History Spotlight, 2/7

President Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is overthrown and flees Haiti ending 28 years of single family rule on this day in 1986. Baby Doc was actually progressive and lenient compared to his father, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, but that' not saying much.
Papa Doc started out pretty good - as good as it gets for someone born in poverty in Haiti in the early part of the 20th Century. His father was a justice of the peace and his mother was confined to a mental institution (put "early 20th Century Haitian asylum" on my list of places not to go) so he was mostly raised by his aunt. He got a medical degree from the University of Haiti and spent a year studying public health issues at the University of Michigan. When he returned to Haiti, he was a prominent figure in the campaign against the tropical diseases that ravaged the island.
During that period, Haiti went through a succession of brutal, incompetent, just plain nasty US-backed puppet rulers. This instilled in Papa Doc the two main ideals that would guide his life: first, the black majority, rather than the wealthier mulatto minority, are an untapped well of power and second, the US is evil, unless they're on your side. He became active in the black pride movement and studied voodoo, Haiti's native religion.
In 1956, the president Paul Magloire resigned the presidency and Baby Doc ran for the office in an election widely seem as stolen. Drawing on his study of voodoo, Baby Doc modeled his image on that of Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of death. He almost always wore sunglasses to hid his eyes and often spoke with the high, nasally voice of Baron Samedi.
In 1958, he successfully put down a coup attempt and, in 1961, he had the country's constitution amended to make him president for life. He also weakened the power of the army (they had been behind the coup attempt) and started his own secret police force called the Tonton Macoutes, after the voodoo bogeyman. The Tonton Macoutes didn't get paid, as such - their salary was wholly derived from crime and extortion. As you might imagine, they got very good at it.
When he died in 1971, his 19-year old son, Jean-Claude became president. Baby Doc never really wanted to be president. He was perfectly happy being a wealthy playboy on his father's (or rather, the people of Haiti's) dime and mostly left the day-to-day operations of the county to his mother and a hand-picked cadre of old line Papa Doc cronies (known as the dinosaurs). Baby Doc made of couple of mostly symbolic gestures such as releasing a couple of political prisoners and easing up on press censorship. But mostly he raided the treasury. All during this time things were getting worse in Haiti. Baby Doc had squandered the political goodwill he had received when he ascended the throne and then he went and made it worse by marrying a light-skinned mulatto woman, Michele Bennet Pasquet. Papa Doc's power base had been built on black pride from the dark skinned people and when Baby Doc married a mulatto, the black people of Haiti saw that as a betrayal of his father's ideals. Not helping was the extravagant, $3 million price tag of the wedding. Also not helping was the fact that the bride's family had notoriously shifty dealing that revolted the populace, like selling Haitian cadavers to foreign medical schools.
When an outbreak of swine fever virus nearly destroyed the pig population of the island (many people had their one pig as an investment) and the AIDS virus rampaged, completely unchecked, people felt desperate. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited the island and called for democratic and social reforms. A groundswell of revolt started in the clergy and spread to the laymen. Two years later, in 1986, a revolution started in the rural areas and quickly spread to the cities. By February, he had fled the country for France, where he still lives today in a one bedroom apartment in Paris.