Jean-Claude Duvalier, Ex-Haitian Leader Known as Baby Doc, Dies at 63
The Death of an Evil Man
I try not to speak ill of the dead, but some men’s evil can not go by unremarked. The Duvaliers were both monsters of a scale that none but their collective victims can truly imagine. The massive human misery and suffering they caused makes it impossible to heed the maxim about the dead because there is nothing but bad things to say about either papa doc or baby doc Duvalier.
Jean-Claude Duvalier, the second-generation “president for life” who plunged one of the world’s poorest countries into further despair by presiding over widespread killing, torture and plunder, died Oct. 4 at his home in Port-au-Prince. He was 63.
He had a heart attack, his lawyer, Reynold George, told the Associated Press.
Despite a brief, hopeful window when it appeared that the overweight, overwhelmed dauphin might liberalize the country, the younger Duvalier soon followed in his father’s violent footsteps. Tens of thousands of Haitians were killed under the regimes, with many more tortured, according to human-rights groups.
Jean-Claude Duvalier maintained his father’s well-established terror apparatus — most notably the Tontons Macoutes, the shadowy militia whose name means “bogeymen” — and added new techniques for skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from the national treasury.
More: Jean-Claude Duvalier, Ex-Haitian Leader Known as Baby Doc, Dies at 63