
Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier (3 July 1951-4 October 2014) was the President of Haiti from 1971 to 1986, succeeding his father Francois Duvalier and preceding Henri Namphy.
Biography[]
Jean-Claude Duvalier was born on 3 July 1951 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the son of future president Francois Duvalier and his wife Simone Ovide. He was of Mulatto (part French, part African) descent. At the age of six, Jean-Claude saw his father take power as President of Haiti. When his father died in April 1971, "Baby Doc" became the new president at the age of 19. His father's dictatorship continued under his son, and hundreds of thousands of Haitians were killed, tortured, imprisoned, or evicted from the counry under Duvalier's corrupt rule. His wedding cost $3,000,000, showing his notoriously lavish lifestyle. He sold drugs and dismembered body parts to other countries to make an illegal source of income, and eventually people grew tired of his reign of terror. In 1986, a popular uprising overthrew him. He pled not guilty during a 2013 United Nations trial on him for war crimes, but he died in 2014 of a heart attack before any decision could be reached.