Jean-Claude Duvalier — “Baby Doc,” who inherited a dictatorship at 19 and lost it at 34

Before dawn on 7 February 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier — “Baby Doc,” the president-for-life of Haiti — drove to the airport outside Port-au-Prince and boarded a United States Air Force cargo plane bound for France. With him went his wife, members of his family, and a circle of associates, and, according to investigators, a large share of a fortune drained from one of the world’s poorest countries. His flight, arranged with American help, ended fifteen years of his own rule and twenty-nine years of dynastic dictatorship by the Duvalier family. As news of his departure spread, Haitians poured into the streets in celebration, and some turned on the symbols and enforcers of the regime.

Jean-Claude Duvalier had not earned his power; he had inherited it. His father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, a country doctor who became president in 1957 and then president-for-life, had ruled Haiti through terror, voodoo mystique, and a private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, that murdered and intimidated his opponents. When Papa Doc died in April 1971, the office passed to his son, then just 19 years old — the youngest non-royal head of state in the world, installed by a referendum that allowed no opposition.

For a time the heir governed lightly, leaving affairs to his late father’s advisers and his own mother while he lived as a playboy. The machinery of repression remained: the Tonton Macoutes, by the 1980s some 15,000 strong, continued to enforce loyalty through fear. But the regime’s foundations rotted. Corruption on a grand scale, the looting of the treasury, a stagnant economy, and external shocks — including a US-pressured slaughter of the peasantry’s pigs and the collapse of tourism — deepened Haiti’s poverty and despair, while Duvalier’s lavish lifestyle, crowned by a multimillion-dollar wedding in 1980, advertised the regime’s indifference.

By 1985 the country had had enough. Protests over hunger, unemployment, and repression spread from the provinces to the capital and would not be put down. The security forces wavered, the United States withdrew its support, and in February 1986 Duvalier fled into a French exile that lasted twenty-five years. He returned to Haiti in 2011 and died in 2014, never convicted of the regime’s crimes. His victims — the tortured, the disappeared, the impoverished — were left to a country the Duvaliers had hollowed out.