President Joe Biden has identified Haiti as a critical choke point for drugs flowing into the United States, naming it last month to a list of 23 countries designated as “major drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries.”
But even as South American cocaine and Jamaica-grown cannabis are running rampant through the lawless country, Biden’s own drug-fighting agency has decided to shut down its operations in Haiti.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has listed its Haiti field office among 14 foreign operations that the agency is shutting down, along with offices in The Bahamas and Nicaragua. The decision comes at the same time the U.S. leads a struggling international effort to restore security in Haiti, where violent gangs are spreading hunger and violence, and concerns are growing about the gangs’ collaboration with South American and Mexican drug cartels.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted by this news, to be honest,” said Luis Moreno, a retired State Department official who headed the narcotics-control office in Bogotá, Colombia, and once served as deputy chief the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Calling the DEA’s decision “shortsighted,” he added: “You can trace the violence in Haiti to the gangs, and how do the gangs pay for themselves? Everyone knows the Haitian gangs’ finances come from drug trafficking.”
A DEA spokesperson told the Miami Herald that the decision to close the office in Haiti and other countries was made following “a thorough review of our foreign operations, which was initiated in August 2021 and completed in March 2023.”
“DEA made a strategic decision to reallocate resources to focus on what matters most: saving American lives by attacking every link of the global synthetic drug supply chain,” the spokesperson said, referring to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has become a focus of the Biden administration. As part of the “data-driven” move, the spokesperson said, the agency will open two new foreign offices and close 14 existing ones.
The spokesperson would not say where the two new foreign offices will be established, though it has been reported they will be in Jordan and Albania.
Besides Haiti, the offices slated to close are: The Bahamas, Burma, China, Cyprus, Egypt, Georgia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Russia, Senegal and Shanghai.
Biden recently said he’s launched a global fight against fentanyl, which is fueling record number of overdose deaths and resulted in the arrests and prosecution of several high-level cartel leaders, drug traffickers and money launderers. He also called for “urgent action by countries in the region” on cocaine, which he said is at record-high production and cultivation rates in South America.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a security specialist at the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution in Washington., said she recognizes “the decisions have been driven by a set of factors that are overarching and specific to each place,” noting that Haiti has been a challenging security environment for agents. But she believes that the DEA “losing eyes on the ground” is not a good development.
She and other Haiti observers say the DEA should not have to choose between fighting fentanyl shipped from Mexico and China rather than cocaine smuggled through Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean.
Haiti’s powerful gangs are evolving, trading kidnappings-for-ransom for drug trafficking, she said. And just as high-caliber firearms are freely flowing into the country, so too are illicit drugs, and they are being moved across the country often with the help of gangs, she said.
“We clearly see some gang leaders like 5 Segond’s Izo trying to transform themselves into at least small regional cartels,” Felbab-Brown said about one of Haiti’s more prominent gangs. “Izo is openly going around calling himself a cartel leader. He drives around in armored vehicles with his territorial labels, and he has also invested intensely in building up a maritime capacity.”
Not having a DEA office in Haiti also affects the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against Haitian businessmen and politicians accused of having gang links, she said. In several cases, State Department officials have emphasized some of the sanctioned people’s involvement in drug trafficking.
Felbab-Brown said a DEA presence in Haiti means “more indictments can be made and there can be better detection on how sanctioned politicians and businessmen are adapting to the sanctions and working via proxies, brokers to deal with the gangs.”
Moreno agrees.
“Having the ability to have ears on the ground and to know what the movement is of trafficking and its connection to the gangs and to political corruption, I think that would be essential to everyone,” he said.
Drug traffickers are corrupting Haiti’s security forces as well as the political system, Moreno said. “We all know that the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse was directly connected with drug trafficking. I’m kind of flabbergasted by this news, to be honest.”
While two of the suspects in the investigation of Moïse’s slaying had once worked as DEA informants — and the Haitian Americans and Colombian commandos who stormed his house on July 7, 2021, impersonated DEA agents — the agency’s Washington office refused to join the U.S. investigation into the murder plot, instead leaving the inquiry to the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations.
A senior administration official said that he had not seen the specific report on the closure of the field offices. But the DEA’s presence, especially in countries geographically closest to the U.S., is very important, he said.
“I know that countries value it tremendously and it provides incredible value to the security of our partners around the region,” the official said. “A robust DEA presence throughout our hemisphere with our closest partners gives them confidence and reassures them that the American people are working to address the transnational crime that threatens them and eventually the drugs that come into our own countries through these cartel networks.”
U.N. role
In a July report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime described the connections between some of Haiti’s more prominent gangs and international organized crime groups as “diverse and overlapping.”
