François Duvalier Biography

François Duvalier

(Port-au-Prince, 1907-1971) Haitian politician, President of the Republic from 1957 until his death.The son of a family with few resources, he managed to study medicine, a discipline in which he graduated in 1934.He entered the San Francisco de Sales hospital as an intern and later, having been appointed doctor, opened a consultation at the Emilie Séguineau clinic , in the vicinity of Port-au-Prince.

François Duvalier

In the 1940s he was responsible for combating the pineapple plague in the country, with such success that the Committee on Inter-American Affairs selected with a score of Haitian doctors to attend a course in public health at the University of Michigan.In 1946 he joined the Movement of Workers and Peasants (MOP), which played a leading role in the overthrow of President Elie Lescot.

Duvalier reached a political position that elevated him to the post of director of the Health Service in 1946 and later to that of Undersecretary of State for Labor (1948) and Minister of Labor (1949) with President Dumarsais Estimé.In these years of silent political execution, he achieved notoriety as an intellectual scholar of voodoo, a subject that focused his ethnographic research.

Paul Magloire's military coup in 1950 returned him to his former position as a doctor in the North American health mission but his political activities drove him into hiding from December 1954 to August 1956.He successfully ran in the presidential elections of September 22, 1957, which ended a chaotic one-year period in which six presidents.On October 22, he took the oath of office.

Duvalier established a personalist dictatorship based on the exaltation of blackness and voodoo, resorting to political terror through the tonton-macoutes (a word that designates the traveling voodoo magician, more literally the 'bogeyman'), a paramilitary group recruited from the subproletariat and the uprooted peasantry.On April 30, 1961, before his term expired, he was considered reelected for six more years through unconstitutional elections, and on April 1, 1964, he had himself proclaimed president for life, a condition in which he was confirmed on June 14; eight days later he took office.

He insisted on his providential character and dressed himself with a supernatural and personalistic aura (which is why he liked to be called 'Papa Doc').His alleged powers to escape immune to the numerous attacks, guerrilla invasions and coup attempts sponsored by Cuba, the Dominican Republic or the United States, he attributed to a divine and magical origin.A "revolutionary catechism" was even published with profane prayers of Duvalier deification.Upon his death on April 21, 1971, his son Jean-Claude Duvalier was proclaimed president in accordance with the provisions of succession, which made Haiti the only hereditary republic in the world.

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