30231: Bick: (reply/ask) RE: 30219: (news) Chamberlain: Drugs in Haiti in DR (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

paulbick@msn.com



Hey all,

I'm looking for more information on Haiti's role as a transship site for
South American drugs en route to the US.  We usually think of "illicit
flows" in terms of porous border regions, movements of commodities on the
ground, the relationship between the "legal" and the "licit," etc..  but,
what actually -happens- in Haiti?  What exactly does the "transship" process
look like?  Obviously, large shipments are broken into smaller units for
targeted redistribution and easier smuggling...and the process leaves both
money and drugs in Haiti, but how?  Where?  Who orchestrates this process?
What does the network look like?  Where does the money go? How does Haiti as
"transship site" rearticulate other big ideas like "security," "poverty",
"justice," even "class" or "race"?

There are of course, the usual hazy suspects - in the hills above Port, and
in the halls of corrupt government... but "failed state" and "corrupt elite"
have become floating signifiers in Haiti - catch-phrases that obscure more
than they illuminate (like "poorest country in the hemisphere").  The
intertwining discourses of poverty and illicit flow seem designed to
normalize and reproduce an "intractable situation" rather than clarify or
unpack anything - much less staunch these flows...

This Katz article is fascinating in that it cites such specific government
figures.. How is it, for example, that the state department "knows" that 9%
of US cocaine comes through Haiti, or that drug flights from Venezuela have
increased 162% in 2006?  If these very precise figures are tied to real
"knowledge," rather than simple, informed speculation (or worse), it seems
that governments know too much to be so ineffective in their interventions.
And yet, as I understand it, the industry has never been as robust as it is
today.