Haiti drug trafficking likely to rise in quake aftermath

By William B. Plowman for USA TODAY
Rescue workers pick through the rubble of a police station Jan. 14 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The 5,000 convicts who escaped the National Penitentiary after the Jan. 12 earthquake threaten to boost drug activity.

By Chris Hawley, USA TODAY

Chaos, a lack of jobs and thousands of escaped prisoners could cause drug trafficking to jump in Haiti, where cocaine already flows through and into the United States, law enforcement officials say.

The U.S. Justice Department says Haiti and the Dominican Republic are way stations for drugs coming to the USA from Latin America. The department says the number of drug planes landing in Haiti has been on the rise in recent years and may get worse in the earthquake's wake.
Capt. Peter Brown, who commands U.S. Coast Guard efforts in the Caribbean, said the smugglers are back at work after a brief break after the Jan. 12 quake.

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On Jan. 26, a Coast Guard cutter sent to help with relief found 360 pounds of cocaine and 46 pounds of marijuana on board a Haitian freighter.

Brown says the 5,000 convicts who escaped the National Penitentiary in Haiti threaten to boost drug activity. About 1,000 of the escapees are members of gangs with drug ties, said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group, a Belgium-based research foundation.

"We're prepared and alert to the possibility that as Haiti is reconstructed, criminals might try to use it as a transit point," Brown said.

That could be a major setback for Haiti, where President René Préval has called drug trafficking a major threat to the country's stability.

"The chaos and desperation that have set in provide an opening that trafficking organizations will undoubtedly seek to exploit," said Cindy Arnson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank that studies national and world affairs.

At least 12 Haitian officials, including the former national police chief, the former head of presidential security and the ex-president of the Senate, have been convicted in U.S. courts since 2004 on charges of aiding drug smugglers.

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The leader of the 2004 uprising against former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Guy Philippe, is wanted by the Drug Enforcement Agency on cocaine-smuggling charges.

Drug traffickers were also behind riots in April 2008 in the city of Les Cayes, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.

Haiti is a "major transit country" for drugs: There are more than 1,100 miles of mostly unpatrolled coastline and at least 29 clandestine airstrips, the U.S. State Department said in a 2009 report.

The Haitian coast guard has only two patrol boats.

Drug planes and speedboats deliver shipments of cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia, according to the report. The drugs are then taken to Port-au-Prince or the north coast, where freighters transport them to Europe or through the Bahamas and on to Florida, the report said.
Some cocaine is taken to the Dominican Republic, which shares a 220-mile border with Haiti.

There, drug couriers smuggle it aboard flights to France, Germany or Spain.

In 2008, the U.S. military detected 23 suspected drug flights to Haiti and 91 to the Dominican Republic, and the numbers have been rising since 2006, according to the State Department.

Haitian roads are so bad that even when flights are detected, Haiti police can rarely get to the landing sites in time to catch the shipments.

"Haiti has always been a weak link against drug trafficking," said Ivelaw Griffith, an expert on crime in the Caribbean at the City University of New York.

"It's a grave situation, and it's going to get graver, because people are now going to be even more susceptible to whatever corrupting forces are out there," Griffith said.

The United States has pledged $7.9 million to improve Haiti's coast guard and anti-drug agency as part of the Mérida Initiative, a multinational anti-drug aid package.

Some say that is not enough given the earthquake.

"There wasn't much law enforcement to begin with, and now there's even less," said Robert Perito, director of the Haiti program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank that promotes conflict resolution.

"Right now we've got (foreign) military crawling all over the island," Perito said. "But they won't be there forever."

Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic