Ninety-nine years ago today, July 27, 1915, the president of Haiti, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, was assassinated by an angry mob. He was Haiti’s fifth president in five years, and had been in office for just over five months when he fled to the French embassy to seek asylum.

Let me back up a bit (this is mostly coming from the Wikipedia page, by the way). After several months of repressive rule targeting his political opponents, Sam upped the ante by ordering the execution of 167 political prisoners. Among those to be executed was former Haitian president Oreste Zamor, who had served as president for about eight months in 1914. The executions were carried out on July 27, 1915, and the populace, to put it mildly, got pissed off when they found out. I’ll let Wikipedia take it from here:

Sam fled to the French embassy, where he received asylum. The rebels’ mulatto leaders broke into the embassy and found Sam. They dragged him out and beat him senseless then threw his limp body over the embassy’s iron fence to the waiting populace, who then ripped his body to pieces and paraded the parts through the capital’s neighborhoods. For the next two weeks, the country was in chaos.

The next day, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson ordered American troops to seize Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. This was at least in part because he feared that instability in the country could lead to a German invasion—this was during World War I and the Mexican Revolution, remember, and the U.S. Navy had recently caught a German ship trying to smuggle arms to the Mexican government. The United States continued to occupy Haiti until August 1934.

Photo credit: By A. R. Harrison, United States Marine Corps [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.