In Haiti, former dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier is thriving His portrait, a very flattering one, is sold on the streets. If money can be laundered, so can dictators. Duvalier was the commencement speaker last month at the law school in Gonaives, an appearance that the university's president called "totally inconceivable." The students cheered. Last week, Duvalier drove himself - with a police escort - to the government's memorial ceremony to mark the second anniversary of Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake. The audience, which included Haiti's President Michel Martelly, his prime minister and former president Bill Clinton, rose to greet him. Duvalier is back in Haiti, and it is very possible that he will never be tried for the crimes that his alleged victims and international human rights groups assert - forced disappearances, illegal detentions, intimidation, torture, and executions of journalists, activists, political opponents and others. "I cannot believe my eyes," said Boby Duval, who spent nine months in the mid-1970s in Fort Dimanche, one of three prisons known as "the triangle of death" during the long reign of the Duvalier family - father and son, Papa Doc and Baby Doc - and the Tontons Macoutes, their paramilitary enforcers and secret police. Duval, a bear of a man who now runs a popular soccer academy for thousands of kids from the slums, entered the prison as a robust young athlete. He emerged weighing 100 pounds. "They didn't kill you in Fort Dimanche," he said. They starved you to death. I watched people die of starvation. And you never knew, "When am I next?" " Soon after Duvalier returned to Port-au-Prince in January 2011, after a 25-year exile in France, three cases were filed against him, alleging embezzlement of funds, human rights violations and crimes against humanity. Although an older generation in Haiti recalls with a shudder the bad things that happened in the Duvalier years, many Haitians are nostalgic for the era, when the country was more prosperous, tourists were not afraid to come and Haiti was the world's leading maker of baseballs. More than 60 percent of the Haitian population is younger than 25, so they have no memory of Baby Doc's reign, only stories of better days. A life in power Duvalier was a plump and pampered young man of 19 when he became "president for life" in 1971 after the death of his father, the far more ruthless Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who once worked as a physician. The younger Duvalier and his then-wife, Michele Bennett, were famous for their luxurious lifestyle and shopping sprees. After the couple divorced in 1993, Duvalier endured a more modest exile, without the Ferrari or the mansion, living in a borrowed apartment, saying he was broke.