Even before Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the US Ambassador to the Dominican Republic warned that Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s return to Haiti would be “unhelpful.” A February 2006 cable –published on The Guardian’s website– quotes the Foreign Minister of the Dominican Republic telling the US Ambassador that, “Anti-Duvalier Haitians might seek revenge, even after 20 years.” Today’s hot documents show why.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 220, which stated, “The flight of Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] Duvalier from Haiti has created an opportunity to break the pattern of Hatian history.” By almost all accounts, Baby Doc’s [1971 to 1986] reign –though bad– was less bloody than that of his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier [1957-1971].
According to a 1970 US Interdepartmental National Security Study Memorandum, “Many of [Papa Doc’s] acts have seemed deliberately calculated affronts to Western human values.” The affronts included: “the wanton killing of entire families…the wholesale elimination of villages…the stealing of [a rival’s] corpse at a funeral; the beating of worshipers inside of Port-au-Prince cathedral; the forced attendance of school children at a public execution…the public display of a rotting corpse on Port-au-Prince’s main thoroughfare; the delivery of the severed heads of his enemies to Duvalier; [and] the forcing of his son-in-law Max Dominique to take part in the execution of his friends.” (more…)
