Edition: U.S. / Global

Drug Traffickers Find Haiti a Hospitable Port of Call

By LYDIA POLGREEN and TIM WEINER; Kathie Klarreich contributed reporting from Miami for this article.
Published: May 16, 2004

The riches that arrived in this tiny village came from the sea -- not in the nets its fishermen haul from the sparkling waters but in an abandoned speedboat that washed up last year stocked with dozens of hard, cellophane-wrapped bricks of Colombian cocaine.

''Everyone else was grabbing it, so I took some,'' said a 23-year-old fisherman who identified himself as Vital. ''I gave it to my father, and the men came from Port-au-Prince to buy it for a lot of money.''

The cargo taught this village of brightly painted houses on Haiti's south coast what Haitian police and government officials have known for years: the drug trade is one of the few ways in Haiti to amass a fortune.

This chaotic, impoverished country has been a bustling crossroads for moving Colombian cocaine to the United States for at least 20 years. But since the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on Feb. 29, investigators, diplomats and government officials here describe emerging evidence of a state so riddled with drug money that it touched even the presidential palace, through Mr. Aristide's chief of security.

What is still unanswered is whether those links reached Mr. Aristide himself. A senior Western diplomat who has been briefed on a federal investigation under way in Miami into drug ties in the Aristide government said an indictment of Mr. Aristide might be ''a couple of months away.''

The former president denies any corruption, but the accusations against Mr. Aristide represent the bottoming out of a long-ambivalent relationship with United States.

The Clinton administration used force to usher Mr. Aristide back to power in 1994 after he was pushed out in a coup. This year, as Mr. Aristide faced a mounting rebellion in Haiti, the Bush administration provided him with a jet to leave. ''We're glad to see him go,'' Vice President Dick Cheney said.

Mr. Aristide claimed to have been kidnapped, and his supporters and others say that the drug accusations are intended to intimidate the former president and discourage him from trying to reclaim his presidency by saying that he was illegally removed.

''It seems very much to be a politically driven enterprise,'' Robert Maguire, director of programs in international affairs at Trinity College in Washington and an expert on Haiti.''Drug trafficking in Haiti has been around a very long time. So why now? I think they may be using this as leverage against him to marginalize his voice.''

Professor Maguire said that the military junta that overthrew Mr. Aristide in 1991, including its leader, Raoul Cédras, faced similar accusations, but instead of prosecution got a comfortable exile in South America.

In any case, investigations into drug links in Haiti go back at least seven years, and the accusations against the former president provide the most vivid example yet of Haiti's growing importance as a drug link to the United States since Mexico cracked down on smugglers.

Both American officials and Aristide supporters assert that the rebel soldiers who helped push Mr. Aristide from power in February used drug profits to pay for their revolt.

So much drug money was at stake in the power struggle that culminated in Mr. Aristide's departure that Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who has studied drug trafficking in Haiti, called the rebellion ''basically a narco-coup.''

''The battle was over who is going to control the drug trafficking and the profits of the drug trade,'' he said.

Today, diplomats worry that the corruption of drug money has so infected the country's fragile police force and justice system that it will now contaminate the interim government, particularly as rebels with links to the trafficking continue to jockey for influence here.

''Our biggest concern is the drug trafficking,'' the United States ambassador, James B. Foley, said in a speech to Haiti's Chamber of Commerce in Port-au-Prince last month. ''With the departure of one regime that maintained intimate relations with big drug traffickers,'' he added, ''there will be an effort to rebuild the networks, including by trying to infiltrate and manipulate the police.''

Since Mr. Aristide's ouster, American officials have begun tightening the noose on members of the former Aristide government and assert that drug money was ''a cancer that infected every level of government,'' said a senior Western diplomat briefed on the criminal investigation.

One possible link to Mr. Aristide, investigators and experts say, is Oriel Jean, Mr. Aristide's chief of palace security who was detained in Canada in March on immigration charges and then turned over to the American authorities, who claim jurisdiction over traffickers, including foreign nationals, trying to smuggle drugs into the United States.

Mr. Jean was charged in Miami with one count of conspiracy to traffic cocaine. Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Miami now say he is likely to face a new indictment as part of a wider investigation into drug trafficking in Haiti.

An affidavit filed by the D.E.A., which was based on testimony by an informant and unsealed by a Florida federal judge last month, said Mr. Jean took a $50,000 payoff for each cocaine shipment arriving by plane in Haiti over the last three years. The cocaine was then ''smuggled into the United States,'' the affidavit said.

Mr. Jean's lawyer, David Raben, said his client would plead not guilty to all charges.