Pubdate: Tue, 08 Jan 2008
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2008 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Authors: Carol J. Williams, and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times

SMUGGLERS SEE HAITI AS NEW GATEWAY FOR DRUGS

MALPASSE, Haiti - Three beefy men wearing wraparound sunglasses and 
gold chains leaned against their SUV at this remote border crossing 
with the Dominican Republic. As one of them muttered into a 
walkie-talkie, four Haitian policemen pulled up looking like they 
meant business.

The SUV's back hatch was opened. The cops eyeballed its load of 
opaque plastic-wrapped bundles. One officer picked up a package the 
size of a bread loaf, appraising its weight with his forearm.

Then the police and the bejeweled trio knocked fists in solidarity, 
traded vehicles and drove off toward the Haitian capital, 
Port-au-Prince. And thus ended the drug bust that wasn't.

Pandemic police corruption in Haiti is just one reason drug-running 
through Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican 
Republic, has more than doubled over the past two years. It accounts 
for more than 10 percent of illegal substances reaching the United 
States and an even larger share of the volume destined for Europe, 
U.S. and international agents say.

With counter-narcotics operations choking off traditional routes from 
Colombia and Mexico, smugglers are finding unfettered paths in 
lawless Haiti, where poverty, isolation and inept law enforcement 
combine to provide traffickers a new path of least resistance.

"Why are they bringing it here? Because this is the weakest point in 
the region," said Fred Blaise, a Haitian-born Florida police officer 
serving in Haiti with the United Nations Stabilization Mission.

"Haiti doesn't have helicopters. It doesn't have planes. It doesn't 
have radar to even know what's coming and going."

A fledgling coast guard has been restored after a four-year hiatus 
that followed the flight into exile of former President Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide and the chaos that ensued. But the force has few officers 
and no speedboats. The 1,500-mile coastline is wide open to 
smugglers' fast boats and airdrops.

"It takes only eight hours for speedboats coming from Colombia and 
Venezuela to get to Jacmel," Haiti's police commissioner, Mario 
Andresol, said of the southern port town of dilapidated gingerbread 
houses. "Once the drugs get to Haiti, they can be loaded onto 
vehicles and sent to Port-au-Prince, then north for the trip to the 
United States."

Haiti has no army or border guard to patrol the 225-mile frontier 
with the Dominican Republic. At best, a couple of police officers are 
sometimes on hand at the four legal crossings.

 From Malpasse, contraband can be dispatched across the enormous 
saltwater Lake Azuei in fishermen's crude, black-sailed sloops, in 
all-terrain vehicles that speed over denuded mountainsides into 
gang-ruled central and northern cities, or loaded into dump trucks at 
a roadside quarry that is abandoned but for the transactions that 
traffickers make little attempt to hide.

Much of Colombia's cocaine now comes to the southern coast of 
Hispaniola via Venezuela. Last year, then-U.S. Ambassador William 
Brownfield said the volume flowing through Venezuela had quintupled 
since 2001 to as much as 250 tons a year. That's a quarter to half of 
Colombia's production.

The Joint Interagency Task Force of the U.S. military's Southern 
Command tracked 81 unregistered flights from Colombia or Venezuela to 
this island in the first nine months of 2007. The U.S. Drug 
Enforcement Agency reports that more vigorous surveillance of the 
Colombian coastline has compelled highly adaptive smugglers to use new routes.

"There is always the balloon effect," said Vito S. Guarino, assistant 
special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean Division. "Wherever 
you put pressure, they go somewhere else." He estimates that drug 
transshipment through the Caribbean is up as much as 30 percent.

Haitian or Dominican authorities are often tipped off about illegal 
flights and voyages that have been spotted by the U.S. or other 
nations, but local law enforcement officials are rarely in a position 
to intercept them.

Haitian farmers and fishermen in coastal villages can be induced with 
a few dollars to store drugs, guard makeshift warehouses or cart the 
contraband to the next stop on the route, spawning local economies 
that are becoming increasingly dependent on the drug trade, the 
police commissioner said.

Narco-trafficking enterprises already are entrenched in central 
Haiti, having cropped up along the one passable road from the capital 
to the northern coast.

"We are looking for bandits and gangsters, but we are also finding 
police and congressmen among them," said Andresol, who concedes that 
he can't trust most of the 5,000 men on his force.

Andresol, an anti-corruption crusader who has made it his mission to 
restore a conscience to Haitian law enforcement, said the November 
arrest of a lawmaker from the central plains town of Maissade, Joseph 
Willot, deflated his sense that interdictions this year had put a 
dent in the island's drug trade.

Venezuela's status as a favored launch pad for illegal flights taking 
Colombian dope toward its final market is the direct result of 
extensive corruption in the armed forces of President Hugo Chavez, 
foreign counter-narcotics officials say.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom