HaitiAnalysis.com

First of two articles

Youri Latortue is one of Haiti’s most powerful politicians.

As an outspoken Senator, he is an ally of Haitian President Michel Martelly. Both are leading advocates for reestablishing the demobilized Haitian Army. He supported Martelly’s nominee for Prime Minister, neoliberal businessman Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, who was rejected by the Parliament in a Jun. 21 vote.

But Youri Latortue is also a drug-trafficker, gang godfather, and death-squad leader, according to the testimony and reports of many colleagues, crime witnesses and government officials, both Haitian and international.

In fact, “Senator Youri Latortue may well be the most brazenly corrupt of leading Haitian politicians,” according to the U.S. Embassy. Secret U.S. State Department cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks and reviewed by Haiti Liberté paint a portrait of a relentlessly unscrupulous, ambitious strongman, who has helped bring down Haitian governments and holds Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth largest city, as his personal fiefdom.

His Rise to Power

Born in Gonaives, Youri Latortue went to law school in Port-au-Prince and then graduated from Haiti’s military academy in 1990. He became a lieutenant in the Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH), teaching briefly at the Military Academy. But after the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Latortue joined the Army’s notorious Anti-Gang Unit (previously called Criminal Research) headed by Col. Michel Francois, one of the coup’s principal leaders.

“It was widely known that he was involved in many of the political killings carried out during the 1991-94 coup, in particular the shooting of Father Jean-Marie Vincent in August 2004,” explained a once highly-placed government security source who wishes to remain anonymous. “He was one of Michel Francois’ death-squad leaders.”

In 2004, a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights wrote that “a former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerriere... claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of Catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izméry.”

In 2005, a U.S. policeman with the United Nations Police (UNPOL) videotaped an interview that he made with a young woman who feared for her life “because the 28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue murder the priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent,” she said. The video, released in October 2010 by the Haiti Information Project (HIP), is now available on YouTube [http://bit.ly/l6Rrkv].

She describes how the priest drove up to his gate that night. “That's when I saw... a double white pickup with a bunch of men in black,” she continued. “I saw Youri... I [didn’t recognize] the other ones. But the reason why I remember Youri [was] because he used to come to [name removed] house. And I saw him getting out of the [pick-up]and shooting at the car. But at that time, I didn't know [the victim] was a priest... I didn't know the person who was in that car.” It was only later that she learned who it was (see Haiti Liberté, Vol.4, No.14, 10/20/2010).

The video-taped interview was sent to HIP with the following note: “The UN has no interest in pursuing this case or revealing this evidence despite the statements of this eyewitness that Youri Latortue was the triggerman that shot and killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994.... It is a travesty of justice that the UN has been withholding this testimony from the public. They are supposed to be impartial but Latortue has powerful friends in the US Embassy who view him as an asset since his role following the ouster of Aristide in 2004.”

After Aristide returned to Haiti from exile on Oct. 15, 1994, he dissolved the FAdH in early 1995, and Latortue was transferred to the Interim Police force, made up of former FAdH soldiers. Dr. Fourel Célestin, a former FAdH colonel, was appointed as President Aristide’s security advisor, and he proposed bringing Youri Latortue into the Palace security under his aegis.

“Aristide was dead set against it, having heard the persistent rumors of Latortue’s murderous role during the coup,” the former government source said. “But Célestin convinced him, arguing that the Palace needed to have some of the Army bad guys if it was going to dismantle and neutralize the force.” Aristide relented.

In March 1995, unknown assassins shot to death well-known pro-coup spokeswoman Mireille Durocher-Bertin and another passenger in her car on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s visit to Haiti. The shooting was a tremendous embarrassment to the Aristide government and to Clinton. A team of FBI agents spent time in Haiti investigating the murder, and Youri Latortue was one of their suspects. Washington yanked Latortue’s U.S. travel visa.

Latortue worked out of Célestin’s Palace office until 1996 when President René Préval took power. Washington insisted that certain former FAdH officers deemed too close to Aristide – Célestin, Major Dany Toussaint, Major Joseph Médard – be removed from leadership of the new police and two new Palace Security details: the USP (Presidential Security Unit), similar to the U.S. Secret Service, and the USGPN (Security Unit to Guard the National Palace). When they were removed, that left a void in the Palace security’s command, a void that was filled by Latortue. He became the USGPN’s deputy chief under Frantz Jean-Francois. Two better trusted pro-Lavalas security agents – Nesly Lucien and Oriel Jean – were named to head the USP. That arrangement lasted throughout Préval’s term (despite his grave misgivings about Latortue, as we shall see) until he handed the Presidency back to Aristide in 2001.

