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Jean-Claude Duvalier was born on July 3, 1951, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the son of Haitian president Francois Duvalier. When he was 19 years old his father died, and he took over as president, making him the youngest president in the world. Haiti, which was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest countries on the planet, had been ruled by the corrupt and murderous Francois since 1957. While Jean-Claude wasn't as brutal as his father, he was just as corrupt--it's been estimated that he stole between $300 million and $800 million from the country during his reign as president, and at one point the US Commerce Department reported that almost 65% of the country's revenues had "disappeared". Shortly after taking office Jean-Claude loosened the vise-like grip on the country that his father had exercised; he freed some political prisoners, eased government censorship of newspapers, TV and magazines and introduced some economic reforms. However, he did not liberalize the country's political situation, and no opposition to or disagreement with his rule was allowed. The country struggled along until 1985, when discontent with economic mismanagement, corruption and lack of political freedom erupted into demonstrations across much of the country. When government troops chasing protesters invaded a schoolyard and shot and killed three schoolchildren, the demonstrations across the country increased and many of them turned into riots. Duvalier's security forces, including the dreaded Tonton Macoutes secret police, were unable to quell the mounting unrest and in 1986, when the army demanded his abdication, he and his family fled to France. He left behind him a country with an 80% illiteracy rate, where almost nine out of ten people are unemployed, an infant mortality rate of more than 33%, a per-capita income of less than $300, a life expectancy of 53 years--the lowest in the Western Hemisphere--and a population racked by diseases that have been eradicated in most other countries. Things unfortunately haven't changed much since then.
