SMUGGLERS SEE HAITI AS NEW GATEWAY FOR DRUGS

MALPASSE, Haiti - Three beefy men wearing wraparound sunglasses and
gold chains leaned against their SUV at this remote border crossing
with the Dominican Republic. As one of them muttered into a
walkie-talkie, four Haitian policemen pulled up looking like they
meant business.

The SUV's back hatch was opened. The cops eyeballed its load of
opaque plastic-wrapped bundles. One officer picked up a package the
size of a bread loaf, appraising its weight with his forearm.

Then the police and the bejeweled trio knocked fists in solidarity,
traded vehicles and drove off toward the Haitian capital,
Port-au-Prince. And thus ended the drug bust that wasn't.

Pandemic police corruption in Haiti is just one reason drug-running
through Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, has more than doubled over the past two years. It accounts
for more than 10 percent of illegal substances reaching the United
States and an even larger share of the volume destined for Europe,
U.S. and international agents say.

With counter-narcotics operations choking off traditional routes from
Colombia and Mexico, smugglers are finding unfettered paths in
lawless Haiti, where poverty, isolation and inept law enforcement
combine to provide traffickers a new path of least resistance.

"Why are they bringing it here? Because this is the weakest point in
the region," said Fred Blaise, a Haitian-born Florida police officer
serving in Haiti with the United Nations Stabilization Mission.

"Haiti doesn't have helicopters. It doesn't have planes. It doesn't
have radar to even know what's coming and going."

A fledgling coast guard has been restored after a four-year hiatus
that followed the flight into exile of former President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and the chaos that ensued. But the force has few officers
and no speedboats. The 1,500-mile coastline is wide open to
smugglers' fast boats and airdrops.

"It takes only eight hours for speedboats coming from Colombia and
Venezuela to get to Jacmel," Haiti's police commissioner, Mario
Andresol, said of the southern port town of dilapidated gingerbread
houses. "Once the drugs get to Haiti, they can be loaded onto
vehicles and sent to Port-au-Prince, then north for the trip to the
United States."

Haiti has no army or border guard to patrol the 225-mile frontier
with the Dominican Republic. At best, a couple of police officers are
sometimes on hand at the four legal crossings.

From Malpasse, contraband can be dispatched across the enormous
saltwater Lake Azuei in fishermen's crude, black-sailed sloops, in
all-terrain vehicles that speed over denuded mountainsides into
gang-ruled central and northern cities, or loaded into dump trucks at
a roadside quarry that is abandoned but for the transactions that
traffickers make little attempt to hide.

Much of Colombia's cocaine now comes to the southern coast of
Hispaniola via Venezuela. Last year, then-U.S. Ambassador William
Brownfield said the volume flowing through Venezuela had quintupled
since 2001 to as much as 250 tons a year. That's a quarter to half of
Colombia's production.

The Joint Interagency Task Force of the U.S. military's Southern
Command tracked 81 unregistered flights from Colombia or Venezuela to
this island in the first nine months of 2007. The U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency reports that more vigorous surveillance of the
Colombian coastline has compelled highly adaptive smugglers to use new routes.

"There is always the balloon effect," said Vito S. Guarino, assistant
special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean Division. "Wherever
you put pressure, they go somewhere else." He estimates that drug
transshipment through the Caribbean is up as much as 30 percent.

Haitian or Dominican authorities are often tipped off about illegal
flights and voyages that have been spotted by the U.S. or other
nations, but local law enforcement officials are rarely in a position
to intercept them.

Haitian farmers and fishermen in coastal villages can be induced with
a few dollars to store drugs, guard makeshift warehouses or cart the
contraband to the next stop on the route, spawning local economies
that are becoming increasingly dependent on the drug trade, the
police commissioner said.

Narco-trafficking enterprises already are entrenched in central
Haiti, having cropped up along the one passable road from the capital
to the northern coast.

"We are looking for bandits and gangsters, but we are also finding
police and congressmen among them," said Andresol, who concedes that
he can't trust most of the 5,000 men on his force.

Andresol, an anti-corruption crusader who has made it his mission to
restore a conscience to Haitian law enforcement, said the November
arrest of a lawmaker from the central plains town of Maissade, Joseph
Willot, deflated his sense that interdictions this year had put a
dent in the island's drug trade.

Venezuela's status as a favored launch pad for illegal flights taking
Colombian dope toward its final market is the direct result of
extensive corruption in the armed forces of President Hugo Chavez,
foreign counter-narcotics officials say.