Haiti's Papa Doc began as a doctor fighting tropical disease among the poor
In the 1940s, François Duvalier treated Haitians suffering from typhus, yaws and malaria, and grateful patients nicknamed him Papa Doc. He kept that affectionate name for life. Yet as president he became one of the Caribbean's most feared dictators, ruling through a secret militia so pervasive that people dreaded voicing dissent even at home.
Born in Port-au-Prince in 1907, Duvalier qualified in medicine in 1934 and studied public health for a year at the University of Michigan. The American occupation of Haiti, which began in 1915, left him with a lasting sense of racial grievance. He embraced black nationalism and the négritude ideas of the writer Jean Price-Mars, and studied Vodou as an ethnologist, knowledge that later served him politically. He rose to become health minister in the late 1940s before going into hiding under the Magloire regime.
In 1957 he won the presidency on a populist platform, casting his rival, the mulatto industrialist Louis Déjoie, as a symbol of the light-skinned elite resented by the black majority; even then, witnesses reported fraud and intimidation. After a failed 1958 invasion by exiled officers and American mercenaries, he distrusted the army, purged its high command and built rival forces. Chief among them was a militia known as the Tonton Macoute, named after a bogeyman of Haitian folklore, which by 1961 outnumbered the army two to one and eventually reached 300,000.
Elections became theatre. A 1961 vote extending his rule recorded over 1.3 million yes votes and not one against, and in 1964 another referendum, with ballots premarked yes, made him president for life with power to name his successor. He wove Vodou imagery into a personality cult and was excommunicated after expelling most foreign-born bishops. A massive 1959 heart attack, possibly from an insulin overdose, left him comatose for nine hours, and his doctor suspected lasting neurological damage. Later, told that a fugitive rival had turned himself into a black dog, he reportedly ordered black dogs across Haiti killed.
Relations with Washington swung with Cold War priorities. The Kennedy administration cut most aid in 1962 over repression and missing funds, but after 1963 the United States grudgingly accepted him as an anti-communist bulwark. He diverted millions in foreign aid to personal accounts. Duvalier died in office in 1971, handing power to his son Jean-Claude, known as Baby Doc.
Source: François Duvalier
