François Duvalier

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François Duvalier (1968)

François Duvalier , also called Papa Doc (* probably April 14, 1907 in Port-au-Prince ; † April 21, 1971 there ), was a Haitian politician and dictator. Duvalier took office as President of Haiti on October 22, 1957. After surviving an attempted coup in mid-1958, he first eliminated his political opponents in the armed forces and subsequently did everything to either get the military as a power factor in Haiti under his complete control or to eliminate it. Duvalier enacted a new constitution and then won the 1961 election with the official final result of 1.32 million votes for Duvalier with not a single vote against. Duvalier's regime held the country under control until his death. He appointed his 19-year-old son Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc”) as his successor.

Life

Youth and political career

François Duvalier was born in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. His exact date of birth can only be roughly determined due to insufficient records. His father, who earned his living as a teacher and judge, let him attend the Lycée Pétion high school.

Duvalier before studying in Port-au-Prince medicine and practiced mainly in the rural areas of Haiti as a doctor , traveled through the province and received in this way insight into the life of the rural population and the importance of voodoo for their everyday life. He was very popular in his country clinic as he made valuable contributions in the fight against typhoid , yaws and other serious diseases. He married Simone Ovide in 1939 and became director general of the National Health Service in 1946 as part of a US-funded anti-disease program.

In 1949 he became Minister of Health and Labor . After he joined the coup of Paul Magloire had opposed, he had to go into hiding until 1956 amnesty was adopted.

Seizure of power

After the military withdrew from political life, presidential elections were held in 1957 . Most of the candidates used improper means during the election campaign to manipulate the outcome of the election. While the other candidates were able to stir up various sections of the population to strike and protest marches through their influence, François Duvalier was no exception: he had influence over the union of truck and bus drivers and was able to paralyze traffic all over Haiti as he saw fit. After all the others - with the exception of one other candidate - had given up prematurely, Duvalier, generally regarded as a puppet of the military, won the elections on September 22, 1957 with over 70% of the votes cast. Although there were certain irregularities in this election, none prevailed Doubts that the election result corresponded to the will of the citizens.

Consolidation of Power

Duvalier took office as President of Haiti on October 22, 1957. After surviving an attempted coup on July 28, 1958 , he first eliminated his political opponents in the armed forces and then did everything to either get the military as a power factor in Haiti under his complete control or to eliminate it. After a few years, through a personnel policy that assigned all key posts to his confidants and filled the command posts in quick succession, he succeeded in politically subordinating the armed forces completely to the leadership of the state. In order to prevent further coups against himself, he moved the arsenal of the military to the presidential palace (a daring step, after all, the presidential palace, which had been misused as an arsenal, had already been blown up once in Haitian history). A presidential guard was also responsible for his personal protection.

Above all, however, he and Clément Barbot (whom he had immediately killed when he tried to use this instrument against Duvalier himself) created their own militia in 1959 , known as the VSN (Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale), to exercise power outside the capital to secure. The members of this troop were feared in Haiti as the Tontons Macoutes (with the Tonton Macoute, the "uncle ogre" or "uncle with the sack", who puts children in his sack and takes them with him, one threatens disobedient young children in Haiti). Because the lower classes of this group did not receive official pay, the Tontons Macoutes, who numbered thousands in the early 1960s, had to make a living through criminal activities such as extortion.

Duvalier enacted a new constitution and then won the election on April 30, 1961 with the official final result of 1.32 million votes for Duvalier without a single vote against. The New York Times then judged this to be the greatest electoral fraud in Latin American history.

Duvalier based his power on the black lower and middle classes, whom he both promoted against the Mulatto upper class and used on occasion as leverage - for example, when the Mulatto business owners, for the purpose of destabilizing "Papa Docs" rule, were preparing to open their shops for them to close for a number of days, after which Duvalier gave up the shops for looting. He exploited the voodoo belief of the poor for his own purposes by having it spread that he was the death spirit Baron Samedi , a loa (voodoo spirit) living in cemeteries , and that supernatural powers protect him. In all of this, he did not effectively support the black middle class: Because of the ubiquitous corruption and the lack of any perspective, Haiti experienced a downright flight of talent during his tenure through a veritable exodus of Haitian academics .

Duvalier ran a campaign against the opposition communists , in which they were either forced into exile or murdered. On April 28, 1969, Duvalier passed a law that classifies “communist activities of any kind” as crimes against state security. This was the death penalty.

Duvalier had the no fewer than nine overthrow attempts during his term of office suppressed with brutal violence; his retaliatory attacks sometimes cost many more innocent lives than those who were actually guilty. Within the country, Duvalier instigated numerous political assassinations carried out by the Tonton Macoutes and made his rivals disappear . It is estimated that 30,000 people fell victim to the repressive regime. Attacks on Duvalier from the ranks of the military were taken particularly seriously. When bombs exploded near the Presidential Palace in 1967, 20 members of the Presidential Guard were executed .

