Why is Haiti so poor? Like Afghanistan, it's a corrupt CIA-backed narco-kleptocracy

zulchzulu

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Thu Jan-14-10 11:10 AM
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Why is Haiti so poor? Like Afghanistan, it's a corrupt CIA-backed narco-kleptocracy

Edited on Thu Jan-14-10 11:53 AM by zulchzulu

Anyone who has been half-awake knows that Haiti has been known as a "parking lot" for the cocaine trade and political maneuvering by the CIA over the years has allowed the country to be (like Afghanistan) a narco-kleptocracy.

Haiti is a perfect location being 500 miles from the Colombian cartels and 700 miles from Florida.

Here is a sample of how it works:

The 1980's CIA collusion with allied drug traffickers lead to the formation of a protected narcotics pipeline, resulting an increase in supply and drop in price. Former DEA agents have repeatedly pointed out that 50%-70% of the cocaine entering the U.S. went via drug cartels that enjoyed CIA protection.

"..Taken alone, one Contra drug ring, that of Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo (two Contra supporters based in Guadalajara, Mexico) were known by DEA to be smuggling four tons A MONTH into the U.S. during the early Contra war. Other operations including Manuel Noriega (a CIA asset, strongman leader of Panama), John Hull (ranch owner and CIA asset, Costa Rica), Felix Rodriguez (Contra supporter, El Salvador), Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros (Honduran Military, Contra supporter, Honduras) along with other elements of the Guatemalan and Honduran military. Cumulatively, the aforementioned CIA assets were concurrently trafficking close to two hundred tons a year or close to 70% of total U.S. consumption. All of these CIA assets have been ascertained as being connected to CIA via public documentation and testimony."

http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/outline.html

http://www.lessignets.com/signetsdiane/calendrier/images/sept/22/Jean-Claude_Duvalier,1020.jpg

Who can forget Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Duvalier was invested with near-absolute power by the Constitution. He took some steps to blunt the harsher edges of the regime. For instance, he released some political prisoners and eased press censorship. However, there were no substantive changes to the regime's basic character. Opposition was not tolerated, and the legislature remained a rubber stamp.

Much of the Duvaliers' wealth came from the Régie du Tabac (Tobacco Administration). Duvalier used this "nonfiscal account," established decades earlier, as a tobacco monopoly, but he later expanded it to include the proceeds from other government enterprises and used it as a slush fund for which no balance sheets were ever kept.

By neglecting his role in government, Duvalier squandered considerable domestic and foreign goodwill and facilitated the dominance of Haitian affairs by a clique of hardline Duvalierist cronies known as the dinosaurs. The public displayed more affection toward the president than they had displayed for his more formidable father. Foreign officials and observers also seemed more tolerant toward "Baby Doc," in areas such as human-rights monitoring, and foreign countries were more generous to him with economic assistance. The United States restored its aid program for Haiti in 1971.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Jean-Claude_Duvalier

People may remember Jean Betrand Aristide, who was elected President in several terms before various coups took him out of power. This segment illustrates what may have happened in 2004:

In Haiti, the Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People (FRAPH) overthrows the government while Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is on a visit to the UN in New York. The group rules as a repressive military regime until 1994 when a US-led UN intervention puts Aristide back in power (see September 19, 1994-October 15, 1994) The junta is responsible for the massacre of hundreds—or by some estimates, thousands—of dissidents. The leader of the group is Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, who later acknowledges he had support from the CIA. “Emmanuel Constant is widely alleged, and himself claims, to have been in the pay of, and under the orders of, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the coup period,” Amnesty International will later report. The amount paid to Constant by the CIA during this period is $500/month. Second in command is Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who had led death squads during the years of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorship and who is later convicted and implicated in multiple crimes committed during this period.

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=the_2004_removal_of_jean-bertrand_aristide

Aristide had tried to stop Haiti from being a integral part of the drug trade and here's some information on what he said when he returned to power in 1994:

It was a day before the scheduled return of Haiti’s exiled president Jean Betrand 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 a dramatic move, Aristide told the diplomats that the military government of Haiti had to yield the power that was to end Haiti’s role in the drug trade, a trade financed by Colombia’s Cali cartel, that had exploded in the months following the coup. Aristide told the UN that each year Haiti is the transit point for nearly 50 tons of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars, providing Haiti’s military rulers with $200 million in profits.

Aristide’s electrifying accusations opened the floodgate of even more sinister revelations. Massachusetts senator John Kerry heads a subcommittee concerned with international terrorism and drug trafficking that turned up collusion between the CIA and drug traffickers during the late 1980s’ Iran Contra hearings.

(snip)

The U.S. senate also heard testimony in 1988 that then interior minister, Gen. Williams Regala, and his DEA 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 1980’s.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIE402A.html

Even after Aristide got back in power in 1994, he was (according to many) set up to fall again:

Investigative author Dennis Bernstein's charges that the US government's ongoing relationship with drug-trafficking dictators and their associated henchmen is perhaps one of the most important and under- reported stories of our time.
"President Clinton's continuing silence on the Haitian military's involvement in a one-billion-dollar a year illegal cocaine operation-- and the mainstream media's acceptance of this silence--is causing untold suffering in Haiti and the US," Bernstein said. "In fact," he continued, "it is this silence about the drugs that allows the military to continue to skirt the embargo with massive amounts of drug-money, to torture and assassinate thousands of Haitians, and to wreak havoc in this country by continuing to import tons of cocaine onto US soil. The US created, funded, and trained Haiti's drug-dealing death squad--the National Intelligence Service--which apparently was conceived to destabilize President Aristide.

"Democracy doesn't exist without a free and unfettered press that isn't afraid to ask the difficult questions and then to publish the answers to those questions without checking informally with the state department and the CIA. The press's continuing failure to report adequately on illegal intelligence operations and CIA-sponsored drug-running and assassination coup teams may ultimately lead to the death of democracy, not only in Haiti but in the US.

http://www.netti.fi/~makako/mind/haiti1.htm

There are many characters that were and continue to be involved in maintaining control of the drug trade, but here's another example of how anti-Aristide pro-drug trade thugs were paid by the CIA:

...Emmanuel Constant, the former leader of Fraph, the paramilitary organization that terrorized Haitians in the years of the illegal junta, described his work as a paid informer for the C.I.A. Mr. Constant is now in a Maryland jail, awaiting deportation hearings, and he has a clear self-interest in invoking the agency. But whatever embellishments he may have added about his association, Government officials confirm he was paid by the agency and kept in close touch with it at a time when he was doing his best to prevent the return to Haiti of its ousted President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/187.html

Let's just say all this would make for a very interesting movie.

Despite all that, contribute to the Quake relief:
www.WorldVision.org
www.MercyCorps.org
www.oxfamamerica.org/Haiti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake