At the New York Times, "Jean-Claude Duvalier, ‘Baby Doc’ of Haiti, Dies at 63":
Jean-Claude Duvalier, a former president of Haiti known as Baby Doc who ruled the country with a bloody brutality and then shocked the country anew with a sudden return from a 25-year exile in 2011, died on Saturday.More.
Mr. Duvalier, 63, died of a heart attack at his home, his lawyer told The Associated Press. President Michel J. Martelly announced the death on Twitter.
Mr. Duvalier continued to defend what human rights workers called one of the most oppressive governments in the Western Hemisphere, following in the footsteps of his father, François, known as Papa Doc, who also died suddenly, in 1971. The son was 19 when he assumed the post “president for life,” as he and his father called it, becoming the youngest head of state at the time.
He never apologized for atrocities, including brutal crackdowns on opponents at the hands of the feared Tonton Macoutes, a civilian militia that left a thousand people, if not more, dead, disappeared or illegally detained in harsh prisons.
Indeed, he defended himself as victims of his government pursued cases in Haitian courts on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. Mr. Duvalier had appeared in court and calmly denied any wrongdoing and even asserted the country was better off when he ruled.
“Were there deaths and summary executions under your government?” a judge asked him at a hearing in March 2013.
“Deaths exist in all countries,” Mr. Duvalier replied almost inaudibly. “I didn’t intervene in the activities of the police.”
He regularly dined in restaurants in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and attended events at the invitation of Mr. Martelly, whose administration has included relatives and allies of people associated with Mr. Duvalier.
This year, his old political party announced that it would field candidates in elections and opened an office, though analysts were not sure if it was a serious move or a thumb in the eye of the rival he loathed and who succeeded him, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, another formerly exiled president who also returned and still is a political force.
Mr. Duvalier fled the country in 1986, as political repression and worsening economic conditions set off violent unrest in what was then and still is the hemisphere’s poorest country. He asked France for asylum and the United States for the plane that would take him there, an American official said at the time.
His departure set the stage for democratic, though tumultuous, elections. Human rights groups have said that he looted Haiti’s treasury of millions of dollars and has largely lived off ill-gotten gains ever since.
His presence in the country, and the fact that he will now escape trial, appalled victims and human rights workers.
“On Duvalier’s death I’m thinking of the look in my mother’s eyes when she talks about her brother Joel who was disappeared by that dictator,” Patrick Gaspard, a Haitian-American who is the American ambassador to South Africa, said on Twitter. “News of the passing of Duvalier makes me honor my father and generations of Haitians who resisted that vicious dictatorship.”
