Hexed President

HAITI Hexed President

Behind sandbag barricades and rifle-toting guards, Haiti's strong-willed President Francois Duvalier lay last week in his white palace, seriously ill of a heart attack. Out of fear that the truth would embolden opposition elements to start trouble, his aides stuck to a diagnosis of "grippe," but only succeeded in starting dangerous rumors--that Duvalier was paralyzed, was already dead, or had left the country. Superstitious blacks in the Port-au-Prince slums whispered that the President's ouangas (voodoo charms) had lost their power.

The attack, a moderately severe coronary occlusion, struck a fortnight ago, after Duvalier had worn himself out with a succession of 20-hour days at his desk. Just turned 50, he is also fighting diabetes and high blood pressure. To advise Duvalier's six doctors, U.S. Ambassador Gerald Drew brought in a U.S. Navy specialist in internal medicine from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and two diagnosticians from Manhattan. Drew called on the President, found him "in good spirits," complied with a presidential request for "some movies, including the one of President Eisenhower's inauguration."

But Duvalier, who has been running the country in one-man style, will be out of action for weeks, and his political enemies are using his illness in their war of nerves. The most effective method is a vicious appeal to voodoo believers, who are convinced that Duvalier is powerful because of ouangas that he planted about Port-au-Prince. As every practitioner of voodoo knows, the surest way to deprive a charm of its power is to apply human excrement. Last week the President's enemies went after what was supposed to be one of his strongest ouangas: the grave of his father, a tailor, who died last year. Grave robbers pried open the above-ground family tomb in Port-au-Prince's cemetery, hauled out the coffin, defiled the body. The outrage was kept secret from the bedridden President.

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