coordinate their actions against the regime, whose power had grown increasingly stronger.<ref name="Peschanski 2013">{{citation |mode=cs1 |last=Peschanski |first=João Alexandre |title=Papa Doc's Feint: the misled opposition and the consolidation of Duvalier's rule in Haiti |journal=Teoria e Pesquisa |volume=22 |issue=2 |date=2013 |pages=1–10 |issn=0104-0103 |doi=10.4322/tp.2013.016 |doi-access=free }}</ref>
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