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2011-01-16

2011-01-16: (Jean-Claude Duvalier Returns to Haiti After Twenty-Five Years in Exile, Charged With Corruption by a Haitian Magistrate but Allowed to Return to…

Haitian

2011-01-16: (Jean-Claude Duvalier Returns to Haiti After Twenty-Five Years in Exile, Charged With Corruption by a Haitian Magistrate but Allowed to Return to His Hotel, the Dictator’s Homecoming a Test of Whether Haiti Could Confront Its Past): On January 16, 2011, Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti after twenty-five years of exile in France. He was charged with corruption by a Haitian magistrate but was allowed to return to his hotel rather than being detained. The return was a provocation that tested whether Haiti’s fragile democratic institutions could hold a former dictator accountable. Two months later, on March 18, 2011, Aristide and his family returned from exile in South Africa, two former presidents whose opposing legacies encompassed the entire arc of post-Duvalier Haitian politics: the dictator and the democrat, the oppressor and the liberator, both back on the same island, both uncharged with the crimes their opponents attributed to them, both reminders that Haitian history did not resolve itself neatly into heroes and villains.