Haiti Takes On Major Role in Cocaine Trade

Increasingly lawless, corrupt and poor, Haiti has become pivotal to a multibillion-dollar business in cocaine, according to sources here and law enforcement officials in the United States.

They say a Haitian pipeline is flooding the U.S. with the drug, even as the narcotic further corrodes this island nation’s society, its economy and its few government institutions.

Through sophisticated and wealthy local smuggling organizations that are quickly becoming a cartel unto themselves, the U.S. government estimates, more than 135 tons of Colombian cocaine have transited Haiti en route to the U.S. in the last two years.

At the same time, tens of millions of dollars in cash profits from U.S. sales are flowing back to and through Haiti’s unregulated economy, some headed to drug barons in Central America and Colombia but the rest now enriching an entire class of nouveau riche in Haiti whose power is growing exponentially in an otherwise impoverished and rudderless land.

Nearly 100 mansions are under construction in a single sprawling, walled enclave here in Port-au-Prince, the capital of a nation where money laundering is legal and where, most analysts say, drug proceeds have penetrated banks, other businesses and even some of the ongoing political campaigns for long-delayed national elections.

U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officials estimate that, along with the cash, Haitian freighters have smuggled in 1,000 weapons from the U.S. in the last 18 months. Most of these cheap handguns, shotguns and automatic pistols are believed to have gone to drug gangs and politicians.

Already, the cocaine trade functions with near-impunity. U.S. officials say that corruption remains a driving force within Haiti’s customs operations, its port authority and a police force that was created, financed and trained at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Despite an estimated cocaine flow through Haiti last year of nearly 75 tons, up 24% from 1998, a U.S. State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report released this month said Haitian authorities seized just 950 pounds of the drug in 1999--a mere one-third of their 1998 haul.

The report added that none of 25 new, U.S.-trained Haitian counter-narcotics officers have been deployed, that there were only 72 drug arrests--and no convictions--last year, and that drug-corrupted police are routinely dismissed rather than prosecuted.

In all, the report asserted, 14% of the cocaine sold in the United States now passes through this small Caribbean nation of about 7 million people.

Villagers Take What They Can

So ingrained has the trade become in Haitian society that entire villages have come to subsist on what they can siphon from it.

In separate incidents in recent weeks along the country’s unpatrolled southern coast, where Colombian cocaine boats routinely put in, villagers attacked and later sunk the sailboat of a vacationing French family and boats belonging to Cuban fishermen in the mistaken belief that cocaine was on board. And in the north, where cocaine-laden planes routinely land both day and night, a village celebrated after it commandeered a shipment from a jeep that had flipped over at a nearby landing strip.

“Haiti’s weak democratic institutions, fledgling police force and eroding infrastructure provide South American-based narcotics traffickers with a path of least resistance,” the State Department report said.

But interviews with U.S. officials from four federal agencies policing the drug trade, and with sources in Haiti, make clear that the Haitians have become an organized smuggling force in their own right--and that their profits are amplifying the corruption of an economy in which the average annual wage is officially put at $400.

“You’re seeing a transformation,” said Frank Figueroa, the U.S. Customs Service agent in charge of the agency’s Miami office, which has borne the brunt of the Haitian cocaine boom. “The Haitians are now smuggling their own dope. And that’s a bad sign for us.

“It shows they’ve developed their own infrastructure in Haiti. . . . We could have an epidemic in no time.”

By most standards, the epidemic has already begun. And behind it is a combination of ingenuity, geography, anarchy and voodoo.

During the past five months, U.S. Customs officers along the Miami River have uncovered more than a ton of pure cocaine arriving from Haiti--but not until after agents in gas masks spent tens of thousands of dollars drilling deeply through mud, human waste and voodoo icons into the sealed, hollowed-out keels of five aging Haitian freighters.

Customs and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, meanwhile, have found millions in cash going back to Haiti in the same types of vessels. Last year, on one rusty cargo ship, $1 million in small bills was found inside toolboxes.

