20130: Esser: A Way Station For Dope, Haiti Again Gets The Wrong Kind Of Interference (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Village Voice [New York City]
http://www.villagevoice.com

March 10 - 16, 2004

Drug Through the Mud
A Way Station For Dope, Haiti Again Gets The Wrong Kind Of Interference
by James Ridgeway

WASHINGTON, D.C—It was the junior senator from Massachusetts, John
Kerry, who came the closest to exposing raw political power in Haiti
when he led a Senate foreign relations subcommittee's probe into the
drug trade during the early 1990s.

For 10 years, the Haitian military had been deeply involved in
trafficking drugs from the Colombia cartels. Kerry's subcommittee on
terrorism heard Gabriel Taboada, a former Medellin cartel operative,
testify that "the cartel used Haiti as a bridge so as to later move
the drugs toward the United States."

Haitian military leaders, including the then head of the government,
Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, along with Port-au-Prince police
chief Joseph Michel François and army chief Philippe Biamby, even
traveled to Colombia to meet with top cartel dealers.

At the time, just before Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to take up
the presidency, there was speculation in Washington that Clinton's
Justice Department would indict these major figures in a
Noriega-style bust. But this never happened, perhaps because airing
the information would have compromised U.S. intelligence and drug
enforcement operations in the area, putting agents at risk and
wrecking ops aimed at bigger fish. Instead of a straight-up
indictment, Clinton went for one of his trademark fishy solutions,
setting up a team of arbitrators consisting of Jimmy Carter, Sam
Nunn, and Colin Powell, who negotiated—if that is the word—the flight
of the ruling junta to safe haven in Panama. Drugs weren't part of
the deal. And that was unfortunate, because among those who had
attended the meetings in Colombia was Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, who,
before Aristide, was head of something in the army called the
civil-enforcement program. He later became the key figure in a
death-squad gang called FRAPH. Alan Nairn, writing in The Nation,
subsequently exposed Constant as a CIA asset in Haiti. On Aristide's
return, Constant was arrested, jailed in the U.S., and then quickly
released and deported back to Haiti. His current whereabouts are
unclear, perhaps in Queens or maybe in Haiti. But he's bound to be
behind the scenes in the planning of actions by the publicly
identified rebel leaders, Louis Jodel Chamblain, a killer formerly in
the army, and Guy Philippe, another army man. Whether Constant is
still hooked up with American intelligence, who knows?

Under Aristide, the drug trade reportedly continued to flourish as
living conditions grew worse and worse. The American intelligence
agencies, which never liked Aristide and portrayed him to the press
as a nutcase, did their best to straighten things out by setting up a
national intelligence service in Haiti. When Aristide managed to shut
down the army, the U.S. helped him create a weak national police
force. And the new intelligence service? It soon began trading drugs.

As for Haiti's economy, which the experts fuss over as if it were
some odd archaeological object, it's not all that complicated. It is
based on exports, which currently means assembled goods, which
produce little serious investment and leave the people either just
below or just above utter poverty. The place once had a sort of
sustainable small agriculture, which the best minds of the first
world determined had to go; it was re-geared to mono-crop exports.
That degraded the environment. American bureaucrats wanted things
their way. They lost it when a few Haitian pigs got swine flu and in
the bureaucrats' hysteria over making sure the sick pig meat never
got to U.S. shores, the bureaucrats insisted the Haitian pigs be
killed. Instead, the Haitians would get new, bigger, and better
imported American pigs. But American pigs wouldn't eat the garbage
that the Haitian pigs thrived on, and had to eat wheat-based,
vitamin-laced food. They were extremely expensive to have around, and
villagers began to fight with one another over who owned what pig.
The project was a disaster.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel, because the ruined
Haitian peasantry could move to the cities, live in slums, and work
in assembly factories. Aristide himself capped this situation by
accepting the IMF and other international banking terms for loans
through a restructuring that essentially promised more of the same.
What has happened in Haiti is not a failure of American policy
planners. It is caused by a disgusting and irresponsible group of
American politicians. Haiti is only of interest to American
politicians when they can get something out of it. Since the Haitians
for the most part are black and poor, that's not very often. The Bush
freebooters are bad, but the Black Caucus isn't much better.

The people interested in Haiti are few and far between. Among them
are members of Bush's favored base, the Christian right. And they are
appealing to the oligarchy that runs the place if only because
evangelicals offer an inexpensive solution: Footing the bill for a
wired-up preacher to get a couple of miracles out of a huge crowd is
a lot cheaper than building a hospital. But when Christianity runs
head-on into folk religions, as it often does in Haiti, voodoo can
sidetrack it. Voodoo becomes a defense against American values, and a
valuable aspect of Haitian resilience.

Additional reporting: Alicia Ng and Ashley Glacel
.