Haiti’s Nightmare: The CIA Cocaine & Columbia

The article linked below, featured at my former site was originally published in 1994. Republished in 2021 when Jovenel Moïse, the president of Haiti, was assassinated on July 7 at 1 a.m.

This article was included in a post that was not limited to the assassination as you can see by the url, featured below– Take note the Windward Passage is mentioned.

https://pennyforyourthoughts2.blogspot.com/2021/07/haiti-and-cuba-drug-running-windward.html

I’ve included additional external links to additional pertinent information

Excerpts from the Village Sun

BY PAUL DeRIENZO | It was a day before the scheduled return of Haiti’s exiled president, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, and it was clear that the October 30, 1993 deadline for a return to democratic rule in the western hemisphere’s poorest nation could not occur. Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who had been elected nearly three years before with 70 percent of the vote in Haiti’s first free election, was speaking to a packed session of the United Nations General Assembly.

In November 1989, Col. Paul was found dead after he consumed a traditional Haitian goodwill gift — a bowel of pumpkin soup. Haitian officials accused Paul’s wife of the murder, apparently because she had been cheated out of her share of a cocaine deal by associates of her husband, who were involved in smuggling through Miami.

The U.S. Senate also heard testimony in 1988 that Haiti’s then-interior minister, Gen. Williams Regala, and his D.E.A. liaison officer protected and supervised cocaine shipments. The testimony also charged the then-Haitian military commander Gen. Henry Namphy with accepting bribes from Colombian traffickers in return for landing rights in the mid-1980s.

It was in 1989 that yet another military coup brought Lt. Gen. Prosper Avril to power. Under U.S. pressure, Avril, the former finance chief under Haiti’s 30-year Duvalier family dictatorship, fired 140 officers suspected of drug trafficking. Avril, who is currently living in Miami, is being sued by six Haitians, including Port-au-Prince Mayor Evans Paul, who claim they were abducted and tortured by the Haitian military under Avril’s orders in November 1989.

According to a witness before Senator John Kerry’s subcommittee, Avril is in fact a major player in Haiti’s role as a transit point in the cocaine trade.

The latest news has…

The US flying people with valid passports out of Haiti?

The U.S. government said on Saturday that it is arranging a charter flight from Haiti to the U.S. for those with valid passports. 

DeSantis confirms flights into Haiti

“We don’t want to say anything too publicly about what exactly we’re doing until it happens,” DeSantis said. “It’s a very dicey situation. But we do feel an obligation to go in and help Florida citizens who were caught in the crossfire of a very difficult situation.”

Given the extreme exploitation of Haiti, I’m not assuming all of this is humanitarianism- I’d written numerous reports regarding missionaries kidnapping Haitian children and moving them through Dominican Republic and Clinton, inexplicably, intervening when the missionaries were arrested.

Cocaine Coup and the overthrow of Aristide

But the most disturbing allegations have been of the role played by the C.I.A. in keeping many of the coup leaders on the agency’s payroll, as part of an anti-drug intelligence unit set up by the U.S. in Haiti in 1986. Many of these same military men have had their U.S. assets frozen, and are prevented from entering this country because of their role in overthrowing Aristide, and subsequent human-rights violations, including torture and murders of political opponents, raising the question — was the U.S. involved in a cocaine coup that overthrew Aristide?

When thousands of U.S. soldiers went crashing into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega on December 20, 1989, the administration of President George Bush justified the action as a major victory in the war on drugs. The cost of that victory was played down in the rush of propaganda hailing a rare victory, in a war where the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t often seen.

The gunfire had barely subsided in Panama, and General Noriega was hardly settled into his new digs in a federal prison, when another battle in the war on drugs seemed won. In Haiti, decades of brutal dictatorship seemed to be passing, with the election of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to lead the Caribbean nation of 6 million. It was a time when dreams of a better future by Haiti’s impoverished people seemed within reach.

But it wasn’t long before the dream was transformed into a nightmare. Less than a year after the election, on September 30, 1991, Haiti’s army launched a ruthless coup d’état that forced Aristide into exile. The coup ushered in yet another period of military repression in Haiti’s tortured history — a history marked by twenty years of U.S. military occupation, beginning with the 1915 crushing of a popular revolt by U.S. Marines.

The O.A.S. imposed an embargo that failed to topple the coup leaders, but forced negotiations, brokered by the U.N. at Governors Island in New York last July. The coup leader General Raoul Cedras agreed to allow Aristide to return in exchange for an end to the embargo.

