Haiti becomes drug distribution point

LA Times:

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 last two years. It accounts for more than 10% 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."

...

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.

...

"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. Local politicians in Haiti also offer protection to drug runners, he said, fostering transshipment in exchange for a share of the profits that can be doled out to impoverished constituents to bolster their clout.

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There is more.

The rule of law has always been an alien concept in Haiti. The ineptitude of governance on Haiti outstrips Zimbabwe in many ways. There has never been a descent government in Haiti since the French left and many would argue it was not too good before they left. The US has intervened often but no one wants to stick around and try to rule the mess that is Haiti. Perhaps we will have to devote some resources to interdict the drug trade that Chavez is facilitating in Venezuela. If we can determine that he is profiting from the trade, perhaps we can use a little lawfare against him.