A lot of people inside and outside Haiti would firmly disagree. The younger Duvalier left the country amid allegations of abject corruption and human-rights violations committed during his 15-year rule. No self-respecting politician in Haiti today professes any allegiance to him, and the Bush administration doesn’t want him to come back any time soon. “We would view the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier as a negative development for Haiti and the region,” said a U.S. State Department official last week. His return would have been unthinkable under Aristide, whose political career began as an outspoken opponent of the Duvalier regime in the 1980s, when the future president was still a Roman Catholic priest in the capital of Port-au-Prince. But in the aftermath of Aristide’s fall from power, some mainstream politicians no longer dismiss the idea. “I have no problem with Duvalier coming back,” says Marc Bazin, a retired World Bank official and former presidential candidate who broke with Baby Doc after briefly serving as his Finance minister in 1982. “If we’re going to look for consensus and reconciliation, we can’t keep those people out.”
Any decision to allow Duvalier back into the country would have to be made by Gerard Latortue, an ex-foreign minister and a former U.N. official who was appointed interim prime minister last month to guide Haiti through its post-Aristide transition. Latortue has yet to voice any opinion on the matter, but there appear to be no legal impediments barring the return of Duvalier, who was granted asylum by the French government when he fled Haiti. Attorneys working for the Aristide government prepared a case against Duvalier on charges of stealing state funds, but it never came to trial.
Now 52, Duvalier walks with a stiff gait. His height and gray-flecked hair give him the appearance of a distinguished diplomat. He lives outside Paris and is reportedly strapped for cash, despite the fact that he was recently included among the world’s 10 most corrupt former chiefs of state by the Berlin-based watchdog organization Transparency International. The group believes that Duvalier looted between $300 million and $800 million from the Haitian Treasury, putting him in sixth place, behind Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Baby Doc shrugs off such charges. “They had all the time in the world to take legal action against me from Haiti,” he says. “Nothing was done.” (That may not hold true in Aristide’s case: the country’s Justice minister last week announced plans to seek his extradition from Jamaica to stand trial on charges of corruption and human-rights abuses.)
What does linger, remarkably, is a certain nostalgia for the Duvalier era–at least when it comes to living conditions. In the 1980s, foreign tourists visited Haiti, the inflation rate was lower and the economy actually grew at an annual rate of nearly 5 percent during one five-year period. According to a survey of 600 Haitian residents of the United States conducted by the Miami pollster Sergio Bendixen in mid-February, 56 percent believe that Haiti’s political and economic situation was better under the Duvaliers–four times the number who favored Aristide’s rule. Still, Robert Fatton Jr., a professor and Haiti expert at the University of Virginia, says that Duvalier’s return would set a very bad precedent, perhaps prompting other former strongmen–including Raoul Cedras, who ruled between 1991 to 1994 and now lives in Panama, and convicted mass murderer Emmanuel Constant, now living in Queens, New York–to try to return. “The current government doesn’t want to see any of those characters back,” said Fatton. “If they let one in, it would be difficult to deny the others.”
A special U.N. envoy said last week it could take as long as 18 months to organize the new presidential election. That would give the dapper dictator time to try to muster some support. “I still have a lot of friends in the country,” he says. He also has no shortage of enemies, including relatives of victims murdered by the brutal Tonton Macoutes militias, whom Duvalier inherited from his father, as well as angry Aristide partisans who have held onto their rifles and wouldn’t mind taking out their deposed hero’s original archenemy. They could be a compelling reason for Jean-Claude Duvalier to stay out of politics, if he does return to his native land one day.
