A Way Station For Dope, Haiti Again Gets The Wrong Kind Of Interference

For 10 years, the Haitian militaryhad been deeply involved in trafficking drugs from the Colombia cartels. Kerry's subcommittee on terrorism heard Gabriel Taboada, a former Medellin cartel operative, testify that "the cartel used Haiti as a bridge so as to later move the drugs toward the United States."

Haitian military leaders, including the then head of the government, Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, along with Port-au-Prince police chief Joseph Michel François and army chief Philippe Biamby, even traveled to Colombia to meet with top cartel dealers.

At the time, just before Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to take up the presidency, there was speculation in Washington that Clinton's Justice Department would indict these major figures in a Noriega-style bust. But this never happened, perhaps because airing the information would have compromised U.S. intelligence and drug enforcement operations in the area, putting agents at risk and wrecking ops aimed at bigger fish. Instead of a straight-up indictment, Clinton went for one of his trademark fishy solutions, setting up a team of arbitrators consisting of Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn, and Colin Powell, who negotiated—if that is the word—the flight of the ruling junta to safe haven in Panama. Drugs weren't part of the deal. And that was unfortunate, because among those who had attended the meetings in Colombia was Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, who, before Aristide, was head of something in the army called the civil-enforcement program. He later became the key figure in a death-squad gang called FRAPH. Alan Nairn, writing in The Nation, subsequently exposed Constant as a CIA asset in Haiti. On Aristide's return, Constant was arrested, jailed in the U.S., and then quickly released and deported back to Haiti. His current whereabouts are unclear, perhaps in Queens or maybe in Haiti. But he's bound to be behind the scenes in the planning of actions by the publicly identified rebel leaders, Louis Jodel Chamblain, a killer formerly in the army, and Guy Philippe, another army man. Whether Constant is still hooked up with American intelligence, who knows?

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