For the third consecutive year, the State Department has deemed that Haiti is failing to fully cooperate with the United States on anti-drug efforts. According to its International Narcotics Control Strategy report published in March, the Caribbean country remains a major transhipment point for Colombian cocaine en route to the United States.[1] Estimates indicate that on average over the last three years more than 10% of all the cocaine arriving in the United States passed through Haiti.
Each year the State Department reviews a list of major drug producing and transit countries, and failure to gain certification of full cooperation can mean the loss of as much as half of projected U.S. aid and the withdrawal of U.S. support in international lending institutions. In Haiti’s case, the dreaded “decertification” status was once again waived on the grounds that the penalties would do more harm than good to U.S. “vital national interests.” Yet, under the Foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Act, enacted in November 2000, no U.S. assistance can be made available to Haiti’s central government until two conditions are met. One is that the government resolve the continuing dispute over last year’s parliamentary election results. The other is that it fully cooperate with U.S. efforts to interdict illicit drug traffic through Haiti.
That huge amounts of cocaine are passing through the country is not in dispute, and in Haiti itself, the extent and effects of the trafficking are no secret. While domestic cocaine usage remains low, the appearance of armed gangs in urban areas and an increase in killings and violent crime, often involving large amounts of cash, is believed to be related to the drug trade. There have also been frequent local media reports that suggest many officers in the new police force are in the pay of the traffickers and may even be coordinating the trafficking logistics themselves.
On another level, the influence of the vast amounts of money spawned by this lucrative trade are plain to see in the huge luxury-home construction boom in the mountains above Port-au-Prince. A recent and sudden proliferation of gas stations across the country is a result of the same phenomenon. They are an obvious way for the traffickers to launder their money. And along Haiti’s southern coast—just a 430-mile speedboat ride from Colombia’s Caribbean shoreline—remote communities are undergoing startling transformations. Local people have become used to finding cocaine packages washed up on the shore or dropped from the air, and with the proceeds from drug sales they are buying motorbikes to replace push bikes, and outboard motors for their row boats. In place of the old shacks with palm-leaf roofs, new breezeblock houses are going up.
The State Department’s March 2001 report acknowledges Haitian government cooperation on drug interdiction operations in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard and other U.S. agencies. It also notes that counternarcotics-related legislation had been delayed by a parliamentary crisis since mid-1997, and that once in session, in August 2000, the new Parliament had responded positively to U.S. lobbying in favor of new anti-drug trafficking legislation.
The Haitian government, however, is taken to task for failing to take other “significant counterdrug actions,” such as the enactment of asset forfeiture and anti-corruption legislation and the expansion of the anti-drug unit of the national police. In addition, the government was criticized for showing “no increase in seizures of illegal drugs, including cocaine, nor in the number of arrests of major traffickers.”
Jaques Edouard Alexis, Haiti’s Prime Minister until February, reacted to U.S. criticisms by pointing out that the best way to tackle the problem of cocaine trafficking through Haiti would be for the United States to reduce its drug consumption.[2] Other Haitian officials say that it is unrealistic to expect the beleaguered Haitian police force to tackle the traffickers when it is hard pressed to contain an ordinary crime wave.
