Pubdate: Fri, 01 Jun 2001
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique (France)
Copyright: 2001 Le Monde diplomatique
Contact:  http://www.mapinc.org/media/613
Website: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/
Author:  Christophe Wargny, La Monde special correspondent

HAITI'S BUSINESS IS DRUGS

The international community froze all loans to Haiti in 1997 because of the 
countrys political turmoil. This May President Mejia of the neighbouring 
Dominican Republic appealed for aid to be resumed since its discontinuation 
is affecting not only Haiti but the whole region. As the political vacuum 
grows, the mafia is expanding to fill it: the traffic in drugs has 
increased more than threefold in the space of four years, adding to Haitis 
already disastrous image.

Gallimards new, lavishly illustrated guide to Haiti (1) paints an enticing 
picture of the pearl of the Caribbean, as it was called in the 17th 
century. But when you arrive theres not a tourist to be seen: just a few 
transient expats. The island has never been in such bad shape socially and 
economically, never had a worse political image in the outside world: 
widespread poverty, neglect, desertion, dilapidation, shipwreck, collapse, 
calvary, chaos, apocalypse. The press runs the gamut of metaphors, biblical 
and non-biblical. After 15 years of transition to democracy and 
international dithering, some people are even beginning to look back with 
nostalgia to the good old days of Jean- Claude Duvalier and his puppet 
government.

The ruling class has a splendid, almost unrivalled history of 
irresponsibility a year and a half (June 1997-December 1998) with no 
government, a year and a half (January 1999-May 2000) with no parliament, 
followed by a year of elections and recriminations.

Meeting the principal actors, especially those rejected at the polls, many 
of them from the best international schools, one is astonished by the 
unconscious contempt for the most deprived people in the Americas. 
Insecurity is growing, hand in hand with the erosion of freedom. The army 
was officially abolished by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995 but 
now the opposition, a small and ill-assorted band popular with the 
diplomatic community, is calling for it to be reinstated.

The elections on 21 May last year, designed to restore all the countrys 
institutions, were highly questionable as to form, but indisputable as to 
content: an overwhelming victory for Aristides party, the Lavalas Family. 
Paradoxically it has accelerated the countrys decline and accentuated its 
isolation. International aid has been largely suspended for the past four 
years and is sorely missed. It was equivalent to the countrys entire 
budget, which is only just enough to pay state employees, late, and raise 
the 20% required to service the national debt, on time.

So much for the first of the three pillars supporting of the top-down, 
essentially informal Haitian economy, which exports five times as much as 
it imports. All that now remains of international aid is a vital but 
unsupervised contribution from the non-governmental organisations. There 
are more than 250 of them in the country, and a string of American 
organisations, offshoots of religious cults, sometimes keener to recruit 
new members than help national development.

The second pillar, the diaspora, contributes even more to the subsistence 
economy. The two million Haitians in New York, Miami, Montreal and the West 
Indies produce close on $1bn, three times the state budget. At the same 
time the success of this community encourages the exodus of boat people and 
the brain drain.

The third pillar is drugs. The island is neither a producer nor a consumer, 
yet a sixth of the cocaine entering the United States, mainly via Florida, 
comes from Haiti. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the 
figures for 2000 were a record, higher than those notched up under the 
military junta between 1991 and 1994. The latest US State Department report 
estimated that 67 tonnes of cocaine from South America passed through Haiti 
in 1999, compared with an estimated 54 tonnes in 1998, in other words 15% 
of all the cocaine entering the US (2). The amounts intercepted are minute. 
Haiti is becoming one of the safest trade routes.

Godsend for the traffickers

It is in the ideal position, midway between Colombia and Florida, with 
1,500 km of coastline, its airspace free of surveillance. It is also an 
absolutely typical rudderless state, riddled with corruption and dirt cheap 
a failed state, a state with no future, according to Clintons Secretary of 
State, Warren Christopher, only too eager to leave it to its fate. It is a 
godsend for the Colombian drug traffickers comfortably installed in the 
luxurious El Rancho hotel in Petionville, a smart residential suburb of 
Port-au-Prince, a hotel that doesnt seem to belong in Haiti, the only one 
where the staff speak Spanish.

The cocaine comes in from more or less everywhere, in fast launches or 
light aircraft, and not always on the quiet. Thus last October a Colombian 
plane carrying 400 kilos of cocaine landed on a lightly marked runway in 
the extreme northwest of the island, near the Mole Saint-Nicolas. It was 
destined for the local police, who were standing by to pick it up. 
Intentional or unintentional? The local people got to know and claimed 
their share. As they had elsewhere, in Grande Anse or near Les Cayes, a 
little earlier on. It is almost becoming a habit. The police do not want to 
share goods that are simply in transit. The peasants set up barricades, 
capture the police pick-up and, of course, make off with the drugs. Fearing 
the worst, the stout constabulary take to their heels. The pilot flees and 
the plane is torched. A few days later, anti-riot police and civilians from 
Port-au-Prince, not Colombia, arrive to recover what they can as best they 
can, by negotiation or force.

The shipment leaves a few signs of added wealth to mark its brief transit. 
Either by paying a percentage, or by private carriage to Port- au-Prince, 
by boat, concealed in cargoes of charcoal. Beats sowing seed on stony 
ground. The chief of police, Pierre Denize, could have despatched some of 
the 40 men from his special anti-drugs squad. But he didnt. Trained by the 
UN after the army was disbanded, most of the police are hand in glove with 
the mafia. If you are posted to Miragoane, a little port that thrives on 
smuggling of every kind, why should you keep your eyes peeled for $300 a 
month when you can get 10 times as much for keeping them shut? And build 
yourself a big house and have plenty of servants, your own generator and 
four-wheel-drive.

