SO many of the scenes from this earthquake have reminded me of the early days.  I first stepped onto the broad central square that was the heart of the Haitian government on the morning of Feb. 7, 1986. Just hours earlier, when it was still night, I’d seen Jean-Claude Duvalier, heir to his father’s dictatorship, flee the country with his wife, children and mother, driving a BMW sedan down the airport road and taking it onto a United States cargo plane bound for France. He’d left so late that I was exhausted when dawn came, but still we all descended on the sprawling plaza to see what the new day would bring. Haiti’s experiment with democracy had begun, sort of.  Without Mr. Duvalier, Haiti was a new country, or so we imagined, and so the Haitians imagined, too, initially. That Feb. 7, 24 years ago today, belonged to the Haitian people, and they paraded by the tens of thousands into the square. Here they were surrounded by the structures of Haitian government: the palace, first of all, and the Duvaliers’ paralytic, underutilized Justice Ministry, and so many other municipal buildings that had been filled with rot and corruption. Down the people flocked, carrying freshly cut branches in their upraised fists like symbols of a new life. With the dynasty at last evicted, the Haitian state could finally rise to its mission  to serve the Haitian people.  The Haitians hadn’t just gotten rid of Baby Doc, after all. They’d also begun to expunge the legacy of his father, François Duvalier, a far more important historical figure than Jean-Claude. Papa Doc, who died in 1971 and bequeathed the country to his feckless 19-year-old son, had ruled for 14 long years as an old-fashioned dictator. He used the apparatus of the state to sweep away his enemies, to spy on opposition leaders and to murder perceived and actual rivals, their families, their maids, their dogs. He left corpses on street corners to rot, burned down houses, sometimes with the residents locked inside, lied without shame to foreign officials and the press and shut down all speech at home. He patrolled the countryside with a network of underlings and thugs.  With his ultraviolent rule, Papa Doc set a tone for Haitian governance that has been copied since, but never quite duplicated. Still, his regime was based not just on violence but also on ideology. He’d come to power as a noiriste, an advocate for black power in a country where black power had a singular meaning: to end the rule of Haiti’s mulatto elite, which had been in control of the country’s economy and cosmopolitan life for more than a century, and whose hegemony had been strengthened by the United States during its military occupation from 1915 to 1934.  Papa Doc wanted what the elite had, literally (houses, bank accounts, businesses, land, status), and black power was the ideology he used to justify his depredations. He was the Midas of corruption, though, and noirisme in Haiti was undone by his rule. Although the dark-skinned middle class was empowered during his regime, by the time his son was overthrown (taking his light-skinned and controversial wife with him), most of that class was also eager to see the end of Duvalierism. The family’s rigid kleptocracy had further impoverished and isolated Haiti, and everyone wanted out. (And the story continues: Last week, a Swiss court agreed to release more than $4 million in no doubt ill-gotten gains to Jean-Claude Duvalier.)  The fervor of that February morning nearly a quarter-century ago flooded into the days and weeks that followed, and a kind of ad hoc movement emerged from the people’s desire for change and a new social order. Off the people tramped: to the offices of Ernest Bennett, Jean-Claude’s father-in-law (a BMW distributor, interestingly). To the Duvaliers’ “country” house on the side of the mountain above Port-au-Prince. To the homes of Duvalierist officials, supporters, enforcers. To the headquarters of the Tontons Macoute, the Duvaliers’ secret police.  Amy Wilentz, who teaches journalism at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier.
On this day in 1986, the Duvaliers left Haiti. But the departure of an ultraviolent rule couldn’t uproot the impoverished nation’s longstanding political culture.