ON February 7,1986, the day the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle Bennett, flew off to exile in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery, a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory and turquoise and rose—  bearing the names of Haiti’s great families. At the surprisingly modest memorial of François Duvalier, Jean-Claude’s father, who had ruled from 1957 to 1971, the crowd converged, extinguished the eternal flame, swarmed over the white brick structure, and began pounding on it frenziedly with thousands of stones. Within minutes, the tomb had been reduced to a dusty ruin — a crumpled roof balanced precariously on four battered struts. But when the doors of the vault beneath were finally ripped open, it seemed as if the great dictator, fifteen years dead, had played a final joke on his poor Haitians: the tomb was empty. Some said that the son had made room for his father aboard the plane filled with expensive luggage, others that Papa Doc had never been buried there at all; still others sim…

Read the full text of this article in Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War.