On the second day of his return to Haiti––after living 11 years in the United States––22-year-old Patrick Etienne is overcome with emotion. The silent rivulets streaking his cheeks and staining his clean white T-shirt, however, are not tears of joy.
The day before, along with 36 criminal deportees and one man who was denied entry at the Miami airport, he was escorted by U.S. Federal Marshals onto a special plane of the U.S. Justice Prisoner Air Transport System and released into the hands of the anti-riot squad of the Haitian National Police. He does not yell––as several of his cell mates do––about his rights or the unsanitary and primitive toilet facilities here at the Haitian National Penitentiary where the group is being held. “Just wait till they see what’s waiting for them on the outside,” he utters in a barely audible whisper.
As Etienne describes the incident that has landed him back in Haiti––the injury he caused another motorist when, without a driver’s license, he took his mother’s car for a spin––anguish is visible in his young eyes. He does not know if he will see his parents and siblings or the modest comforts of their Miami home again.
He is embarrassed about the shame he will likely cause his relatives: U.S. criminal deportees are regarded as vile thugs in Haiti. Government officials and the press routinely blame them for increases in violent crime. I have a sense of morality,” Patrick tells me defensively. Struggling to keep his dignity as he wipes his eyes, he continues imploringly, “I just hope I can find work and that others can learn from my experience.”
Patrick Etienne’s fate illustrates a recent trend. Every year the United States deports thousands of foreigri-born youths with U.S. criminal convictions to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Growing frustration in the United States with crime and illegal immigration have changed the rules for all non-citizens, including legal immigrants. The immigration reform and antiterrorism legislation passed in 1996 now mean that one brush with the law––one strike––can put offenders out of the country in which they have spent most of their lives.
Enacted in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing––initially thought to be the work of foreign terrorists––and a media-hyped, crack-induced crime epidemic, the new laws have created two standards of justice for criminal offenders, one for citizens and the other for non-citizen residents. The 1996 laws strip federal court judges of the power to intervene when the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) discriminates, acts arbitrarily or even violates the law, effectively denying due process to non-citizens. “Moral turpitude” is now defined so broadly by the INS that it is possible to be deported for minor offenses like turnstile jumping or jerry-rigging cable TV. The INS deported 254 criminals to Haiti in fiscal year 1997. The figures for the first half of fiscal 1998 are roughly 35% higher.
As public institutions from libraries to schools are eroded by funding cuts, and the stepped-up wars on drugs and crime deluge the court system, overworked judges and lawyers routinely process cases with plea bargains rather than the slower and more costly determination of inncence or guilt afforded by jury trial. This is especially the case when poor individuals are charged with seemingly minor offenses. Some criminal deportees are legal immigrants whose youthful misdemeanors––like shoplifting or smoking marijuana––turn out to have borne harsher consequences than those of their U.S.-born friends.
Most nonviolent drug offenses and many misdemeanors have been retroactively reclassified as aggravated felonies by the INS, and the penalty can be deportation to a country in which the offender has never even set foot. In Haiti it is not unconumon to find deported youths who were born in the Bahamas and grew up in the United States. It is extremely rare to find any criminal deportees who have not served time for their crimes. In fact, upon completing their time served, some have been incarcerated in immigration jails for even longer periods before the INS scoops them up and sends them “home.”
Crime and punishment are big concerns not only in the United States, but throughout Central America and the Caribbean. The emergence of youth gangs beyond U.S. borders and rising rates of violent crime in countries as culturally distinct as EI Salvador and Haiti are routinely blamed on the burgeoning numbers of convicted criminals and gang members who are sent back from the United States each year. EI Salvador has responded to increased crime by suspending rights of habeas corpus and reinstating the death penalty. The Haitian government has recently begun arbitrarily charging some U.S. criminal deportees with crimes against the state upon their arrival and imprisoning them even though they have committed no crimes on Haitian soil. But the inflamed public frustration that in some areas has lead to wide support for vigilantism in response to crime may he responsible for an over-readiness to blame the deported Haitian Americans. Haiti, after all, had an orgarrized-crime problem long before the arrival of the criminal deportees.