On June 22, 1964 Duvalier was officially president for life and maintained a cult of personality through the erection of monuments and memorials . The colors of the Haitian flag were temporarily changed from blue-red to black-red in homage to the "black revolution" he embodied. Duvalier compared himself one after the other with Lenin , Jesus Christ and Jean-Jacques Dessalines - the Haitian founder and emperor of Haiti from 1804 to 1806 - and saw himself as the embodiment of Haiti himself ( “Je suis le drapeau haïtien, une et indivisible” - “I am the banner of Haiti, one and indivisible ”). Like some of his predecessors, Duvalier had rumors spread that he might want to reintroduce the monarchy with an emperor .

Corruption allegations

Duvalier was put under pressure by John F. Kennedy for corruption allegations and for his image as a bloodthirsty dictator, also because Duvalier had expressed his intention on various occasions at the beginning of his tenure to lean closer to the USSR , and also because Duvalier the Pan- supported. Relief supplies were no longer officially sent to Haiti in 1962. However, other donors, such as the UN , did not make their financial support dependent on the question of Duvalier's bloodthirstiness or propensity for corruption and did not consistently monitor the whereabouts of the funds, which is why most of it ended up in numbered accounts abroad. After Kennedy's death, the relationship between Duvalier and the US government changed , which supported him from now on.

Duvalier, who was considered a prime example of a kleptocrat , viewed the state as his private property. That included the residents: Duvalier undertook to conclude an agreement with the President of the Dominican Republic , Joaquín Balaguer , according to which 20,000 Haitian seasonal workers in the Dominican Republic worked annually on unbearable conditions for starvation wages, a good part of which went directly to Duvalier. This practice was often perceived and referred to as modern slavery abroad.

When Duvalier came up with the plan to create a Haitian Brasília outside Port-au-Prince called Duvalierville , he was extremely inventive in finding new sources of taxation. Numerous other monopolies were united on the state tobacco company, which Duvalier also plundered for private purposes. Compliance with these monopolies as well as tax collection was ensured by the Tonton Macoutes . From Duvalierville some building ruins remained in the jungle as well as a further enrichment of Duvalier, who had conceived the project Duvalierville possibly only as a pretext for further cupping of his subjects.

Conflict with the Dominican Republic

In April 1963, Haiti narrowly escaped attack by its neighboring state, the Dominican Republic. After an attack on two of his children, Duvalier incited the Tonton Macoutes against anyone who seemed suspicious to him. One of the suspects escaped to the embassy of the Dominican Republic , which Duvalier then wanted to storm. Juan Bosch , the Dominican president , immediately threatened military intervention. Bosch, who kept up the pressure on Haiti and, at his invitation, allowed American warships to cruise off the Haitian coast, almost induced Duvalier to flee into exile. Fortunately for Duvalier, Bosch was soon overthrown in a military coup in Santo Domingo .

death

Duvalier's regime held the country under control until his death in early 1971. His 19-year-old son Jean-Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc") was his successor, shortly before he had lowered the minimum age for a president from 40 to 20 years. In a referendum , the population voted in favor of Jean-Claude Duvalier as his successor with an official 2,391,916 yes votes, without a single vote against. The rule of the son was also secured by the fact that Duvalier reached consensus with the outside powers on the succession. After “Papa Docs” death, US warships cruised off the Haitian coast to prevent exiled Haitian opposition groups from overthrowing the dictatorship. Inside, Luckner Cambronne ensured the smooth transition of power from father to son.

See also

literature

Fiction presentation:

Web links

Commons : François Duvalier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl, Michael Heinl: Written in blood. The story of the Haitian people, 1492-1995 . University Press of America, Lanham 1996, ISBN 0-7618-0229-0 , p. 538.
  2. ^ Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl, Michael Heinl: Written in blood. The story of the Haitian people, 1492-1995 , p. 548.
  3. ^ Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl, Michael Heinl: Written in blood. The story of the Haitian people, 1492-1995 , pp. 567-570.
  4. ^ Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl, Michael Heinl: Written in blood. The story of the Haitian people, 1492-1995 , pp. 585-586.
  5. ^ François Duvalier Biography. In: Encyclopedia of World Biography. Retrieved February 3, 2018 .
  6. ^ Stephanie Hanes: Jean-Claude Duvalier, ex-Haitian leader known as Baby Doc, dies at 63. In: Washington Post . October 4, 2014, accessed February 3, 2018 .
  7. ^ Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Haiti. Chapter IV. In: Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. December 13, 1979, accessed February 3, 2018 .
  8. HAITI / SUCCESSION: Spirit of the Father . In: Der Spiegel . No. April 18 , 1971 ( spiegel.de [accessed September 30, 2018]).
  9. IMDB: The Comedians' Hour
predecessor Office successor
Antonio Thrasybule Kebreau President of Haiti
October 22, 1957–21. April 1971
Jean-Claude Duvalier
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 21, 2005 .