Yet as the date for Aristide’s return grew near, the military began a campaign of terror against their opponents. The killings peaked in the days before the scheduled return of Aristide, with the brazen murder of Antoine Izmery, a businessman and key Aristide backer, who was abducted from a cathedral and gunned down on a busy city street. Later, Guy Malary, Aristide’s justice minister, was also killed, and his body left by a roadside.

While the US was publicly expressing support, the CIA was openly running disinfo campaigns and possibly worse

President Bill Clinton publicly expressed his support for Aristide’s return to Haiti, and sent the transport U.S.S. Harlan County, with hundreds of troops, to insure the transition to democracy. But at the port where the ship was to dock, pro-military government thugs staged a demonstration, prompting the Harlan County to turn back

Meanwhile, the C.I.A. was openly running a full-scale disinformation campaign against Aristide. Ultra-conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a leading opponent of Aristide, brought C.I.A. analyst Brian Latell to Capitol Hill in October, to brief selected senators and representatives on allegations that Aristide had been treated for mental illness. It turned out that the time during which the C.I.A. report alleges Aristide was treated at a Canadian hospital falls within the same period that Aristide was studying and teaching in Israel. Latell also said he “saw no evidence of oppressive rule” in Haiti.

While Helms was a longtime backer of the brutal dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Democrats have their own ties to the human-rights violators and drug dealers who rule Haiti.

Former Democratic Party head and current secretary of commerce Ron Brown headed a law firm that represented the Duvalier family for decades. Part of that representation was a public-relations campaign that stressed Duvalier’s opposition to communism in the Cold War. United States support for Duvalier was worth more than $400 million in aid to the country, before the man who called himself Haiti’s “President-for-Life” was forced from the country.

This is an extremely lengthy expose- and it’s highly recommended you read it all- But let’s get to the importance of the Windward Passage– Location, location, location (see my response to Mark)

By 1985 the cocaine cartels began to seek transit points for the booming cocaine industry. A natural candidate was Haiti, lying just south of the Bahamas — another favorite transit route.

Haiti is particularly attractive to the drug smugglers because the most direct route from the Colombian coast to Florida lies through the Windward Passage between northern Haiti and eastern Cuba. Port-au-Prince is about 500 nautical miles north of Colombia and 700 miles southeast of Miami.

As coincidence, or something like that, would have it- Guantanamo Bay is located in eastern Cuba- You know Gitmo. Still open to the best of my knowledge Wonder why that really is?

The strategic importance of the bay—close to the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti that links the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea and Panama—

Since then the role of Haiti in the drug trade has grown, and the profits to the Haitian officials involved have skyrocketed. This may explain the difficulty Aristide experienced, during his short rule, in trying to interdict drug shipments.

Columbia, Cocaine and the Cartels

On April 21, 1994, a convicted Colombian drug trafficker, Gabriel Taboada, who is in the fifth year of a 12-year sentence in a Miami federal prison, fingered Francois at a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee

Taboada testified that Lt. Col. Francois collaborated in shipping tons of cocaine to the United States during then 1980s.

Taboada said he met Francois while he was in the Medellin, Colombia, office of drug king Pablo Escobar, in 1984. During a 30-minute conversation, Taboada told Francois he was a car importer. Francois, he said, asked “why wasn’t I in the drug business since the drug business made good money.”

Speaking through an interpreter, Taboada said: “I asked him what his business was and he said that at the time he was in Medellin arranging a cocaine deal.” Taboada said he later learned that Francois was chief of police in Haiti.

Taboada told the committee that the cartel “took planes out of Colombia and landed in Haiti, protected by the Haitian military. Michel Francois protected the drugs in Haiti, and then allowed the drugs to continue to the United States.”

Taboada also told the subcommittee that Haitian military figures often met Medellin cartel members in Colombia, including strongman Prosper Avril, who along with Francois, has long been linked to the drug trade in Haiti.

No doubt smuggling of all types continues to this day. This explains the abundance of and empowerment of gangs. The inability of any government to be effective. The degradation and exploitation of ordinary Haitians. All of this known to many in the US. Undoubtedly in Canada too. And worse still you have involvement of western intelligence agencies.-

Colonel Oliver North garners a mention in this older article-

Smuggling fuels wars. Wars fuel smuggling. It’s a vicious circle that ensnares so many innocent people. Haiti is a microcosm of the type of misery, corruption, that reigns globally.