History of papa doc duvalier

&#;He was four when a revolution ousted [Gerenal Antoine Simon],&#; recalled Bernard Dierderich and Al Burt in their study Papa Doc, &#;and five when an explosion reduced the old wooden Palais National and President Cincinnatus Leconte along with it to splinters.

&#;Duvalier was six when President Tancrède Auguste was poisoned; his funeral was interrupted when two generals began fighting over his succession… One Michel Oreste got the job, but he was overthrown the following year by a man named Zamor, who in turn fell a year later to Davilmar Theodore.&#;

Plagued by chronic political instability, when the populist François &#;Papa Doc&#; Duvalier was elected president of the Republic of Haiti on 22 October you could have been forgiven for thinking that the crisis-rocked Caribbean state was about to turn a corner.

Forget that in some regions the number of pro-Duvalier votes returned were in excess of the actual population