Dictator who inherited Haiti from his father

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, who has died aged 63, became unwilling dictator of Haiti (and the world's youngest president) in 1971, aged 19.

He cut a forlorn and sometimes comic figure for most of his life, manoeuvred by aides and bossed about by first his mother, Simone, and elder sister, Marie-Denise, and later his imperious wife.

In his early years of token power, he privately threatened to resign and flee, but was stopped. Amused foreign reporters dismissed him as “Baby Doc”, the son of his fearsome father, President François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who had terrorised Haiti for 15 years before dying peacefully in bed.

The name stuck and humiliation was ensured.

Jean-Claude Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. After a failed "kidnapping" of him and another sister as schoolchildren, the obese and gormless Jean-Claude, a poor student, was next heard of in 1971 when his ailing father named him as the country's next "president-for-life" and had him endorsed in a rigged referendum (2,391,916 to one, with two abstentions).

“This is the young man you have been waiting for,” his handlers gamely declared to Haiti’s starving citizens. “My father made the political revolution, I will make the economic revolution,” they had him say. But Haitians remained without political freedom and Latin America’s poorest citizens. The young president stood by as others killed and thieved in his name.

Bulwark against Cuba

But things slowly began to change and the economy “stabilised” after a fashion, as tens of thousands of “offshore” factory jobs were created. Provincial roads were paved for the first time, mostly paid for by the US, still keen to use the ramshackle regime as a bulwark against communist Cuba next door.

Spurred by the flight of economic refugees (“boat people”) to the US from the mid-1970s, and helped by power struggles within the regime, opposition voices began to be heard and tolerated.

After five years of timid media dissidence, Duvalier made a serious and eventually fatal political error in 1980 by marrying into the light-skinned upper class whose members his father had killed, arrested or otherwise subdued. When the dissidents spoke up against the extravagant ceremony – ominously held as a thunderstorm raged and turned the capital into a sea of mud – dozens of journalists and politicians were arrested and deported, and the “liberal” years were over.

Duvalier's new wife, Michele Bennett, expelled her mother-in-law from the presidential palace, and set about alienating all sides. The regime's militia, the Tontons Macoutes, was especially outraged by Duvalier's violation of the noiriste doctrines of his father - though in fact Papa Doc had married into the same class. Duvalier Jr allowed his more sophisticated wife to dominate cabinet meetings and make and unmake ministers.

Haitians were scandalised by her shopping orgies in Paris. The deepening poverty and corruption were increasingly exposed by foreign media and the church’s Radio Soleil. Food riots and looting broke out in 1984 and the regime’s shooting of four schoolchildren in 1985 sealed the dictatorship’s fate. Haitians were no longer afraid. Duvalier hastily offered political reforms, but had already lost control of the provinces.

Strong as a monkey’s tail

Duvalier declared himself in a broadcast “still as strong as a monkey’s tail” and a government statement maintained that “peace reigns throughout the country”. But after a final champagne party at the palace Duvalier drove the couple’s Mercedes to the airport and a US government flight took them to Paris.

Trailing Duvalier’s mother with them, they lived in opulent hotels and villas on the French Riviera, drawing on the $100 million or so they had pillaged. Eventually Michele left to live in Paris, taking with her their two children, Nico and Anya, and in 1993 they divorced.

Duvalier’s mother died, and, in his darkest days, relieved of most of his money, he lived for a time in a shed at the bottom of his father-in-law’s Paris garden.

With the US-arranged election of the singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, long a quiet Duvalier supporter, as president in 2011, the way was prepared for his return home, though he made no attempt to regain power and lamely apologised for “any hurt he might have caused”.

Formal legal procedures against him were begun, but a deeply corrupt judiciary ensured that he rarely appeared in court and never went to prison. Almost to the end, he enjoyed the capital’s luxury restaurants and nightlife.

He is survived by Nico and Anya.