François Duvalier
François Duvalier, Papa Doc, was the country doctor elected president of Haiti in 1957 who made himself president for life in 1964, ruled by the Tontons Macoutes, the militia of denim-clad, sunglassed men whose name is the bogeyman of Haitian folklore, killed some thirty thousand people and drove the professional class into exile, cultivated the image of a vodou sorcerer in a black suit and a Baron Samedi hat, and died in his bed in 1971 having named his nineteen-year-old son to succeed him, which the son did for fifteen years. He was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907, the son of a schoolteacher, qualified as a doctor in 1934, worked in the American campaign against yaws in the 1940s, which gave him the name and the peasants' gratitude, and was a leading writer of the noiriste movement that argued Haiti's black majority had been ruled too long by its mulatto elite. He served as minister of health under Estime, went underground under the Magloire dictatorship, and won the election of September 1957, held by the army after a year of coups, as the black candidate of the countryside against the mulatto Louis Dejoie. The first years were the making of the machine: the army purged and starved, the Macoutes raised from 1959 as a counterweight to it and paid by extortion, the press and the unions crushed, the Catholic hierarchy expelled and the archbishopric filled with his own man, the universities closed. He survived a heart attack in 1959 that left him, some thought, impaired, an invasion by exiles, and the anger of Washington, which cut aid in 1962 and put up with him thereafter as the alternative to another Cuba. The 1961 election gave him a second term by a vote of 1,320,748 to nothing, and the referendum of 1964 the presidency for life, with the ballot printed with only one answer. He published a catechism in which the Lord's Prayer was addressed to himself. When Kennedy died he claimed the credit. He died of heart disease and diabetes on 21 April 1971 and was given a state funeral at which, the story goes, a wind rose from the grave. The regime passed to Jean-Claude without a tremor, and the country he left was the poorest in the hemisphere.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 1971 CE
- Nationality: Haitian
- Roles: president, dictator
