ADDICTED TO HAITI

IN 1999 I made a day trip from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince,
up to the wanly charming town of Kenscoff, a couple of hours drive
into the mountains. I'd done this journey before, but not in several
years, and as the road wound upward I couldn't help being astonished
by the sprawling mansions that had taken over the hillsides.

Where this road had once offered peaceful views of terraced fields,
patches of forest, clusters of modest farmhouses, there now hulked
villa after mind-boggling villa, as if the McMansions from Dallas's
flat-as-a-pancake suburbs had been transplanted to the mountains
overlooking Port-au-Prince. Had oil been discovered in Haiti? As
every turn revealed new vistas of architectural bombast, my Haitian
friend in the passenger seat was shaking his head, muttering the same
word over and over:

Drogue. Drugs.

Since Haiti's devastating earthquake, much attention has been
focused, rightly so, on the convergence of economic, political and
cultural forces that rendered the country so vulnerable to this
catastrophe. Many have looked to the past for guidance, and recent
weeks have given us earnest and often perceptive analyses of Haitian
history, reaching back to its brutal colonial origins, its proud,
improbable and staggeringly violent war of independence, and
continuing on through the next 200 years of mostly miserable
governance, that depressing catalog of revolts, coups, betrayals and
interventions -- usually aided, if not procured outright, by foreign
powers -- that drained Haiti of so much of its wealth and promise.

But if Haiti is to be rebuilt, or not merely rebuilt but transformed,
then drug trafficking needs to be recognized for what it is, a
primary force -- arguably, the dominant force -- in Haitian political
life for the past 25 years.

A 1993 memo, written by John Kerry as the chairman of the Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations,
asserted that "there is a partnership made in hell, in cocaine, and
in dollars between the Colombian cartels and the Haitian military."
At the time, Haiti was well on its way to becoming the Caribbean's
leading transshipment point for cocaine entering the United States
from South America, and while the individual actors may have changed
in the years since then, the partnership has continued to thrive.
Today, drug trafficking is a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise in
Haiti, generating tremendous profits in a country where most people
survive on a few dollars a day.

In any country, this kind of wealth would provide ample incentive and
means for acquiring power, but in Haiti the drug trade exerts an
influence out of all proportion to other sectors of society. The
narrative of Haitian politics since the fall of the Duvalier regime
in 1986 closely tracks the rise of drug trafficking. As Haiti
struggled to hold elections in the years immediately after President
Jean-Claude Duvalier's ouster, compelling evidence pointed to the
involvement in cocaine trafficking of Col. Jean-Claude Paul and other
high-ranking officers, a faction of the Haitian military that was,
perhaps not coincidentally, especially pitiless in its suppression of
the democratic movement.

The military continued to be closely linked to the drug trade during
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's brief first turn as president, cut short by
the coup of Sept. 30, 1991, and little changed after his ouster.
Indeed, Port-au-Prince's chief of police, Lt. Col. Joseph Michel
Francois, emerged as the next key man in Haitian drug trafficking,
presiding over a notorious network of soldiers and paramilitary
attaches that, in addition to expanding the country's drug trade,
carried out a ruthless program of political terrorism in which
thousands of Haitians were murdered.

Those years of intense repression coincided with Haiti's rise as the
region's major transshipment point for cocaine, a distinction it
maintained even after civilian rule was restored in 1994. By 2000, an
estimated 75 tons, or 15 percent of the cocaine consumed annually in
the United States, was being channeled through Haiti. Drug-related
corruption and violence became endemic during Mr. Aristide's second
term as president, with many in his inner circle -- including the
National Palace security chief, the director of the Haitian National
Police, the head of an investigations unit of the National Police,
and the president of the Haitian Senate -- eventually serving time in
American prisons for violations of American narcotics and
money-laundering laws.

At virtually every turn over the past two and a half decades, Haiti's
attempts to establish the institutions and standards of civil society
have been subverted or crushed, often with the hand of the drug trade
clearly evident. President Rene Preval's administration made greater
strides than any previous government toward true reform, yet progress
even before Jan. 12 was tenuous. The National Police remained a weak
and uncertain force; the judiciary was dysfunctional; government
ministries were highly politicized and rife with corruption; concepts
of transparency, human rights and the rule of law were fragile at best.

At present, there is no lack of debate on how best to go about
remaking Haiti. Plan better. Build better. Push for institutional
reform. Pour in many billions of dollars in international aid, with
stronger oversight, firmer resolve, greater involvement of the
Haitian public and private sectors. An opposing school of thought
says that aid should be cut off completely, forcing Haitians to take
ownership of their country's fate; only shock therapy can break the
enduring cycle of dependence, dysfunction and self-inflicted poverty.

Whichever way you lean, chances are that the power and profits of
drug trafficking will doom your prescription to irrelevance. Yes,
Americans have shown tremendous generosity toward Haiti since Jan. 12
- -- more than $20 million in text donations to the Red Cross, $57
million and counting raised by the Hope for Haiti Now telethon, the
private planes stacked up at airports in southern Florida, waiting
for a landing slot in Port-au-Prince. That's the part of the story
that makes us feel good.

Then there's the other part. The United States leads the world in
cocaine consumption, which means there is a line that goes straight
from our stupendous drug habit back to the conditions in Haiti, all
those years of toxic governance that set the stage for so much
destruction, so much death and injury.

So it's come to this: the richest country in the hemisphere and the
poorest, the first republic and the second, trapped together in the
New World's most glaring modern failure, the war on drugs. It would
be naive to hope that Americans will quit their cocaine any time soon
for Haiti's sake. But it would be equally naive not to recognize this
huge obstacle standing in Haiti's way, and the role we've played in
creating it. Our aspirations for Haiti lead straight through our addictions.