Aristide Foes Decry Lawman’s Arrest

Mario Andresol is probably the closest thing the Haitian National Police ever had to a super-cop.

As chief of investigations, Andresol relentlessly probed the many political slayings that have rocked Haiti in recent years, sometimes implicating ruling party officials. He jailed Colombian drug traffickers and pursued the corrupt Haitian cops who protected them.

He escaped assassins’ bullets at least twice, received dozens of death threats and won the praise of law enforcement officials from Washington to Buenos Aires. In one of the hemisphere’s most corrupt and politicized police forces, he seemed a rare Haitian hybrid of Frank Serpico and Eliot Ness.

Now Andresol is in jail, charged with masterminding a coup attempt and murder in a bizarre series of attacks on police targets that some Haitians instead link to followers of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The case starkly defines Haiti’s perilous political landscape and the sad state of its national police force, which U.S. taxpayers spent more than $50 million to build, train and arm.

Under a series of grants, the U.S. Justice Department took the lead in creating the force after Aristide disbanded the Haitian army that overthrew him in 1991. The U.S. law enforcement specialists, working closely with Haitian authorities, spent years vetting the Haitian recruits and training them here and at a U.S. military camp in Missouri.

But diplomatic observers say Aristide has been removing those officers from key positions since he returned to power early this year after elections marred by irregularities, replacing them with ruling Lavalas Family party loyalists.

Among those replaced was Andresol, a former army captain who rose steadily through the ranks of the military and then the police in his 20-year career.

Aristide’s government has yet to detail Andresol’s alleged involvement in last month’s attacks; analysts theorize that prosecutors will claim that he masterminded the assaults out of professional indignation or revenge.

But some Aristide critics have suggested that Andresol was jailed because he was too independent--and because he knows too much about too many powerful people in Haiti.

When asked during a recent visit to his jail cell why he thought he had been locked up, Andresol, 40, looked away, shrugged and then smiled.

“They know I am uncorrupted,” he said finally. “I think I have many people against me in the police force. I hurt many of their careers while enforcing the rule of law. I have many enemies, everywhere.”

Since July 31, Andresol has shared a sweltering 10-by-15-foot cell with seven other men, despite an Aug. 7 court order that he be released immediately. He lives in such fear of assassination, his wife says, that he sleeps only during the day, when the other inmates protect him. His cellmates, she says, are former Haitian army officers who say they have been held for seven months without charges.

The charges against Andresol, which he stridently denies, stem from a string of attacks in late July. A heavily armed commando team of six to eight men clad in the uniforms of Haiti’s disbanded army attacked a suburban police station in Port-au-Prince, the capital, shouting pro-army slogans, then seized the nation’s police academy for six hours. The attackers left the academy, unchallenged, at dawn and besieged two police stations in central Haiti before disappearing.

Aristide’s government and a commission that investigated the incident said it was a coup attempt, a conclusion few Haitians accept.

The assaults continued for 16 hours before police commando units were dispatched to restore order, and none of the actual attackers have been named or arrested.

Aristide’s opponents allege that the operation was staged as a pretext for the president to crack down on the political opposition that has hamstrung his party since his inauguration. At least 40 opposition figures were arrested in the aftermath, although most were later released.

It was also a foil, they assert, to further consolidate the president’s control over the national police force, which many Lavalas supporters fear has been commanded by officers more loyal to Washington than Port-au-Prince.

The man Aristide installed as the Haitian National Police chief in March is variously described as the president’s former caretaker and his driver. Among Chief Jean Nesly Lucien’s first acts: stripping Andresol of his position as the department’s chief investigator. Other key officers also have been replaced.

Although these changes offer a motive for the charges against Andresol, not even Haitian analysts sympathetic to Aristide accept the government’s theory.

Others have an even more chilling take on the affair.

“To me, the purpose of the whole exercise was to prove how incompetent the police are and to show that the police are incapable of protecting even themselves,” said Michele Montas, director of Radio Haiti Inter. Montas is the widow of the most prominent victim of Haiti’s recent bloodshed, broadcaster and peasant activist Jean Leopold Dominique, a longtime Aristide ally.

Montas said she suspects that the attacks may have been a rehearsal for a coup to be launched by some of Haiti’s former military dictators.

“At the very least,” she said, “the whole thing is an embarrassment for the police and for Aristide.”

Even the U.S. State Department, which funded the Haitian National Police, gives its creation low marks.

“Allegations of corruption, incompetence and narcotics trafficking are leveled against members at all levels of the force,” the department concluded in its annual report on human rights in Haiti in February.

“The Haitian National Police continued to beat, torture and otherwise mistreat detainees. Methodical investigations by the HNP are rare, and impunity remains a problem.”

One U.S. official, requesting anonymity, said Andresol was among the force’s few bright lights before his removal from the investigative post.

Montas suggested that the arrest of Andresol was the result of “sheer panic.”

“If they are holding Mario, it’s because Mario is one of the few people who knows the most,” she said.

Andresol says he could be killed for what he knows--or for what he has done as an investigator through the years.

He reported an alleged assassination plot in detail in a May 23 letter to his replacement.

He described a meeting 10 days earlier in which some of those enemies--he didn’t name them--planned a three-stage operation to kill him.

The first step was to ensure that his personal security was removed; all seven of Andresol’s bodyguards already had been transferred to the provinces.

Second, Andresol wrote, they planned to ambush him after an official meeting at police headquarters.

Failing that, they intended to kidnap him or a member of his family from their home.

The chief police investigator took no action, and, 10 weeks later, Andresol’s wife, Monette, asserts, her husband’s enemies actually attempted their plan. She and Andresol’s lawyer allege that his July 31 “arrest” was, instead, an aborted execution.

Andresol had been summoned to the Justice Ministry that afternoon, ostensibly to assist in the investigation into the July 28 attacks, said his wife.

As he left the ministry with his wife and driver that evening, they were chased by two trucks carrying heavily armed men in black ski masks.

Andresol’s driver spun his vehicle into a well-lighted gas station, where the men ordered Andresol and his wife to lie face down at gunpoint, she said.

“I’m sure they meant to kill us on a darkened road,” Monette Andresol recalled in an interview. “But there were too many witnesses at the gas station. And one of the masked men--Mario recognized his voice--protected him from the others.

“Then the leader of the group had to call someone on his mobile phone to ask what to do with us. They had no plan for that. Then they decided to arrest all of us.”

Monette Andresol and the driver were released the next day.

Mario Andresol’s lawyer, Osner Fevry, took the case to court, where, after a long hearing, Judge Jean Perez Paul ruled Aug. 7 that Andresol’s arrest was “illegal and arbitrary.” The judge ordered that all charges against him be dropped and that he be released immediately, regardless of a government appeal.

Haitian Justice Minister Gary Lissade declined several requests for an interview, but a deputy prosecutor told local reporters that Andresol’s continued detention is based on the government’s appeal to a higher court.

“They want to punish him for the way he talks, the way he works, the way he thinks,” concluded his wife, who brings her husband breakfast and dinner each day because Haiti’s prisons have too little food for their thousands of prisoners.

“He only tried to respect the law and follow the rules all the time,” she said. “They don’t seem to like that kind of attitude here.”

When asked by a visitor to his cell how he was faring, Andresol said: “So far, so good. I’m still alive.”