suspension of the constitution and had the parliament give him unlimited executive powers. Political opponents were subject to physical harassment and surveillance by security forces. Failed rubber cultivation program As an Axis blockade cut off rubber supplies from the East, Lescot's administration began an ambitious program, in cooperation with the United States, to expand wartime production of rubber in the Haitian countryside. The Export-Import Bank in Washington granted $5 million in 1941 for the development of rubber plants in Haiti. The program was called the Société Haïtiano-Américane de Développement Agricole (SHADA) and managed by American agronomist Thomas Fennell. SHADA began production in 1941 with the provision of ample military support per contract with the US government. By 1943, an estimated were cleared for the planting of cryptostegia vine, which was considered to yield high amounts of latex. The program eventually claimed over 100,000 hectares of land. Farmers in Haiti's northern countryside were lured from food crop cultivation to meet increasing demand for rubber. Lescot energetically campaigned on SHADA's behalf, arguing the program would modernize Haitian agriculture. The United States also promoted the project with a robust public relations campaign. Peasant families were forcibly removed from Haiti's most arable tracts of land. After nearly a million fruit-bearing trees in Jérémie were cut down and peasant houses invaded or razed, the Haitian Minister of Agriculture, Maurice Dartigue, wrote to Fennell asking him to respect "the mentality and legitimate interests of the Haitian peasant and city-dwellers." But yields did not meet expectations, and insufficient amounts of rubber were produced to generate significant exports. Droughts contributed to poor harvests. "The worst thing that can be said of SHADA is that they are doing [their operations] at considerable expense to the American taxpayer and in a manner that does not command the respect of the Haitian people", concluded a survey by the US military. The US government offered $175,000 as compensation to displaced peasants after recommending the program's cancellation. Lescot feared SHADA's termination would add the burden of higher unemployment (at its height it employed over 90,000 people) to a sinking economy and hurt his public image. He asked the Rubber Development Corporation to extend its closing of the program gradually until the end of the war, but was refused. Decline and exile With his government near bankruptcy and struggling with a flagging economy, Lescot pleaded unsuccessfully with the United States for an extension on