21904: radtimes: Drug Traffickers Find Haiti a Hospitable Port (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Drug Traffickers Find Haiti a Hospitable Port

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/americas/16hait.html

By LYDIA POLGREEN and TIM WEINER
Published: May 16, 2004

CHEVALIER, Haiti - The riches that arrived in this tiny village came from
the sea - not in the nets its fishermen haul from the sparkling waters but
in an abandoned speedboat that washed up last year stocked with dozens of
hard, cellophane-wrapped bricks of Colombian cocaine.

"Everyone else was grabbing it, so I took some," said a 23-year-old
fisherman who identified himself as Vital. "I gave it to my father, and the
men came from Port-au-Prince to buy it for a lot of money."

The cargo taught this village of brightly painted houses on Haiti's south
coast what Haitian police and government officials have known for years:
the drug trade is one of the few ways in Haiti to amass a fortune.

This chaotic, impoverished country has been a bustling crossroads for
moving Colombian cocaine to the United States for at least 20 years. But
since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29,
investigators, diplomats and government officials here describe emerging
evidence of a state so riddled with drug money that it touched even the
presidential palace, through Mr. Aristide's chief of security.

What is still unanswered is whether those links reached Mr. Aristide
himself. A senior Western diplomat who has been briefed on a federal
investigation under way in Miami into drug ties in the Aristide government
said an indictment of Mr. Aristide might be "a couple of months away."

The former president denies any corruption, but the accusations against Mr.
Aristide represent the bottoming out of a long-ambivalent relationship with
United States.

The Clinton administration used force to usher Mr. Aristide back to power
in 1994 after he was pushed out in a coup. This year, as Mr. Aristide faced
a mounting rebellion in Haiti, the Bush administration provided him with a
jet to leave. "We're glad to see him go," Vice President Dick Cheney said.

Mr. Aristide claimed to have been kidnapped, and his supporters and others
say that the drug accusations are intended to intimidate the former
president and discourage him from trying to reclaim his presidency by
saying that he was illegally removed.

"It seems very much to be a politically driven enterprise," Robert Maguire,
director of programs in international affairs at Trinity College in
Washington and an expert on Haiti."Drug trafficking in Haiti has been
around a very long time. So why now? I think they may be using this as
leverage against him to marginalize his voice."

Professor Maguire said that the military junta that overthrew Mr. Aristide
in 1991, including its leader, Raoul Cédras, faced similar accusations, but
instead of prosecution got a comfortable exile in South America.

In any case, investigations into drug links in Haiti go back at least seven
years, and the accusations against the former president provide the most
vivid example yet of Haiti's growing importance as a drug link to the
United States since Mexico cracked down on smugglers.

Both American officials and Aristide supporters assert that the rebel
soldiers who helped push Mr. Aristide from power in February used drug
profits to pay for their revolt.

So much drug money was at stake in the power struggle that culminated in
Mr. Aristide's departure that Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University
of Miami who has studied drug trafficking in Haiti, called the rebellion
"basically a narco-coup."

"The battle was over who is going to control the drug trafficking and the
profits of the drug trade," he said.

Today, diplomats worry that the corruption of drug money has so infected
the country's fragile police force and justice system that it will now
contaminate the interim government, particularly as rebels with links to
the trafficking continue to jockey for influence here.

"Our biggest concern is the drug trafficking," the United States
ambassador, James B. Foley, said in a speech to Haiti's Chamber of Commerce
in Port-au-Prince last month. "With the departure of one regime that
maintained intimate relations with big drug traffickers," he added, "there
will be an effort to rebuild the networks, including by trying to
infiltrate and manipulate the police."

Since Mr. Aristide's ouster, American officials have begun tightening the
noose on members of the former Aristide government and assert that drug
money was "a cancer that infected every level of government," said a senior
Western diplomat briefed on the criminal investigation.

One possible link to Mr. Aristide, investigators and experts say, is Oriel
Jean, Mr. Aristide's chief of palace security who was detained in Canada in
March on immigration charges and then turned over to the American
authorities, who claim jurisdiction over traffickers, including foreign
nationals, trying to smuggle drugs into the United States.

Mr. Jean was charged in Miami with one count of conspiracy to traffic
cocaine. Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Miami now say he is
likely to face a new indictment as part of a wider investigation into drug
trafficking in Haiti.

An affidavit filed by the D.E.A., which was based on testimony by an
informant and unsealed by a Florida federal judge last month, said Mr. Jean
took a $50,000 payoff for each cocaine shipment arriving by plane in Haiti
over the last three years. The cocaine was then "smuggled into the United
States," the affidavit said.

