HAITI GETS ANOTHER LABEL: DRUG STATE

Signs of drug money are starting to pop up in a desperately poor country.

Mysterious planes land on deserted highways in the dead of night. Gleaming
gas stations sprout in a country where one in 70 people owns a car. Majestic
mansions rise, turrets looming eerily over sad slums.

Signs of drug money are growing in Haiti, one of the world's poorest nations
- -- supporting contentions by U.S. officials that the Caribbean island has
become a major conduit for smuggling narcotics into the United States.
Increasingly, ill-gotten profits are staying in the cash-starved nation,
fueling accusations that local authorities are tainted and toughening the
challenge for U.S. anti-drug enforcers trying to slow the drug flow.

Haiti accounts for 14 percent of all cocaine entering the United States and
"is now the major drug transshipment country of the entire Caribbean," said
Rep. John L. Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Subcommittee on Criminal
Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

With feeble local enforcement and a central location, Haiti is an ideal
crossroads. It is just eight hours by speedboat from Colombia, the main
cocaine producer, and an eight-hour journey from the United States.

Drugs flow through other Caribbean points as well, especially the U.S.
territory of Puerto Rico. But with the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy in charge
of policing that island's shores, and with better organized and equipped
authorities in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica trying hard to seal off
their territory, international attention increasingly is focusing on Haiti.

In January, U.S. Army Secretary Louis Caldera flew to Port-au-Prince to urge
President Rene Preval to take tough measures to fight drug traffickers.

Special Agent Michael S. Vigil, Caribbean chief for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, told a congressional committee in April that
"Haiti's weak democratic institutions (and) eroding infrastructure provide
South America-based narcotics traffickers with a path of very little
resistance."

Some 75 tons of cocaine moved through Haiti in 1999, according to the most
recent State Department annual narcotics report. That's a 24 percent
increase over 1998 and at least double the annual amount under the 1991-94
military dictatorship that monopolized the local drug trade and first opened
Haiti's sea and airports to Colombian traffickers.

That dictatorship was ousted by a U.S.-led invasion in 1994 that restored
Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Results for Haitian democracy have been mixed: elections this year have been
repeatedly postponed amid unrest and killings. And many say the country,
though freer, is more open than ever to the drug trade.

"Haiti is on its way to becoming a narco-state," said Ivelaw Griffiths, a
political science professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville, and
author of "Drugs and Security in the Caribbean."

The evidence cited for drug money investments includes gas stations and
other new businesses sprouting up in a stagnant economy. Also suspicious are
many of the dozens of mansions being built in gated communities on hillsides
overlooking the capital, says Gerard Pierre-Charles, head of Haiti's biggest
opposition party.

Haiti is used to transport drug profits for Colombian and Dominican
smugglers to New York, DEA officials say. But Haitians also are organizing
their own smuggling forces, buying their own drugs and laundering the
profits at home, say the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Many loads are dropped in bales from aircraft to Haitian villagers and
fishermen at sea. Some is then trucked to the Dominican Republic for further
shipping. Some goes straight to Miami.

Entire villages are said to profit. In March, a French family on a sailboat
anchored off Haiti's southern peninsula was attacked by villagers yelling,
"Drugs, drugs." They forced the boat to shore and, finding no drugs,
furiously set it ablaze.

The Clinton administration has been ambivalent about withholding foreign aid
as leverage. Haiti was recently decertified for not cooperating in the drug
fight, then granted a waiver because "assistance to illicit traffickers of
drugs and migrants" would increase with greater impoverishment.

Most DEA activity here focuses on helping Haitian officials seize money at
Port-au-Prince's airport, with $4 million seized in nine months, says Vigil,
the DEA's Caribbean chief. What slips through is taken by couriers into
Panama, and some to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, he said.

The drug issue is mixed up in Haiti's bitter, inscrutable politics.

Opposition politicians and some foreign observers accuse cronies of Aristide
- -- whose Lavalas Party still dominates, and who is himself expected to run
again for president this year -- of involvement in drugs.

Aristide refused requests for an interview. But Lavalas spokesman Yvon
Neptune dismissed the criticism as "political propaganda."

In Haiti's defense, Burt Wides, a U.S. attorney representing Haiti's
government, told a congressional committee in March that in 1998, more than
100 police officers were fired on suspicion of drug activity.

Despite corruption among police and other law enforcement officials, Wides
contended, it was unfair to conclude that Haiti's top officials are ignoring
the problem or themselves corrupted.

However, critics note that none of the dismissed officers have been
prosecuted. While dozens of drug-trafficking suspects were arrested last
year, not one was convicted, the U.S. State Department says. Many were
quietly freed from prison, often by government officials, judges and police
officers, according to Haitian government reports.

"Under the military, the drug trade at least was clandestine. Now it's right
in your face," said opposition leader Pierre-Charles.