Police Inspector Bazille Berthony, who works in the poor, crime-ridden section of Port-auPrince called Cite Soleil, says it is not U.S. deportees who are leading the gangs here. “Base Big Up, our largest gang, existed here in the Cite when I was a child growing up,” the 23-year-old inspector tells me. He adds that the leaders of Haiti’s most notorious gangs include corrupt cops drummed out of the newly formed Haitian National Police and former Ton Ton Macoutes as well as members of criminal families.
When I mention that a number of the U.S. military personnel with whom I have spoken claim that U.S. deportees are the brains behind Haitian criminal gangs, he shakes his head and begins laying out photographs of the gang leaders who have been arrested or killed in shootouts during his tenure. “None of these guys has ever been to the United States.,” he says slowly. “They operate in Cite Soled and hide out in Delmas. Their connections are to Haitian criminal elites, not American Jails.”
A high-ranking foreign police trainer whose experience includes training detectives in charge of anti-smuggling and narcotics units in Mexico and Lebanon agrees with Berthony. “There is neither the critical mass in terms of numbers of U.S. criminal deportees nor the organized gang structures among them to have the kind of significant impact on crime that U.S. gangs are beginning to have in Mexico,” he told me. “We just do not see it here like we do in other places.”
The fetid grey sludge that on drier days creates mucky lanes throughout the Haitian slum of La Saline swells into a knee-high filthy river outside the cramped quarters where Touche Caman, his girlfriend and their two children live. “If you think this is bad,” he shouts above the din of raindrops pelting his metallic roof, “just wait till I take you to see the sewage flowing through Cite Soleil. They say it takes a germ the size of an elephant to kill a Haitian,” he laughs sardonically.
Caman, a 28-year-old street tough who left Haiti at age five and grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, is one of my guides through the nether world of the Port-au-Prince slums. Caman is no angel. He spent three-and-a-half years in a U.S. prison on a drug charge before being deported to Haiti five years ago. Behind all his defensive theatricality, Caman’s eyes offer a complex and poignant vision of Haiti and of his immigrant American childhood.
“I’ll never forget the day my father made me wear my older sister’s hand-me-down jeans to school,” Caman tells me. First he was ridiculed by his schoolmates for wearing girl’s clothes and then was severely punished for being ungrateful when he tried to talk about his classmates’ reactions with his father. “My father would yell about how in Haiti children wore rags,” Caman recalls. “I just wanted to be like my American friends.”
When he was ten, Caman’s parents divorced and he was sent to live with his father in a Stamford housing project. But by his early teens their relationship had worsened and shortly after turning 15, Caman left home. An avid reader, he completed high school. But to survive, Caman began living a street hustler’s life and that eventually landed him back in his father’s country. Being sent to Haiti––the poorest, most deprived corner of the Western Hemisphere––is a harsh post-prison fate. “It’s a life sentence, like being sent to die in hell,” Caman remarks. “I used to see Haiti on TV and change the channel––all that poverty and violence. Who wants to go to Haiti? You want to go to Hawaii.”
Caman spent his first years in Haiti deeply depressed. He missed his family. He spoke no French and little Creole. Haiti shocked him. “Nobody ever told me about this stuff, child slavery, kids with huge bellies and diseases we have vacines for,” he tells me, his eyes widening. “You just can’t believe people can live like this. It’s not human.” Everywhere he looked Caman saw corruption and degradation. It was hard for him to feel pride in anything. “They told me this is a black country,” he says shaking his head. Observing the mulatto caste system based on skin color and the power of U.S. dollars, Caman concluded that “the only two colors that matter here are white and green.”
Touche Carnan is one of a handful of criminal deportees who formed a support group in early 1996. In Creole it is called Chans Altenativ (Alternative Chance). The program offers deportees, most of whom are coming straight from U.S. jails or INS detention, a fresh start and a bridge to understanding Haiti. Since its inception, Chans Altenativ has offered classes in Creole and French, computer skills, nonviolence training and life skills. It has helped some members with referrals to alcohol and substance-abuse support groups as well as clinic referrals for health and nutrition problems. For those without relatives in Haiti, the group is the closest thing to family.