Mr. Jean's lawyer, David Raben, said his client would plead not guilty to
all charges.

Another central figure in the Miami investigation of Haiti's drug links is
Beaudoin Ketant, a notorious Haitian trafficker who flaunted his wealth
with a gaudy $8 million villa and flashy cars and who boasted of his
connections to the government.

After years of intense pressure, Mr. Aristide's government, which American
officials now say was lax in its antidrug cooperation, turned him over to
American drug-enforcement officers last summer. Mr. Ketant, a crucial
contact in Haiti for the major Colombian cocaine cartels, was featured on
the television program "America's Most Wanted" in 2001.

At his sentencing on Feb. 25, four days before Mr. Aristide fled Haiti, he
received a 27-year sentence for shipping more than 30 tons of Colombian
cocaine to the United States. Mr. Ketant said in open court that he had
personally paid Mr. Aristide millions of dollars in bribes and that this
money bought protection for cocaine shipments passing through Haiti.

"The man is a drug lord," he told Judge Federico A. Moreno of the United
States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. "He controlled
the drug trade in Haiti. He turned the country into a narco-country."

The judge told Mr. Ketant: "I'm not sentencing President Aristide. He
hasn't been charged."

Mr. Ketant replied: "Not yet, your honor. You will be seeing him pretty soon."

Ira Kurzban, a Miami lawyer who represents Mr. Aristide, denied the
accusations, saying, "They have no evidence or any proof or anything that
will indicate Aristide was involved in drug trafficking because he wasn't."

He said the former government did its best to help American officials fight
the drug trade even as the United States and other countries choked off
support to Haiti's police force.

American officials say that at least 80 tons of cocaine was shipped through
Haiti in the Aristide years, and drug enforcement officials and diplomats
estimate that 8 percent of the cocaine shipped from Colombia to the United
States still flows through Haiti.

The State Department, based on information gleaned in drug investigations,
estimates that drug payoffs in Haiti - "transit fees" paid by Colombian
traffickers to corrupt officials - amount to about $1,500 a pound. State
Department officials say drug payoffs to Haitian officials during Mr.
Aristide's last three years in power amounted to about $250 million.

Diplomats and experts say the rebels who helped oust Mr. Aristide were
motivated in part by a desire to seize control of those payoffs. At least
two leaders of the revolt against Mr. Aristide are suspected by the United
States of trafficking.

Guy Philippe, the leader of the revolt, was investigated by American and
Haitian officials for drug trafficking before he took refuge in the
Dominican Republic in 2000, a senior Western diplomat said.

Mr. Philippe, who says he received American counternarcotics training in
Ecuador in the early 1990's, denies the accusations. A former police
official, he remains in Haiti and is trying to get hundreds of his soldiers
appointed to Haiti's police force. He is also hinting he may seek elective
office next year. "I am completely clean," he said in an interview. "I
never touched drugs. People who say that are just envious of my popularity."

Meanwhile, trafficking continues, especially in areas controlled by rebels.
In March, officials in Miami found 220 pounds of cocaine on a Bolivian
freighter that had left the rebel-held city of Gonaïves four days earlier.
Weeks later, American officials seized 130 pounds of cocaine on a
Panamanian freighter that had arrived from Cap Haitien.

Officials of the interim government say they are committed to fighting drug
runners, but the country's exhausted treasury has no money for more police
or equipment, though this week the United States and other countries began
committing aid dollars to the struggling appointed government.

Jean-Claude Jean, the newly appointed official who is responsible for
halting drug trafficking, said his department had just 51 officers and
little equipment. He bought a laptop computer with his own money to create
the country's first database of suspected traffickers. He held this job
once before, in 2002, but after nine months was suddenly transferred to a
desk job.

"If you are fighting drug traffickers and corruption, they wouldn't tell
you not to do your job, they would just transfer you," he said. "Everyone
knew who was a drug dealer - we all knew Ketant was a trafficker. But if we
wanted to arrest him we would have been killed."

In Port-Salut, Mr. Aristide's hometown, about 15 miles from here on Haiti's
southern coast, a police inspector, Jean Octave, said his officers were
aware of a drug trafficking operation at a grassy airstrip in the city but
were helpless to stop it.

"We are just six men," he said. "We have no cars, no motorcycles, no
bulletproof vests, no way to keep records. We would like to fight it, but
we cannot."

Kathie Klarreich contributed reporting from Miami for this article.

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