Coke Floats

By Tim Padgett/Cap-Haitien

Marnet would rather be a forklift driver than a cocaine trafficker. But Haiti has a lot more demand for the latter--especially in the northern port of Cap-Haitien, where Marnet, 29, watched this fall as his one honest meal ticket, the U.S. Army, shipped home the last of its intervention forces. "I may have to join my friends and be a welder," he said--not just any welder but a narco welder, who refits ships to hide drugs. Marnet walked to a cargo vessel, where two large generators powered the torches he said his pals were using to solder double hulls and other secret compartments. On a matchbox, he drew the designs they were following. He then pointed to their nearby bosses, who were opening Samsonite suitcases stuffed with cash in full view of police on the dock. "The sun is very bright in Haiti," Marnet said sarcastically. "It makes it hard for the police to see these things."

U.S. politicians can see them from Washington. They just can't do much about the situation. When the Americans ousted Haiti's brutal military regime in 1994, they aimed to bring order and normality to the impoverished Caribbean state. U.S. peacekeeping forces restored Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency to which he had been freely elected in 1990. They sank almost $100 million into Haiti's police and judiciary. But today Haiti is as lawless as it is destitute. A breakdown in America's alliance with Aristide, who left office in 1996, helped create the kind of power vacuum drug lords love to fill. Now, after easily winning the presidency again last week, can Aristide do much about the problem?

It may be too late. Haiti, perfectly situated between Colombia and Miami, has become the Yankee-proof drug-trafficking nexus the Colombian cartels have long dreamed of, a place whose police corruption and judicial void make U.S. interdiction efforts all but futile. "There is no institutional [structure] there for us to work with," says U.S. Customs Service commissioner Raymond Kelly. "Everything is broken."

Drug trafficking is hardly new to Haiti. But in the past few years, say U.S. officials, the cocaine cruising through the country has leaped from less than 5% of the total bound for the U.S. to more than 15%--amounting to almost six tons a month. When U.S. forces entered Haiti six years ago, they helped create a new civilian police force and coast guard. But the fledgling, threadbare agencies are a laugh to the cartels. U.S. officials, citing Haitian inspector general reports on officer misconduct, estimate that 85% of police supervisors--including four in Cap-Haitien who were recently caught with their own bulging satchels of dope cash--are in the pockets of traffickers. The Haitian coast guard has made a few impressive busts in recent years, but it has fewer than 100 men and about 10 ships--some of the best of which are fast Colombian cigarette boats that agents have seized from dealers.

The crisis casts doubt on whether U.S. efforts to build democratic institutions in Haiti were serious--or just the latest of Washington's half-hearted repair jobs in its own hemisphere. "This sort of reform carries a time span of 20 years minimum, not six," says Haitian national police director Pierre Denize, who has fewer than 50 drug agents, no radar to detect smuggling boats or planes and often stingy intelligence from U.S. agents still wary of him and his force. "If the U.S. spent as much on Haitian police as it does stopping Haitian boat people, we could build some trust." Says prominent business consultant Lionel Delatour: "It looks very unlikely that the U.S. will invest enough here to avert disaster."

Washington complains in turn that it is seeing too little return and too much dirt on its investment. "No amount of U.S. assistance will restore credibility" to Haiti's cops, says Representative Benjamin Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee. His views are echoed by the nonpartisan U.S. General Accounting Office, which recently concluded that "the key factor" in the failure of U.S. antidrug efforts in Haiti has been the government's "lack of commitment."

Both the Clinton Administration and U.S. congressional leaders blame Aristide. His relations with Washington soured in 1996 when the U.S. insisted his first term had expired, even though he had spent most of it in exile. (Haitian law prohibits consecutive presidential terms.) Many Western diplomats in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, say that was a mistake, since Aristide, despite his volatility, could have lent his immense popularity among Haitians to the police-building effort. His critics charge that Aristide's powerful Fanmi Lavalas Party is gripped by narco pols, which Aristide denies. They accuse Dany Toussaint, head of the Haitian Senate's public-security committee, of using Lavalas thugs to bully police inspector general Luc Eucher Joseph into quitting last April, after he had cited more than 1,000 cops for corruption, a charge Toussaint denies. And opposition leaders--many of whom, angry over alleged Lavalas-engineered fraud in Senate elections last May, boycotted last week's presidential race--decry this year's spate of assassinations of corruption critics, notably radio commentator Jean Dominique last April.

Not everyone in the U.S. is ready to write off Haiti as a lost cause. Kelly, who once advised Denize's force, is lobbying Congress for more resources. "Mr. Denize," the customs commissioner says, "is doing the best he can. It will be up to Mr. Aristide now to turn things around." Denize's cops nabbed a Colombian capo last summer. They handed him over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which lauded the collar as proof of the potential for cooperation. "Despite all the pessimistic talk, [Haitian police] will allow us to work there," says Sam Meale, the DEA's acting chief in the Caribbean. So, it seems, will the Haitian coast guard.

Still, most of the coke that is shipped out of Haiti gets through to the U.S.--about 80%, according to U.S. agents. Over the past year, customs cops on the Miami River seized a record 7,200 lbs. of cocaine, most from Haitian ships, four times as much as in the previous year. Haiti's imaginative narco welders have forced an inspection revolution. Customs teams often spend days dismantling keels, engine rooms and even onboard septic tanks and voodoo shrines that have yielded as much as 1,100 lbs. of coke at a time. "We've never seen the Colombians use a vessel's structure this way," says Miami customs supervisor Tom Stefanello over the racket of his agents' riveters.

The cash flowing back in the Samsonites is so lavish that money-wiring agencies in Port-au-Prince post signs limiting transfers to Colombia to $1,000. Haiti, of course, has no money-laundering laws. The money is fueling a grossly incongruous boom in luxury-home construction in Port-au-Prince and, say locals, paying for a glitzy new shopping center in more impoverished Port-de-Paix. The mall was built by Michel Oreste, 70, whom Haitian officials describe as a modern-day successor to the buccaneers who once controlled the northern coast. Oreste denies involvement in drugs, and while Haitian police say they fear that drug money is filtering into his businesses, he is not suspected of drug trafficking. "But I have many friends here involved in that business," he says, smiling to reveal a lone lower tooth that juts out like a tusk. Is their narco cash invested in his mall? Says Oreste: "My conscience is clear."

Poorer Haitians are less subtle. So far, the only troubles Colombian traffickers have had in Haiti are the frenzied crowds who sometimes ransack their boats and planes upon arrival, hoping to grab some cocaine they can sell back in their shantytowns--at cut-rate prices that would give a drug lord heart failure. European tourists who recently came ashore in sailboats were beaten by mobs because their vessels contained no dope. Diplomats already call Haiti a failed state. But scenes like these are earning the country the brand of something worse: a narco state.

--With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/Port-au-Prince and Massimo Calabresi/Washington

With reporting by Kathie Klarreich/Port-au-Prince and Massimo Calabresi/Washington