The failings of the judicial system—fresh from a five-year, U.S. funded and directed reform program costing $27 million—are also widely blamed. A BBC news dispatch in May 2000 cited an internal Haitian police report that revealed that not one person arrested on drug charges over the past five years had ever gone to trial.[3] Mario Andresol, head of the Haitian drug squad, told the BBC that his unit had arrested 94 people in the previous year and all had been released. “All I can guess is that they bought their way out. It’s not hard to do with wages as they are, compared to the money they can offer,” he said.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, elected head of state for the second time last November, has responded to U.S. concerns with a number of initiatives. In December, he agreed to an eight-point action plan with President Clinton’s special envoy, Tony Lake, that included a commitment to substantially enhance cooperation to combat drug trafficking. Since then, he has successfully pushed a Parliament dominated by his Lavalas Family party to pass new anti-money laundering legislation, and to accept the proposal allowing U.S. ships and planes to patrol Haiti’s coastline and interdict any drug-carrying vessels. Aristide’s press office also calls attention to Haiti’s admission in March to the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force, and that group’s “recognition of efforts already deployed by the Government of Haiti to combat drug trafficking and money laundering.”[4]
Such moves make little impression on the U.S. Congressional representatives, particularly Republicans, who have for some time alleged that members of Aristide’s inner circle are themselves involved in drug trafficking.[5] These rumors have long circulated in U.S. political circles and among Aristide’s opponents in Haiti, but it was not until last year, when Parliamentary elections returned a Lavalas Family majority, that more details began to appear in the U.S. media. US News & World Report and Newsweek reported unattributed suggestions that linked Dany Toussaint, a Lavalas Family leader, to the drug trade.[6] An article in Time magazine claimed that in April 2000 Toussaint had forced a police inspector general to quit the force after he cited more than 1,000 police officers for drug related corruption.[7] Toussaint, a former Haitian Army major and a longtime Aristide loyalist, ran for office as a member of the Lavalas Family in the May 2000 elections and was elected Senator from the populous Western department, an administrative area that includes the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The conservative Washington Times reported last year that Toussaint’s name appeared on “a classified list, now circulating in the Clinton administration and on Capitol Hill, of five prominent Haitians believed involved in drug trafficking.”[8] Others on the list supposedly include Medard Joseph and Jean-Marie Fourel Celestin, like Toussaint, both former military officers and both elected Lavalas Family Senators in May 2000, along with the then-police chief, Pierre Denizé, and justice minister, Camille Leblanc, who are accused of “facilitating drug smuggling through corruption—looking the other way and taking bribes.” Perhaps significantly, neither the United States nor journalists have presented any evidence to substantiate these claims. Toussaint dismissed the accusations as part of a Republican smear campaign to undermine the new Lavalas Family government, and sees them as a continuation of long-running Republican efforts to discredit Aristide.[9]
Ben Dupuy, leader of the left nationalist National Popular Party believes that “the whole question rests on unconfirmed rumors,” and recalls that 1991-94 military coup regime leaders, General Cedras and Colonel Michel Francois were allegedly “little cocaine kings, yet were provided safe-conduct to get themselves out of harms way.”[10] He questions the real motives behind the accusations, and, following the ratification of the accord allowing the United States to enter Haiti’s waters and air space, remarked wryly that it gave the United States “the opportunity to go after its political opponents in Haiti under the pretext that they are drug dealers.”[11]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Arthur is a writer and researcher specializing in Haitian affairs. He is the author of Haiti in Focus: A Guide to the People, Politics, and Culture (Interlink Publishing Group, 2001) and co-editor of A Haiti Anthology: Libète (Markus Wiener, 1999).
NOTES
1. “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report-Haiti,” U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, March 1, 2001.
2. L’Agence Haitienne de Presse (AHP), Port-au-Prince, March 3, 2000.
3. Peter Greste, “Haiti ‘weak link’ in drug chain,” BBC World Service News, May 16, 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_750000/7504340.stm.
4. “Action by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide In Furtherance of the 8-point Commitment Aimed at Resolving the Political Crisis in Haiti,” Office of the Foreign Press Liaison, April 7, 2001.
5. Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R.-N.Y.) Chair of the House International Relations Committee, speaking at a congressional hearing on U.S. policy towards Haiti in December 1997 said: “In a disturbing development, senior UN and U.S. officials stated that they would not be surprised if former Haitian Army officials, including key Aristide security aides associated with the Lavalas Family party, are involved with drug trafficking.”
6. Linda Robinson, “The Cocaine Connection: Amid poverty and political disarray, traffickers find Haiti open for business,” U.S. News & World Report, May 29, 2000; and Joe Contreras, “Haiti: A Shabby Epilogue,” Newsweek, November 28, 2000.
7. Tim Padgett, “Coke Floats,” Time, April 11, 2001.
8. Tom Carter, “Cocaine Furthers Setbacks in Haiti. Drugs Shipments Soar; Votes Tainted,” The Washington Times, August 6, 2000.
9. Joe Contreras, “Haiti: A Shabby Epilogue,” Newsweek, November 28, 2000.
10. Email interview with Ben Dupuy, May 5, 2001.
11. L’Agence Haitienne de Presse (AHP), Port-au-Prince, December 12, 2000.
