Jean-Claude Duvalier obituary

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.

"My father made the political revolution, I will make the economic revolution," they had him say. The new regime would be "Duvalierism reviewed, corrected and broadened" and the doctrine "Jean-Claudism". It was just talk, and Haitians remained without political freedom and Latin America's poorest citizens. The young president stood by as others killed and thieved in his name.

But things slowly began to change and the economy "stabilised" after a fashion, as tens of thousands of "offshore" factory jobs were created. Provincial roads were paved for the first time, mostly paid for by the US, still keen to use the ramshackle regime as a bulwark against communist Cuba next door. Spurred by the flight of economic refugees ("boat people") to the US in search of prosperity from the mid-1970s, and helped by power-struggles within the regime, opposition voices began to be heard and tolerated.

After five years of timid media dissidence, Duvalier made a serious and eventually fatal political error in 1980 by marrying into the light-skinned upper-class whose members his father had killed, arrested or otherwise subdued. When the dissidents spoke up against the extravagant ceremony – ominously held as a thunderstorm raged and turned the capital into a sea of mud – dozens of journalists and politicians were arrested and deported, and the "liberal" years were over. These had included legalisation of the first small political parties and rise of a popular radio station run by Catholic liberation theologians. Pope John Paul II even visited Haiti in 1983, frostily shaking Duvalier's hand and warning that "things must change here".

Duvalier's new wife, Michèle Bennett, expelled her mother-in-law, still the powerful official "first lady," from the presidential palace, and set about alienating all sides. The regime's militia, the Tontons Macoutes, was especially outraged by Duvalier's violation of the noiriste doctrines of his father – though Papa Doc had married into the same class. Duvalier Jr allowed his more sophisticated and energetic wife to dominate cabinet meetings and make and unmake ministers.

Haitians were scandalised by her shopping orgies in Paris. The deepening poverty and corruption was increasingly exposed by foreign media and the church's Radio Soleil. Food riots and looting broke out in 1984 and the regime's shooting of four schoolchildren in 1985 sealed the dictatorship's fate. Haitians were no longer afraid. Duvalier hastily offered political reforms, but had already lost control of the provinces.

Duvalier declared himself in a broadcast "still as strong as a monkey's tail" and a government statement maintained that "peace reigns throughout the country". I watched as the couple fled before dawn on 7 February 1986 (after a last defiant champagne party at the palace). Duvalier drove their Mercedes to the airport and a pre-arranged US government flight took them to Paris, where the French government had been persuaded by Washington to accept them.

Trailing Duvalier's old mother with them, they lived in opulent hotels and villas on the French Riviera, drawing on the $100m or so they had pillaged from state funds. Eventually Michèle left to live in Paris, taking with her their two children, Nico and Anya, and in 1993 they divorced. Duvalier's mother died, and, in his darkest days, relieved of most of his money, he lived for a time in a shed at the bottom of his father-in-law's suburban Paris garden.

He found a new companion, again an upper-class Haitian, and she and Duvalierist remnants in Haiti encouraged him to try for a political comeback. But despite some hankering for Duvalier-era "peace" amid the years-long chaos and killings that had followed his overthrow, his half-hearted statements came to nothing.

And then he got lucky, with the US-arranged election of the singer Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly, long a quiet Duvalier supporter, as president in 2011. After years of threats that he would be arrested if he tried to return, Duvalier was now able to go back to Haiti without any real risk. He made no attempt to return to power and lamely apologised for any hurt he said he might have caused his compatriots. He joined Martelly on the platform on several public occasions.

Formal legal procedures against him were begun, but a deeply corrupt judiciary ensured that he rarely appeared in court and never went to prison for the killings and theft he presided over. Almost to the end, he enjoyed the capital's luxury restaurants and night-life.

He is survived by Nico and Anya.