Except in the capital, where the people suffer badly from the prevailing 
insecurity, their attitude is ambiguous. In Miragoane, the illicit trade 
creates a certain number of jobs in transport, doctoring the goods, 
producing false papers, etc. and keeps the black market supplied. In Cap 
Haitien, there are cache specialists who can fool US customs investigators.

Disillusion in the ranks

The bitterest pill for the international community is that it trained the 
police in question. The force was originally 6,000-strong but there are now 
fewer than 3,000. A few were previously dismissed on charges of corruption 
under Rene Prevals presidency but many were recruited from the ranks of the 
disbanded army and were consequently well used to embezzlement and dirty 
work of all kinds. The result was that many good men left. The cohort 
trained at Regina in Canada a hundred or so officers, a third of them 
Haitian Canadians just fell apart when they came face to face with the 
realities on the ground, weak government, closed political ranks and a 
pernicious judicial system. Crazy orders to do nothing when we are called 
out; extortion of those we arrest; transfers for no apparent reason; paid 
surveillance of private houses. The opposite of all we had been taught. I 
was ashamed, says Gerard, one of the latest to resign.

There is not one policemen on the beat, and just a few to be found in the 
police stations. A third of the force is posted to special elite units 
answerable to the presidents office. They continue to draw their pay while 
working for one of the many private police agencies. A regular police 
uniform may be a rare sight in Port-au-Prince but there are crowds of armed 
militia on the streets, in banks and standing guard over the big up-market 
houses. Every little supermarket has its own man with an Uzi on his hip.

The fact is that service stations, supermarkets, banks, import-export 
companies and above all luxury houses and four-wheel-drives are on the 
increase. A small fraction of the drugs money is invested in the island but 
most it finds its way to safe countries, particularly the US, and the banks 
are fairly lax about enforcing the law that imposes limits on cash 
transactions. Arrogant Petionville is full of easy money but little gets 
into the pockets of the local shopkeepers or domestic servants. There is, 
however, a boom in the building trade.

The massive UN presence after 1994 helped to diminish Haitis role as a hub 
of the cocaine trade. But the police training scheme was not accompanied by 
any decisive improvements in the system of justice or by the promised 
economic boom. Dealers never stay in prison for long. Who could resist the 
pressure of the narcos, the big families, the corrupt sections of the state 
machine? The entanglements of Senator Dany Toussaint of the Lavalas Family 
are just coming to light, wanted for drug trafficking by the US Justice 
Department and accessory to murder in Haiti. Through a section of the 
police force, drugs also affect other members of the legislature.

The jobs they create, the sums at stake (even locally), the links with 
other forms of smuggling, the unexpected involvement of local people, the 
money laundering, the indirect funding of a section of political life, the 
expansion of building for the wealthy middle class, all combine to make 
drugs an important factor in local economic life. Probably more lucrative 
than the export of works of art to meet worldwide demand or products 
assembled in the vicinity of the port, where the few businessmen have to 
keep sniffer dogs to prevent unwanted extra cargo being loaded into their 
containers.

The vast development programme announced for 2004, the bicentenary of 
independence, is at present facing international sanctions. Without massive 
support for development, including a complete overhaul of the machinery of 
state, how can Haiti possibly afford to turn down the undisclosable 
dividends of the drugs trade? Port-au-Prince has so little to recommend it 
to the powerful neighbour that regards it with such contempt: nothing but 
drugs, boat people and maybe solidarity with its own black community.

A treaty agreed by former President Preval in 1997 gives US special forces 
full rights to act in Haitian territorial waters and airspace with no 
restrictions. But the US coast guards are much more zealous about catching 
the boat people in their wheezy old craft than chasing the speed boats from 
Colombia. The CIA has agents in the police force, itself partly trained in 
the US. A specially trained local unit is stationed on the Dominican border 
but this does not stop the flow of migrants from Haiti 100 to 200 a day or 
the shipments of snow from Haitian to Dominican ports.

Haiti did not get its annual certificate of good conduct from the US 
government last year. It does not actually appear on the list of 
narco-states. However, the new Republican administration, which was against 
the action to restore President Aristide in 1994 and has little interest in 
development, might well take that step. What, after all, is Haiti if not a 
convenient scapegoat to distract attention from the inconsistency of the US 
as it conducts a war on drugs and simultaneously presses on with its 
programme of liberalisation?

This is all the more reason for Aristide to start taking measures in his 
second term in office to reverse the heavy police involvement. It is up to 
him to remind the police that their proper task is to guarantee freedom and 
combat crime. And, indeed, since January the Miami customs authorities seem 
to be better informed (3) and seizures are a distinct improvement on 
previous results. Nonetheless, it is likely that the peasants in 
Port-de-Paix and dockers in Miragoane will be looking to the drugs trade to 
help line their pockets for some time to come, and the drugs barons in the 
El Rancho hotel will still have a place by the pool.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Footnotes:

Christophe Wargny is a senior lecturer at the Conservatoire national des 
arts et metiers (CNAM), Paris

(1) Haiti, Guide decouverte, Gallimard, Paris, 2001.

(2) Statement by Madeleine Albright, reported by Reuters, 3 January 2000.

(3) Miami Herald, 16 January 2001, and Associated Press, 1 February 2001.

Translated by Barbara Wilson
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom