HAITI'S BUSINESS IS DRUGS

The international community froze all loans to Haiti in 1997 because of the
countrys political turmoil. This May President Mejia of the neighbouring
Dominican Republic appealed for aid to be resumed since its discontinuation
is affecting not only Haiti but the whole region. As the political vacuum
grows, the mafia is expanding to fill it: the traffic in drugs has
increased more than threefold in the space of four years, adding to Haitis
already disastrous image.

Gallimards new, lavishly illustrated guide to Haiti (1) paints an enticing
picture of the pearl of the Caribbean, as it was called in the 17th
century. But when you arrive theres not a tourist to be seen: just a few
transient expats. The island has never been in such bad shape socially and
economically, never had a worse political image in the outside world:
widespread poverty, neglect, desertion, dilapidation, shipwreck, collapse,
calvary, chaos, apocalypse. The press runs the gamut of metaphors, biblical
and non-biblical. After 15 years of transition to democracy and
international dithering, some people are even beginning to look back with
nostalgia to the good old days of Jean- Claude Duvalier and his puppet
government.

The ruling class has a splendid, almost unrivalled history of
irresponsibility a year and a half (June 1997-December 1998) with no
government, a year and a half (January 1999-May 2000) with no parliament,
followed by a year of elections and recriminations.

Meeting the principal actors, especially those rejected at the polls, many
of them from the best international schools, one is astonished by the
unconscious contempt for the most deprived people in the Americas.
Insecurity is growing, hand in hand with the erosion of freedom. The army
was officially abolished by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995 but
now the opposition, a small and ill-assorted band popular with the
diplomatic community, is calling for it to be reinstated.

The elections on 21 May last year, designed to restore all the countrys
institutions, were highly questionable as to form, but indisputable as to
content: an overwhelming victory for Aristides party, the Lavalas Family.
Paradoxically it has accelerated the countrys decline and accentuated its
isolation. International aid has been largely suspended for the past four
years and is sorely missed. It was equivalent to the countrys entire
budget, which is only just enough to pay state employees, late, and raise
the 20% required to service the national debt, on time.

So much for the first of the three pillars supporting of the top-down,
essentially informal Haitian economy, which exports five times as much as
it imports. All that now remains of international aid is a vital but
unsupervised contribution from the non-governmental organisations. There
are more than 250 of them in the country, and a string of American
organisations, offshoots of religious cults, sometimes keener to recruit
new members than help national development.

The second pillar, the diaspora, contributes even more to the subsistence
economy. The two million Haitians in New York, Miami, Montreal and the West
Indies produce close on $1bn, three times the state budget. At the same
time the success of this community encourages the exodus of boat people and
the brain drain.

The third pillar is drugs. The island is neither a producer nor a consumer,
yet a sixth of the cocaine entering the United States, mainly via Florida,
comes from Haiti. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the
figures for 2000 were a record, higher than those notched up under the
military junta between 1991 and 1994. The latest US State Department report
estimated that 67 tonnes of cocaine from South America passed through Haiti
in 1999, compared with an estimated 54 tonnes in 1998, in other words 15%
of all the cocaine entering the US (2). The amounts intercepted are minute.
Haiti is becoming one of the safest trade routes.

Godsend for the traffickers

It is in the ideal position, midway between Colombia and Florida, with
1,500 km of coastline, its airspace free of surveillance. It is also an
absolutely typical rudderless state, riddled with corruption and dirt cheap
a failed state, a state with no future, according to Clintons Secretary of
State, Warren Christopher, only too eager to leave it to its fate. It is a
godsend for the Colombian drug traffickers comfortably installed in the
luxurious El Rancho hotel in Petionville, a smart residential suburb of
Port-au-Prince, a hotel that doesnt seem to belong in Haiti, the only one
where the staff speak Spanish.

The cocaine comes in from more or less everywhere, in fast launches or
light aircraft, and not always on the quiet. Thus last October a Colombian
plane carrying 400 kilos of cocaine landed on a lightly marked runway in
the extreme northwest of the island, near the Mole Saint-Nicolas. It was
destined for the local police, who were standing by to pick it up.
Intentional or unintentional? The local people got to know and claimed
their share. As they had elsewhere, in Grande Anse or near Les Cayes, a
little earlier on. It is almost becoming a habit. The police do not want to
share goods that are simply in transit. The peasants set up barricades,
capture the police pick-up and, of course, make off with the drugs. Fearing
the worst, the stout constabulary take to their heels. The pilot flees and
the plane is torched. A few days later, anti-riot police and civilians from
Port-au-Prince, not Colombia, arrive to recover what they can as best they
can, by negotiation or force.

The shipment leaves a few signs of added wealth to mark its brief transit.
Either by paying a percentage, or by private carriage to Port- au-Prince,
by boat, concealed in cargoes of charcoal. Beats sowing seed on stony
ground. The chief of police, Pierre Denize, could have despatched some of
the 40 men from his special anti-drugs squad. But he didnt. Trained by the
UN after the army was disbanded, most of the police are hand in glove with
the mafia. If you are posted to Miragoane, a little port that thrives on
smuggling of every kind, why should you keep your eyes peeled for $300 a
month when you can get 10 times as much for keeping them shut? And build
yourself a big house and have plenty of servants, your own generator and
four-wheel-drive.