“Haitian gangs such as G9, 5 Segond, Grand Ravine, Baz Galil and 400 Mawozo oversee partnerships with international criminal networks, which in turn facilitate trafficking in firearms and drugs and people smuggling,” the report said. “There are suspicions that Haitian criminal groups have links to groups in Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.”
And while some people have dismissed the suggestion of a cartel operating in an environment as chaotic as Haiti’s, sources say they are increasingly finding evidence to the contrary. Boats and airplanes come and go undetected, and despite the chaos on the ground, corrupt politicians and others have founds ways to facilitate gang access to high-powered weapons.
In another report, the U.N. agency said gangs are exerting control over southern key routes and are smuggling into the Dominican Republic, where it is then shipped to other countries or sent straight to Florida.
‘Narco-state’
Haiti’s emergence as a “narco-state” began in the late 1980s, when Colombian cocaine smugglers paid local cops and politicians to help move tons of cocaine through the country.
In the early 2000s, smugglers‘ planes were still landing on clandestine air strips and even on major roads in broad daylight. At least a dozen Haitian and Colombian traffickers, Haitian government officials and Haitian cops were convicted on drug-related charges in the U.S..
Over time, however, the number of arrests went down, leading Haitian police officers, DEA agents and the Haitian president to question the agency’s commitment to cracking down on trafficking.
In 2015, a cocaine and heroin haul with a street value of $100 million on a Panamanian-flagged ship importing sugar led to the agency’s biggest scandal in Haiti, as two DEA agents accused the the Port-au-Prince office of corruption and collusion.
The case became known as “the sugar boat” and the agents claimed that thousands of kilos of cocaine and other drugs had been passing through the country undetected for years en route to the U.S. The whistleblowers’ accusations came as gangs and organized crime networks were growing stronger.
The supervisor in the DEA office, who was also accused of colluding with the former head of Haiti’s anti-drug unit, was removed. Two years after the sugar boat incident, the DEA’s new country director focused on restoring its credibility.
Over the next four years, the Haiti field office underwent a makeover as the new agent in charge made several high-profile arrests and extraditions, and investigated the smuggling of weapons as well as drugs.
Since 2022, however, the DEA’s office has struggled to make an impact. The COVID-19 pandemic, the gang crisis and reduced staffing at the U.S. Embassy, where the office is located, hampered the agency’s work. The office’s lone agent, in what should have been a four-person outfit, needed authorization from Washington to meet informants due to the security situation. When the State Department in March ordered the departure of non-emergency personnel after a surge in violence, the DEA agent got on an airplane and left. He has since been transferred.
Last October, four Colombian nationals were arrested in the town of Belladère while trying to cross into the Dominican Republic. Three of the men had arrived from Venezuela aboard a small aircraft that landed near Les Cayes in the southwest region undetected. From there, they managed to make their way across gang-controlled roads, nearly 200 miles east to the remote border crossing where they were eventually arrested along with a Colombian national who had traveled by road to meet them and a second man, a Haitian national.
The case got almost no mention in the local media. Even the DEA wasn’t aware of the case until recently, even though it involved U.S.-bound cocaine originating in Colombia.
The case has raised eyebrows amid increasing worries that Haiti’s criminal network of armed gangs may have links with Mexican and Colombian drug cartels and organized crime groups in Venezuela.
Haiti’s spillover effect
The deepening crisis in Haiti is not occurring in isolation and is linked to the broader Caribbean problem in which illicit firearms and drugs are a growing concern, the U.N. drug office says.
Among the countries it highlighted this year is the Turks and Caicos Islands. The British dependency is at the end of the Bahamian archipelago, 136 miles from Haiti’s northern coast and 500 miles from Miami. On Monday, the territory of 40,000 residents logged its 35th homicide for the year.
At least 14 organized criminal groups have been identified in the territory, which is experiencing a violent crime wave. In addition to the surge in violence, islanders are seeing a spike in Haitian migration, which in August led to the discovery of a $2 million marijuana haul after a string of landings.
Two sources familiar with the case told the Herald the drugs, which were wrapped in Jamaican packaging, had arrived in southern Haiti from Jamaica and transported to the north, where they were loaded onto boats to take advantage of the clandestine migrant routes.
“There is a longstanding vulnerability to illicit activities in Southern Haiti, and today both weapons and drugs continue to be shipped to this part of the country by air and by sea,” Ghada Waly, the executive director of the U.N. drug office, told the U.N. Security Council earlier this year. She focused heavily on Haiti’s southern coast, where Jamaica-grown cannabis is being used as cash in a “guns for ganja” trade between the two countries.
“The Southern departments have become critical entry points for cocaine from South America, and cannabis from the Caribbean, with Haiti being a transit hub for both.”
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