Jean-Claude Duvalier, who has died of a heart attack aged 63, became unwilling dictator of Haiti (and the world's youngest president) in 1971, when he was only 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 (who demanded to be president in his place), and then 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 until dying peacefully in bed. The name stuck and humiliation was ensured.
He 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 in an effort to keep afloat the murderous system his father had built.
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