In Haiti, former dictator ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier is thriving

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — For a once-notorious dictator facing charges of crimes against humanity, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier is living a nice life here after his sudden return from exile a year ago.

Although technically under house arrest, the former “president for life” dines with his many admirers at the chic bistros of Petionville, where he can be found at Quartier Latin, having his poulet creole. His faltering health has improved enough for a little red wine.

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For Boby Duval, a former prisoner at Fort Dimanche, the return of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier from exile in France is a leap backward as he tries to move past his imprisonment, when he watched 180 inmates die.

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 Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier became Haiti’s “president for life” at age 19. Take a look at some of the youngest leaders to have taken power, from Dominica’s prime minister to Bhutan’s dragon king.

His portrait, a very flattering one, is sold on the streets.

If money can be laundered, so can dictators. Duvalier was the commencement speaker last month at the law school in Gonaives, an appearance that the university’s president called “totally inconceivable.”

The students cheered.

Last week, Duvalier drove himself — with a police escort — to the government’s memorial ceremony to mark the second anniversary of Haiti’s cataclysmic earthquake. The audience, which included Haiti’s President Michel Martelly, his prime minister and former president Bill Clinton, rose to greet him.

Duvalier is back in Haiti, and it is very possible that he will never be tried for the crimes that his alleged victims and international human rights groups assert — forced disappearances, illegal detentions, intimidation, torture, and executions of journalists, activists, political opponents and others.

“I cannot believe my eyes,” said Boby Duval, who spent nine months in the mid-1970s in Fort Dimanche, one of three prisons known as “the triangle of death” during the long reign of the Duvalier family — father and son, Papa Doc and Baby Doc — and the Tontons Macoutes, their paramilitary enforcers and secret police.

Duval, a bear of a man who now runs a popular soccer academy for thousands of kids from the slums, entered the prison as a robust young athlete. He emerged weighing 100 pounds. “They didn’t kill you in Fort Dimanche,” he said. “They starved you to death. I watched people die of starvation. And you never knew, ‘When am I next?’ ”

Soon after Duvalier returned to Port-au-Prince in January 2011, after a 25-year exile in France, three cases were filed against him, alleging embezzlement of funds, human rights violations and crimes against humanity.

Although an older generation in Haiti recalls with a shudder the bad things that happened in the Duvalier years, many Haitians are nostalgic for the era, when the country was more prosperous, tourists were not afraid to come and Haiti was the world’s leading maker of baseballs.

More than 60 percent of the Haitian population is younger than 25, so they have no memory of Baby Doc’s reign, only stories of better days.

A life in power

Duvalier was a plump and pampered young man of 19 when he became “president for life” in 1971 after the death of his father, the far more ruthless Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who once worked as a physician.

The younger Duvalier and his then-wife, Michele Bennett, were famous for their luxurious lifestyle and shopping sprees. After the couple divorced in 1993, Duvalier endured a more modest exile, without the Ferrari or the mansion, living in a borrowed apartment, saying he was broke.