Birth of Bernard Diederich, who founded the Haiti Sun and named Papa Doc’s terror

Bernard Diederich was born at Christchurch, New Zealand, on 18 July 1926. He went to sea at sixteen, and a sailing trip in 1949 dropped him in Haiti; he stayed. In Port-au-Prince he founded and edited the Haiti Sun, an English-language weekly, and stringed for the Associated Press, the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. In 1963 Francois Duvalier had him jailed and expelled. He kept writing about Haiti anyway, and with Al Burt produced Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoutes, still the standard account of the regime. He died at his home in Freres, Port-au-Prince, on 14 January 2020, aged 93.