Although U.S. counter-narcotics officials in Miami blame Haiti’s feeble drug enforcement on a police force in which dozens of officers have been implicated in the drug trade in recent years, U.S. law compounds their frustration.

One of the freighters that Customs seized last month, the 168-foot Croyance, had been seized and auctioned by the U.S. government about a year earlier, only to end up back in the hands of Haitian traffickers.

The World War II-era supply vessel also illustrated the growing sophistication of the smugglers. When it was first seized by Customs in November 1998 as the Mon Repos, agents found 485 pounds of cocaine in a false compartment in the ballast tank. Last month, agents searched for days before they found 541 pounds of the drug welded inside the vessel’s narrow, underwater keel.

But the Croyance and the four other Haitian vessels on the Miami River that Customs targeted, seized and drilled into in early February represented one of U.S. law enforcement’s few success stories in its effort to break the Haitian connection.

Another case on file in Miami federal court provides a chilling historical backdrop to the Haitian cocaine boom. Among the 13 Haitians and Americans indicted in that 1997 case was former Haitian Lt. Col. Michel-Joseph Francois, one of three military officers the U.S. targeted for removal when it sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in 1994 in Operation Restore Democracy.

Francois was Port-au-Prince’s police chief under the military regime that ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. He is charged with nothing less than helping transform the nation into what U.S. law enforcement officials say it is again becoming.

The indictment stated: “It was the purpose and object of the conspiracy to establish a cocaine transportation and distribution network through the Republic of Haiti, employing in large part the political and military institutions of that country, and to use that network, and other means, to import and subsequently distribute thousands of kilograms of cocaine in the United States, thereby reaping millions of dollars in illicit profits.”

The 32-page indictment contended that the Haitian regime joined hands with the most powerful Colombian drug cartels to use Haiti’s airports and seaports--even constructing new landing strips--as cocaine transit points to U.S. cities ranging from Miami to Chicago to New York.

U.S. Investigates Honduras Link

Half the defendants in the case were convicted in 1998 and are appealing. But Francois remains in Honduras, where he took refuge after he fled Haiti just days before the U.S. deployment that returned Aristide to power. A U.S. attempt to extradite Francois was rejected by the Honduran Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote in July 1997, and U.S. authorities are investigating whether he is now using his base in Honduras to help orchestrate the current upsurge in smuggling.

“It’s not a big leap to assume that Francois is still involved in directing the traffic from Honduras,” said FBI investigator Hardrick Crawford, former supervisor of the squad specializing in Haitian drug traffic.

Authorities in Miami say another key defendant in the case, Beaudoin Ketant, is believed to be in Haiti--one of several fugitives from U.S. drug charges whom the government of Haitian President Rene Preval, who succeeded Aristide in 1996, has declined to extradite to the U.S.

Ira Kurzban, a Miami-based legal advisor to Preval’s government, says Haiti’s extradition treaty with the U.S. does not cover drug offenses.

“Haiti cannot ignore its own laws,” he said. “The Haitian government isn’t a bounty hunter.”

Kurzban also claims that the U.S. is not doing enough to share intelligence information and sophisticated counter-narcotics equipment with Haiti.

“It’s almost ridiculous to blame Haiti, which has no resources and is being inundated by some pretty sophisticated people,” Kurzban said. “Guys like Aristide and Preval know exactly what’s been going on, and they know exactly what it means to have these drug gangs take over. This is not something they want.”

The State Department, which has helped supply Haiti with a handful of aging Coast Guard patrol boats and is building an operations center for the new anti-drug squad in the northern port of Cap-Haitien, expressed only “guarded optimism” about stemming the cocaine flow in the year ahead.

With national elections again postponed by Preval this month, “there is considerable concern that the Haitian National Police will become politicized or corrupted to the point where counter-narcotics operations may be compromised.”

“Haiti is therefore engaged in a race against time,” the report concluded, “to see whether the ability of the [government] to combat narcotics trafficking can outstrip its corrosive effects on Haitian society.”