Shut up and don’t ask questions, or risk torture and even death: Such was the life under former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, survivors recall.
Duvalier, who took office in 1971 at the tender age of 19 from his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, relied on thugs from the feared Tonton Macoutes to enforced the regime’s will.
Duvalier unexpectedly flew home on Jan. 16 after about 25 years in exile, throwing Haiti’s already volatile political scene into turmoil. The former “President for Life” ran the country with an iron fist until he was ousted by a popular revolt in 1986.
Liliane Pierre-Paul, a Haitian journalist, recalls the bleak life under Baby Doc.
“We didn’t have the right to protest or to gather, there was no freedom of speech or freedom of the press. We were under the regime’s full control,” Pierre-Paul said.
Reporters were muzzled, unions, student groups and political parties infiltrated by regime goons, she recalls. And yet it was not as bad as life under Papa Doc, who originally set up the Tonton Macoutes and ran Haiti between 1957 and 1971.
Children were taught to love the regime “from a very young age,” Pierre-Paul said. “All the children were conditioned. At school you could not say that you wanted to be president. If you said that your family would have problems.”
Under pressure from then-US president Jimmy Carter, Baby Doc was forced to soften the regime’s worst repressive policies and press restrictions were loosened.
“We took advantage of those openings to write stories,” said Pierre-Paul, despite pressure from the regime including police detention and legal summons.
However, the repression returned as soon as Carter left office. Pierre-Paul and other journalists with Radio Haiti were arrested and jailed.
“After five days, they created phony charges and accused me of being a terrorist,” she said.
Pierre-Paul was interrogated daily, tortured and sometimes forced to undress before prison guards.
After one month in prison she was expelled from Haiti.
“Politically, the regime was characterized by cracking down on all forms of opposition,” said Edouard Paultre, who was a student in the late 1970s.
“Summary executions, arbitrary detentions, kidnappings, disappearances ... the list of abuse is long,” said Paultre, who today is active in seeking to rebuild democracy in Haiti.
A prisoner’s worst fate was to be dragged off to Fort Dimanche — better known as Fort Death — a Port-au-Prince prison were inmates were routinely beaten and tortured.
The Tonton Macoutes “had the power of life or death over any citizen and their methods included murder, abduction, disappearances, private prisons, rape and torture,” said Gerard Alphonse Ferere, a professor emeritus of Saint Joseph University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ferere, who was jailed and persecuted by Papa Doc, fled to the US in the 1960s. Today his work includes compiling a list of the Duvalier victims which can be seen on the Internet at www.fordi9.com/Pages/Chronicle.html.
“This is just a drop in the ocean, since there are more than 30,000 victims,” Ferere said.
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