Michelle Karshan, a U.S. activist and supporter of Haiti’s democracy movement, works closely with Chars Alternativ. Karshan has spent the past three of the four years she has lived in Haiti attempting to build a sense of community and hope among the deportees. She knows many Haitians are baffled about why she wants to help a group of outlaws who blew their chances in the land of opportunity, especially when there are so many innocent starving children in Haiti. But Karshan believes these “Americanized” Haitians have skills Haiti needs. She says that Haiti can offer these prodigal sons a sense of identity and a purpose beyond the alienating materialism of the street life most knew in the United States.
“Many of these young men are very bright, with strong English skills and more formal education than most Haitians, but they fall into a caste system,” Karshan explains. “When these guys first get here they feel they have been banished. They are traumatized by so much misery. How do you cope with Haiti when you grew up on U.S. television sitcoms?”
As for Caman, since becoming a founding member of Chans Altenativ, his outlook has changed. “At least we can help others understand where they are, learn from our mistakes and know they are not alone,” he says. For Patrick Etienne and the other 36 criminal deportees who arrived with him last March 24, the knowledge that they are not alone has been no small comfort.
Until last March, the Haitian government’s somewhat arbitrarily enforced policy for handling criminal deportees was to detain them for up to one week while fingerprinting, photographing and translating their U.S. criminal dossiers. But Patrick Etienne and the other deportees who arrived in Haiti with him were incarcerated for nearly four months. During that time the water system of the prison broke down, leaving all inmates at the mercy of visiting family members for access to water for drinking and bathing. Chars Altenativ helped the deportees make contact with their family members in Haiti and provided the families moral support to face the onslaught of negative press about the crimes committed by their deported relatives.
Most media reports emphasize the brutality of crimes committed by a few of the deportees––rape, murder, armed robbery. According to Michelle Karshan, who visited the detainees with several members of Chans Altenativ, most of the individuals in the group were first-time offenders under 25 years of age who had been charged with a variety of nonviolent drug offenses. An independent report by the National Coalition of Haitian Rights confirms Karshan’s characterization of their crimes.
Yet Haitian Prosecutor Auguste Brutus insisted in an interview with the Haiti News Network that incarcerations were needed as “preventive measures,” taken in order to keep “bandits” from increasing the level of crime and insecurity in Haiti. Preva Precil, a lawyer hired by Chars Altenativ to represent all of the 38 incarcerated deportees, successfully filed a petition against their illegal detention with the Port-au- Prince justice of the peace. In mid-July, shortly after the local press reported allegations by family members that court officials were demanding bribes of 5,000 Haitian dollars (about $1,700) for each prisoner’s release. they were suddenly freed.
According to Karshan there is a silver lining in all this. Charts Aftenativ has been able to continue its ongoing dialogue with the Haitian government about the treatment of criminal deportees. And for the first time there has been some public sympathy for the plight of deportees and their families. “In radio broadcasts about the illegal detention, people called in to say they thought it was wrong. That’s a step forward,” Karshan says.
Despite the nascent public sympathy, Haiti’s Prosecutor Brutus continues to take a hard line toward criminal deportees. He has responded to Chans Altenativ’s successful lawsuit by arbitrarily charging arriving deportees with plotting to overthrow the Haitian government or arms and drug possession. According to human rights activists in Haiti, two deportees are currently being held who have been charged with such crimes despite a lack of evidence, while other criminal deportees are released at the airport. It is widely rumored that those released have money to pay bribes. Many of the deportees I interviewed during two months in Haiti earlier this year reported having paid bribes for their release.
Chans Altenativ is currently training six of its members as paralegals to help the growing deportee community with a variety of problems––from recovery of property left behind in U.S. prisons to understanding their rights under the new Haitian Constitution. For youths like Patrick Etienne who are caught between the rigidity of new U.S. immigration and anti-terrovism laws and the Haitian government’s fear of crime and coup plots, Chans Altenativ offers a small spark of hope.
For further information on Chans Allernativ write: Haiti Parish Twinning Program, 208 Leake Ave., Nashville, TN 37205. Tel: (615) 356- 4454.
Email: altchrince@aol.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Donna DeCesare is a freelance writer and photographer based in New York City. She wrote “Children of War: Street Gangs in EI Salvador” in the July August, 1998 issue of NACLA Report.
