Chaos in Haiti Repels Even Drug Dealers

It was just over a year ago that a peasant mob in this poor coastal town ripped off a 4-ton shipment of Colombian cocaine--a haul worth $20 million even at local prices.

Fishermen became instant millionaires. Farmers showered in celebratory beers at local nightclubs. And the sudden largess spawned a host of new social ills.

But the populist drug seizure here in a nation that had become a major transshipment hub for Colombian cocaine headed to the U.S. also pointed to the latest--and perhaps strangest--trend in Caribbean drug smuggling.

After a year of mass rip-offs, crashed drug planes and trashed getaway cars, not even the drug dealers, it seems, can tolerate desperate and dilapidated Haiti.

So dramatic is the decrease of the drug flow through this country of 8 million that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and State Department have taken notice.

In its most recent narcotics report, the State Department concluded that Haiti accounted for just 8% of all cocaine reaching the U.S. last year, down from 13% in 1999.

But in Haiti’s government and law enforcement circles, there’s little cause for pride.

“Little of this [decrease] is attributable to the efforts of the Haitian government,” the State Department report says, adding that Haiti must still be regarded as a major transshipment point for South American narcotics. Rather, it cites such incidents as the grass-roots drug rip-off in Grand-Goave to explain one of the more unusual--and inadvertent--successes in the global drug war.

The report notes that intensified U.S. Customs Service searches of Haitian freighters in the Miami River, which netted about 3 tons of cocaine last year, may have played a role in the decline. And it partly credits tough new anti-drug laws recently passed by Haiti’s National Assembly.

But it adds: “The largest factor [in the decrease] may be the difficulties traffickers experienced in moving drugs through Haiti because of poor infrastructure or the seizure of drugs by rival traffickers or other criminals.”

For example, airdrops of large shipments “dropped significantly in 2000, particularly after several aircraft crashed trying to land on makeshift runways,” the department said.

‘Manna From Heaven’ for Poor Villages

Another factor is the increasingly brazen and impoverished citizens, for whom cocaine has in recent years become “the principal business in some coastal towns.”

“Cocaine is widely known as manna from heaven throughout Haiti, as it has become a source of income for entire towns,” the report says.

There was the case last year of a drug plane that landed in Port-de-Paix on Haiti’s north coast. Traffickers met the plane, shot a policeman and packed their SUV with the cocaine.

But as the traffickers sped off on the town’s rutted and neglected streets, the vehicle flipped. Within minutes, hundreds of residents set upon it and stripped it of the drugs.

Another drug plane was burned to a crisp in Leogane, 25 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, by villagers who were outraged when the traffickers refused to share part of the shipment with them.

But Grand-Goave, also outside the capital, is a model of the phenomenon. What’s more, the populist cocaine seizure on June 9, 2000, has fundamentally changed the town by fostering social evils that were compounded when the drug flows went dry, local officials, radio correspondents and police officers say.

Grand-Goave, like most of the Haitian countryside, has always been poor. It has no hospital, park or professional school, and it runs solely on a $2,700 monthly federal handout for municipal salaries. With unemployment approaching 100%, the town’s people have survived on subsistence farming and money sent from relatives in the U.S. and Canada.

Morally, however, it had been a God-fearing town where petty crime was minimal and major crimes such as murder were largely motivated by politics.

That all changed a year ago, residents say, the day two launches sped ashore and nearly the entire town turned out to meet them.

Grand-Goave’s free-for-all began about 5:30 a.m. that day, moments after 8,400 pounds of cocaine landed on the beach. Local police had been tipped off to the shipment; some were probably hired protection for the traffickers, said one local officer who asked not to be named.

Soon the police were overwhelmed by thousands of townspeople, most of them armed with machetes or homemade guns. Outnumbered, the police ultimately gave up and, witnesses said, even helped distribute the sacks. In the end, police officially seized just 300 pounds.

The rest became Grand-Goave’s gross national product for the year to come.

“Simple fishermen became millionaires overnight,” said one commentator at Radio Saka, the local station, where broadcasters asked not to be identified by name for fear of retaliation.

“People were pouring into the local nightclubs and showering themselves with bottles of beer. In time, it corrupted the town at its most basic level. And today, the biggest impact of all this cocaine is a new sense of insecurity.”

Some Now Support New Drug Habits

Many of the townsfolk who scored a bag or two sold some of the drugs and bought weapons to protect the rest. With sudden disposable income, there was a new market for prostitution, and the local radio commentators say local girls as young as 12 entered the trade.

Now the money and much of the drugs are gone, they say. Some of the instant millionaires have taken to stealing bicycles or household goods to support new drug habits. And no manna has landed from heaven in the past 12 months.

“We haven’t seen anything like this since,” said another Radio Saka journalist. “When this thing happened, they were saying that Haiti was one of the biggest routes for drugs. Now, since the 9th of June last year, we haven’t heard anything about drugs here.

“Before, the drug dealers were doing business with the police. But when the people got involved, the price for the dealers became too high.”