Haiti and drugs

Patrick Belton at OxBlog has been following the Haiti situation, so go check out his posts (here’s his latest). Yesterday the Chicago Tribune had a front-page story illustrating the difficulty of dealing with either the government or the rebels on this issue. The highlights: [E]xperts and diplomats say several of the top rebel leaders are ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Patrick Belton at OxBlog has been following the Haiti situation, so go check out his posts (here's his latest). Yesterday the Chicago Tribune had a front-page story illustrating the difficulty of dealing with either the government or the rebels on this issue. The highlights:

Patrick Belton at OxBlog has been following the Haiti situation, so go check out his posts (here’s his latest). Yesterday the Chicago Tribune had a front-page story illustrating the difficulty of dealing with either the government or the rebels on this issue. The highlights:

[E]xperts and diplomats say several of the top rebel leaders are former military and police officials who are suspected of major human-rights violations while in power and who allegedly have financed their insurgency with past profits from the illegal drug trade. That puts the would-be leaders on similar footing with the government of embattled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who U.S. officials and others say has allowed Haiti to become one of the region’s most significant transit points for Colombian cocaine on its way to the United States…. But as U.S. officials back away from Aristide, they risk helping to power a cadre of unsavory characters who may do little to stem the flow of cocaine and other illicit drugs into the United States, experts and diplomats say. “There is absolutely nothing redeeming about these guys,” said Alex Dupuy, a Haiti expert at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. “They are a bunch of thugs. It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. would want to support these guys back in power.” The two top rebel leaders have been suspected of involvement in the drug trade. Authorities in Haiti and elsewhere believe top commander Guy Philippe became involved in narcotics smuggling in the 1990s while he was a leading Haitian police official. Philippe denied in an interview with the Tribune that he ever participated in the drug trade…. Haiti’s state institutions have long been weak because of the nation’s devastated economy. And its now-crumbling police force and much of its political elite have been tainted by the cocaine trade, according to U.S. officials, experts and others. For two decades, Colombian drug lords have used money and power to turn the island nation into a virtual base of operations, using its isolated beaches and even highways as landing strips to off-load cocaine later shipped to U.S. shores. Judith Trunzo, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, said last year that an interior minister’s travel visa to the United States was canceled because of suspected involvement in narcotics trafficking. At least five other Haitian officials’ visas were canceled under similar suspicion, a diplomatic source said last week.

Read the whole thing.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

Tag: Theory

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