Francois "Baby Doc" Duvalier (14 April 1907-21 April 1971) was the President of Haiti from 1957 to 1971, succeeding Antonio Thrasybule Kebreau and preceding his son Jean-Claude Duvalier. He was notoriously cruel, leading the Tonton Macoute terrorist secret police.
Biography[]
Francois Duvalier was born on 14 April 1907 in Port-au-Prince, and he was 8 years old when the United States invaded Haiti. He became a doctor and was made the Minister of Health and Minister of Labor of Haiti in 1946. In 1949 General Paul Magloire ousted President Dumarsais Estime and imposed a military regime, and Duvalier went into hiding to avoid being killed.
When Magloire resigned in 1956, a series of provisional governments took power. Duvalier gained the support of the Haitian Army in a power struggle with Louis Dejoie, a mulatto landowner who gained the support of the people to become president. However, Duvalier took over power in 1957 and purged all of Dejoie's supporters. In 1958 he crushed a coup against him by the army and made the black majority the rulers of all of Haiti; however, he was responsible for clearing out the General Staff and appointing only those loyal to him in high posts. He also put down a United States-supported coup that year and in 1959 founded the Tonton Macoute, a secret police named for the Creole bogeyman. His men would kidnap opposition activists in their sleep and kill or torture them, and he was excommunicated by the Vatican City for not only these activities, but also for evicting all foreign bishops from Haiti. Duvalier replaced the Catholic religion with a cult of personality and with voodoo rituals, and he claimed that he had cursed President John F. Kennedy before his 1963 assassination. However, the United States supported him because of his support for anti-communist forces, as he hated Cuba. He tried to soften relations with Cuba by sending doctors to Cuba to help people, but Fidel Castro continued his support of anti-Duvalier Haitian dissidents that fled to Cuba.
In 1971, Francois died of natural causes. His son Jean-Claude Duvalier became the next President of Haiti.