19796: Esser: Haiti rebels linked to drug trade (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

San Francisco Chhronicle
http://www.sfgate.com

Haiti rebels linked to drug trade
Records show leaders' ties to Colombians

Steven Dudley, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, March 4, 2004


Port-Au-Prince, Haiti -- Some of the rebel leaders who drove
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power are suspected of
involvement in drug trafficking, U.S. officials and Haiti experts say.

While refusing to provide details, a senior Western diplomat in Haiti
said in an interview with The Chronicle that criminal elements are
enmeshed in the insurgency and now seek to reconstitute Haiti's
formerly defunct military.

According to internal documents from a regional governmental
organization that closely monitors state institutions in Haiti, Guy
Philippe, the rebel leader who declared himself head of the revived
Haitian military on Tuesday, and Gilbert Dragon, his
second-in-command, allegedly became involved in drug trafficking in
the late 1990s as members of the Haitian police force.

The documents were shown to The Chronicle by a Western diplomat who
asked to remain anonymous.

Philippe insists that neither he nor any other rebel commander has
anything to do with drugs.

"I'm an open book," he told The Chronicle in an interview in the
northern port of Cap-Haitien, where he had set up temporary
headquarters.

But Bruce Bagley, a political science professor at the University of
Miami who has written extensively on the Caribbean drug trade,
described last week's seizure of power by the rebels as a
"narco-coup."

In the past decade, Haiti's role as a major route for illicit drugs
into the United States has grown significantly, U.S. officials say.
The drugs are typically shipped from northern Colombia in single or
two-engine planes, fishing vessels, freighters and so-called go-fast
boats, before arriving in Florida, the Bahamas or Puerto Rico.

Other officials say that the former Aristide government also was
involved in the drug trade, or at least benefiting from it.

The U.S. State Department has long complained about the lack of
cooperation from the Aristide government in combating the drug trade.
U.S. officials also have suspected officials of Aristide's party,
Lavalas, of taking bribes from traffickers who have turned Haiti into
a major transshipment hub for Colombian cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Last year, the United States revoked the visas of at least five
senior government officials, including the interior minister, for
suspected involvement in drug trafficking. For the past two years,
Washington has decertified Haiti as a cooperative partner in the war
on drugs.

"We really have no reliable interlocutor in the Haitian law
enforcement that we can work with to attack the problem," Paul
Simons, a State Department narcotics officer, said in a briefing last
year. "The government of Haiti has done very little to cooperate ...
to interdict the flow of drugs or honor its international narcotics
commitments."

Last week, a Haitian drug dealer who was sentenced to 27 years in
prison in a Miami court accused Aristide of turning Haiti into a
"narco-country," even though the former president has never been
formally charged with any drug involvement.

Aristide vehemently denied the allegations. But three diplomatic
sources based in Haiti who participated in the negotiations that led
to his departure Sunday for exile in Africa say Washington used the
drug dealer's testimony as leverage to persuade Aristide to resign.

But the most serious charges have been leveled at the rebel leaders.

According to U.S. officials, Philippe and Dragon once belonged to a
group of 10 Haitians sent to Ecuador in 1995 to train as police
officers. Known as "the Latinos," they quickly moved up through the
ranks upon their return to Haiti and soon began accepting bribes from
Colombian drug dealers to facilitate the steady flow of drugs through
this island nation of 8 million.

The documents shown to The Chronicle also noted that "the Latinos"
routinely gave gifts to politicians and even forced the government of
then- President Rene Preval in 1998 to transfer the nation's
inspector general to a diplomatic post in Europe, after he implicated
the group in trafficking approximately 1,600 pounds of cocaine.

Philippe, who also trained with the U.S. Secret Service in 1995, fled
Haiti in 2000, after he and his fellow "Latinos" were implicated in a
coup plot against Aristide.

A U.S. lawyer who successfully prosecuted on behalf of the Haitian
government several rebels in absentia for a 1994 massacre said that
that some leaders of the current insurgency such as Louis-Jodel
Chamblain, once had key roles in the notorious paramilitary group
known as the Front for the Advancement of the Haitian People, or
FRAPH, which operated in the early 1990s.

Attorney Brian Concannon said Michel Francois, the former police
chief of Port-au-Prince, partly bankrolled FRAPH. Francois, charged
in a 1997 U.S. federal indictment along with six others of smuggling
33 tons of cocaine to the United States for more than a decade, is
now a fugitive reportedly living in Honduras.

Bagley, of the University of Miami, said that whoever assumes power
now will have to face the powerful traffickers: "The reality is that
the state is weak; it has no money. The Haitian state doesn't
operate, and the authorities are very bribable.

"It's a country that's never been able to construct an effective state."

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