Pubdate: Sun, 20 Jun 2004
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2004 Sun-Sentinel Company
Contact:  http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: Ann W. O'Neill, Staff Writer

AFFIDAVITS PORTRAY HAITI AS A CHAOTIC DRUG HAVEN

Days before President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced out of Haiti,
a notorious cocaine trafficker stood before a federal judge in Miami
and said Aristide, once his friend, had turned Haiti into "a narco-
country."

"The man is a drug lord," Beaudouin "Jacques" Ketant told U.S.
District Judge Federico A. Moreno on Feb. 25. "He controlled the drug
trade in Haiti." His country in rebellion, Aristide left four days
later aboard a plane provided by the U.S. government.

In recent weeks, it has become clear that federal law enforcement
officials in South Florida are putting a lot of stock in what Ketant
has to say. The high-living cocaine trafficker has emerged as a
central figure in an investigation that has snagged five former
Haitian officials and appears to have Aristide in its sights.

Four of them have hearings scheduled this week and next in federal
court in Miami.

Observers of Haiti say a combination of forces conspired to increase
the cocaine supply and deepen corruption after Aristide was elected in
2000. They include a decision to freeze millions in U.S. aid and a
crackdown on Colombian smuggling routes through Mexico and at the U.S.
border.

Affidavits filed in the cases paint a picture of a politically
chaotic, chronically impoverished country thoroughly corrupted by drug
money. The narco-dollars are alleged to have reached into the upper
echelons of government, even into the presidential palace through
Aristide's trusted security chief.

According to the documents, some top Haitian officials took protection
money and hid stashes of cocaine in their own homes. They steered DEA
agents away from incoming loads, and tipped off traffickers when the
DEA was on to their plans. Such corruption was the result of declining
conditions in the Western Hemisphere's most impoverished nation, Haiti
experts say. The question before a Miami federal grand jury is whether
Aristide turned a blind eye to the graft or actively
participated.

His lawyer, Ira Kurzban, has denied the former president had anything
to do with drug traffickers. Instead, he said, the allegations are
politically motivated. The U.S. is trying to discredit Aristide so
that he will not be able to reclaim power in Haiti, Kurzban charges.
"This is all about the political character assassination of Aristide,"
he said.

Aristide disputed the drug-corruption allegations in a recent
interview with CNN in South Africa, where he lives in exile. "They are
wrong," he said.

Haiti has served as a Caribbean cocaine crossroads for two decades,
with scant notice. Rumors of Aristide's involvement have swirled for
years. "Once Aristide left, the case against him appeared to be
developing rapidly," observed Tom Cash, who headed the DEA's offices
in Miami and the Caribbean from the late 1980s to 1994.

During his tenure, Cash said, he and some of his agents stationed in
Haiti watched as planes dropped bundles of cocaine offshore. No one in
the United States or Haiti seemed particularly concerned.

Through most of the 1990s, he said, other priorities prevailed, most
notably U.S. immigration policy. The U.S. was counting on Aristide's
cooperation to keep down the numbers of Haitian migrants.

Aristide, a populist priest, was viewed as Haiti's great hope when
U.S. Marines ushered him back to power in 1994 but never lived up to
U.S. expectations. By the waning days of the Clinton administration,
his relationship with the United States was so rocky that $500 million
in U.S. aid was frozen. U.S. officials cited legislative election
irregularies corruption as the reason.

Drug traffickers' money filled the void, experts say. Cash, for one,
called it "white powder foreign aid." In essence, Haiti's government
and political patronage system subsisted on a "cocaine tax" levied
against traffickers, said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami
professor who studies the drug trade in Latin America and the
Caribbean. Under such conditions, smuggling exploded in Haiti.

By some estimates, as many as 80 tons passed through the country
during the Aristide years. At one time, about five percent of the
cocaine that reaches the United States passed through Haiti. Now, that
figure is closer to 20 percent, Bagley said.

Meanwhile, during the 1990s, cocaine was turning up on Haitian barges
in Miami. "The interstate of drug trafficking is the Miami River,"
Cash said.

While Cash initially observed what began as "benign neglect" from his
perch atop Miami's DEA field office, Bagley saw cocaine trafficking
and corruption grow into a crisis during trips to Haiti with a
committee studying the drug problem. The committee eventually gave up
in frustration, Bagley said.

"Haiti is lawless, it is broke, and its institutions are bankrupt in
every sense," Bagley said. "Aristide was being starved. There was no
police force. He couldn't do anything about it, so he tolerated drug
trafficking."

Bagley is not convinced Aristide took drug money for himself. Rather,
Bagley said, it propped up Haiti's feeble economy and political
patronage system. "I have spoken to hundreds of people in Haiti,"
Bagley said. "No one told me he was enriching himself."

U.S. investigators are trying to follow the money, according to former
DEA head Cash. Of particular interest: reports that looters discovered
$350,000 in cash in a safe in Aristide's basement the day after he
left. "I know there's a sitting grand jury, and that grand jury is
looking for money," Cash said.

The inquiry, which dates to at least three years ago, received its
first boost with the arrests last year of Ketant and another notorious
drug trafficker, Colombian Carlos "Papi" Ovalle. Ketant was indicted
by a Miami grand jury in 1997, and investigators now are looking into
whether Aristide protected him until Haitian National Police put him
on a DEA plane last year. Ketant is cooperating, trying to shave time
off a 27-year sentence he received in February.

The Haitian official who put Ketant in handcuffs and delivered him to
the DEA, national police commander Rudy Therassan, was indicted last
month in Miami for his alleged role in cocaine corruption. Therassan's
lawyer, Lawrence Besser, specifically identified Ketant in court as an
informant against his client.

Some of the Haitian officials now appear to be cooperating. They are
precisely the type of witnesses prosecutors would use to corroborate
the traffickers' stories as they work their way up to Aristide, Cash
said.

"This is a very large group of very high-ranking people, for Haiti,"
he said. "You're seeing the classic development of investigations --
seeking witnesses, corroborating them, documenting various and sundry
loads, how they were brought in and how they were disposed of.
Aristide has got to be feeling the heat."

Bagley is not convinced prosecutors can build a case against Aristide
with admitted conspirators who are trying to save themselves. "Now
they are madly plea bargaining to get these people to rat on
Aristide," Bagley said. "These individuals are of doubtful character.
They are involved in drug trafficking, trying to get off the hook."

Aristide has not been linked in the public record to cocaine
trafficking and corruption. He did not seem to be living in luxury in
Haiti -- in sharp contrast to the flashy Ketant.

But Cash said mounting circumstantial evidence points to a simple
truth: Aristide "would have had to have been deaf, dumb and blind not
to have seen what was going on with those surrounding him," he said.
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