Exiled Haitian Police Official Held on Smuggling Charges

Port-au-Prince’s exiled police chief, a shadowy, ruthless figure believed to have engineered the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and pitched Haiti into three years of bloody turmoil, has been charged with helping to smuggle more than 33 tons of Colombian cocaine and heroin into the U.S.

According to an indictment unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court here, Lt. Col. Joseph Michel Francois met face-to-face with the leaders of three Colombian cartels to arrange for drug shipments to pass through Haiti via a private airstrip he helped build and protect.

The 50-page indictment naming 13 people was unsealed after Francois, 39, was arrested in Honduras, where he has been living under a grant of political asylum since April. He is expected to be flown to Miami today to face formal arraignment.

“It’s been a major, major case,” said Wilfredo Fernandez, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.

The indictment charges that Francois took part in a “conspiracy to establish a cocaine- and heroin-distribution network through Haiti, employing in large part the political and military institutions of that country.”

All but three of those named in the indictment have been arrested. One of those in custody is a security worker at Miami International Airport who is accused of escorting drug couriers off flights from Haiti.

Fernandez said Francois long has been the target of an investigation into drug trafficking involving former Haitian police and military leaders. He added that the Honduran government has been “extremely helpful and cooperative in arranging for the extradition.”

Francois fled to Honduras after he and Franck Romain, the former mayor of Port-au-Prince, were arrested in the Dominican Republic and charged with conspiring against the government of President Rene Preval. The pair had been in the Dominican Republic since October 1994, two weeks after U.S. troops escorted Aristide back to the Haitian capital.

In September, Francois was convicted in absentia in Haiti and sentenced to life at hard labor for the 1993 killing of a Haitian businessman who was a major financial backer of Aristide.

But long before that, Francois was well-known to both Haitians on the street and U.S. officials in Washington as a behind-the-scenes power broker given to secrecy and control through a national police force that many compared to a death squad. Behind his back, ordinary Haitians referred to Francois as “Sweet Mickey.” Dante Caputa, U.S. special envoy to the United Nations, publicly called him a “killer.”

A 1993 U.S. Government Accounting Office report alleged that Francois and army chief Raoul Cedras, then heading the government, protected the annual passage of 50 tons of Colombian cocaine through Haiti. The indictment alleges that he met personally with Medellin kingpin Pablo Escobar and others to discuss U.S.-bound drug shipments.

Cedras, in exile in Panama, was not named in the indictment.

Miami attorney Ira Kurzban, general counsel in the U.S. for the Haitian government, said Francois’ arrest “removes temporarily a person who has engaged in gross violation of human rights in Haiti, including summary executions, torture and unlawful incarceration of thousands.”

Kurzban added, however, that trying Francois could prove to be embarrassing for the U.S. government if evidence suggests that the CIA “either turned a blind eye to his activities or had him on the payroll.”

Published reports indicate that the CIA helped create and fund both SIN, Haiti’s national intelligence service, and the Front for Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a pro-military organization. Francois, who attended U.S. military command training for foreign officers in Georgia, was associated with both.

News of Francois’ indictment was greeted with huzzahs on the streets of Miami’s Little Haiti, a neighborhood made up of many who went into exile because of run-ins with the former police chief’s forces.

“Everybody knows about him,” said Samedi Florville, director of community outreach at the Haitian Refugee Center. “He is a criminal, a Saddam, a Hitler. He is mean.”

Florville said that Francois’ arrest was sure to dominate the conversation at Friday evening’s regular community meeting. “There will be many people here who have been his victims,” he said. “I tell you, everybody loves this news.”

In Port-au-Prince, Haitian officials said they would seek Francois’ return to face charges of murder and human rights abuses. “This is a person that Haitian justice has been looking for for quite some time,” said Justice Ministry advisor Jerome Jean Noel.