Except in the capital, where the people suffer badly from the prevailing
insecurity, their attitude is ambiguous. In Miragoane, the illicit trade
creates a certain number of jobs in transport, doctoring the goods,
producing false papers, etc. and keeps the black market supplied. In Cap
Haitien, there are cache specialists who can fool US customs investigators.

Disillusion in the ranks

The bitterest pill for the international community is that it trained the
police in question. The force was originally 6,000-strong but there are now
fewer than 3,000. A few were previously dismissed on charges of corruption
under Rene Prevals presidency but many were recruited from the ranks of the
disbanded army and were consequently well used to embezzlement and dirty
work of all kinds. The result was that many good men left. The cohort
trained at Regina in Canada a hundred or so officers, a third of them
Haitian Canadians just fell apart when they came face to face with the
realities on the ground, weak government, closed political ranks and a
pernicious judicial system. Crazy orders to do nothing when we are called
out; extortion of those we arrest; transfers for no apparent reason; paid
surveillance of private houses. The opposite of all we had been taught. I
was ashamed, says Gerard, one of the latest to resign.

There is not one policemen on the beat, and just a few to be found in the
police stations. A third of the force is posted to special elite units
answerable to the presidents office. They continue to draw their pay while
working for one of the many private police agencies. A regular police
uniform may be a rare sight in Port-au-Prince but there are crowds of armed
militia on the streets, in banks and standing guard over the big up-market
houses. Every little supermarket has its own man with an Uzi on his hip.

The fact is that service stations, supermarkets, banks, import-export
companies and above all luxury houses and four-wheel-drives are on the
increase. A small fraction of the drugs money is invested in the island but
most it finds its way to safe countries, particularly the US, and the banks
are fairly lax about enforcing the law that imposes limits on cash
transactions. Arrogant Petionville is full of easy money but little gets
into the pockets of the local shopkeepers or domestic servants. There is,
however, a boom in the building trade.

The massive UN presence after 1994 helped to diminish Haitis role as a hub
of the cocaine trade. But the police training scheme was not accompanied by
any decisive improvements in the system of justice or by the promised
economic boom. Dealers never stay in prison for long. Who could resist the
pressure of the narcos, the big families, the corrupt sections of the state
machine? The entanglements of Senator Dany Toussaint of the Lavalas Family
are just coming to light, wanted for drug trafficking by the US Justice
Department and accessory to murder in Haiti. Through a section of the
police force, drugs also affect other members of the legislature.

The jobs they create, the sums at stake (even locally), the links with
other forms of smuggling, the unexpected involvement of local people, the
money laundering, the indirect funding of a section of political life, the
expansion of building for the wealthy middle class, all combine to make
drugs an important factor in local economic life. Probably more lucrative
than the export of works of art to meet worldwide demand or products
assembled in the vicinity of the port, where the few businessmen have to
keep sniffer dogs to prevent unwanted extra cargo being loaded into their
containers.

The vast development programme announced for 2004, the bicentenary of
independence, is at present facing international sanctions. Without massive
support for development, including a complete overhaul of the machinery of
state, how can Haiti possibly afford to turn down the undisclosable
dividends of the drugs trade? Port-au-Prince has so little to recommend it
to the powerful neighbour that regards it with such contempt: nothing but
drugs, boat people and maybe solidarity with its own black community.

A treaty agreed by former President Preval in 1997 gives US special forces
full rights to act in Haitian territorial waters and airspace with no
restrictions. But the US coast guards are much more zealous about catching
the boat people in their wheezy old craft than chasing the speed boats from
Colombia. The CIA has agents in the police force, itself partly trained in
the US. A specially trained local unit is stationed on the Dominican border
but this does not stop the flow of migrants from Haiti 100 to 200 a day or
the shipments of snow from Haitian to Dominican ports.

Haiti did not get its annual certificate of good conduct from the US
government last year. It does not actually appear on the list of
narco-states. However, the new Republican administration, which was against
the action to restore President Aristide in 1994 and has little interest in
development, might well take that step. What, after all, is Haiti if not a
convenient scapegoat to distract attention from the inconsistency of the US
as it conducts a war on drugs and simultaneously presses on with its
programme of liberalisation?

This is all the more reason for Aristide to start taking measures in his
second term in office to reverse the heavy police involvement. It is up to
him to remind the police that their proper task is to guarantee freedom and
combat crime. And, indeed, since January the Miami customs authorities seem
to be better informed (3) and seizures are a distinct improvement on
previous results. Nonetheless, it is likely that the peasants in
Port-de-Paix and dockers in Miragoane will be looking to the drugs trade to
help line their pockets for some time to come, and the drugs barons in the
El Rancho hotel will still have a place by the pool.

Footnotes:

Christophe Wargny is a senior lecturer at the Conservatoire national des
arts et metiers (CNAM), Paris

(1) Haiti, Guide decouverte, Gallimard, Paris, 2001.

(2) Statement by Madeleine Albright, reported by Reuters, 3 January 2000.

(3) Miami Herald, 16 January 2001, and Associated Press, 1 February 2001.

Translated by Barbara Wilson