Aristide Returns, Youri Takes Leave

“After Aristide's accession, other USGPN policemen found [Latortue] ‘hostile’ to his new President, who worried about his involvement in a ‘plot,’ according to Haiti's elite-owned radio station Signal FM on February 21, 2001,” Canadian investigative journalist Anthony Fenton wrote in a June 2005 Znet article entitled “Have the Latortues Kidnapped Democracy in Haiti?”.

At that point, Latortue was transferred out of the Palace to work under Nesly Lucien, who had been named Police Chief. But in late 2001, Latortue took a paid leave of absence from the police to pursue a master’s degree in law in Canada. He “had lived in Miami, [and] studied in Montreal for two years” he told Fenton in a June 2005 phone interview.

It was during that time that Latortue was paid a visit by Stanley Lucas, an operative for the International Republican Institute (IRI), a tentacle of the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), according to our security source. IRI was playing a central role in organizing the “civilian opposition” to Aristide, principally the so-called “Group of 184,” headed by sweatshop magnate Andy Apaid. But Lucas was also keeping touch with the “armed opposition” of former Haitian soldier and police chief Guy Philippe in the Dominican Republic. This is where Youri came in.

During 2002 and 2003, Latortue shuttled back and forth between the U.S., Canada, and the Dominican Republic, meeting with Guy Philippe, former FRAPH death-squad leader Jodel Chamblain, and others in the “rebel” force forming, training, and launching raids into Haiti. Interestingly, Youri’s U.S. travel visa, which had been suspended in 1995, was reinstated in 2002 when he started to play this role of anti-Aristide intermediary.

“We know that Youri was one of the intellectual authors, one of the key planners, behind the Dec. 17, 2001 attack on the National Palace,” when a band of Philippe’s “rebels” briefly took over the National Palace during a failed coup attempt, our well-placed source explained. “In the investigation after the attack, we learned that it was Youri’s people – his proteges – in the USGPN who, working inside the Palace, let the attackers into the Palace grounds.”

Finally Latortue, Philippe, Lucas, IRI, and the 184 were successful in their destabilization campaign after a U.S. SEAL team kidnapped Aristide from his home on Feb. 29, 2004, completing the second coup against him.

After the 2004 Coup

Youri Latortue then flew back to Haiti with his first cousin once-removed, Gérard Latortue in tow. A few weeks later, Gérard Latortue was installed as de facto Prime Minister. Youri Latortue, often called Gérard’s “nephew,” was appointed as his security and spy chief, with the title “Responsible for National Intelligence to the Primature.”

“The thing was that Gérard had been working for international organizations overseas most of his life and didn’t really know the lay of the land in Haiti,” our security source explained. “He had to rely largely on Youri for guidance. In that sense, Youri was practically the shadow Prime Minister. And during that coup, he was the main one responsible for the massacre of many militants in Belair, Cité Soleil and other pockets of resistance.”

In his post, Latortue was “nicknamed 'Mister 30 Per Cent' because of the percentage he demands in return for favors,” wrote Thierry Oberlin in the December 21, 2004 Le Figaro. “Worried, not without reason, about his own security, the prime minister pays 20,000 euros a month to this former police officer implicated in various scandals for 'organizing an intelligence service'."

But then something interesting happened. In late 2004, Gérard Latortue left Haiti to travel to a conference in Canada, passing through Miami. Youri was part of his delegation. But in Florida, U.S. agents detained Youri for his suspected involvement in drug-trafficking. (Joel Deeb, a Haitian-American arms dealer who reportedly brokered deals with Youri Latortue, “stated that Youri Latortue presently has four sealed DEA indictments pending against him, and that the DEA [has] issued an extradition letter for Youri Latortue to the interim government,” Fenton learned in several interviews with Deeb between April and June 2005. “Youri Latortue himself evaded questions about the DEA indictments, denying that he and Deeb, as Deeb claims, were in regular contact.”)

Gérard Latortue got on the phone to officials in Washington and demanded that Youri be released. Eventually, U.S. officials said they would not hold Youri, but on the condition that he take the next flight back to Haiti, which he did.

“When Gérard returned to Haiti after the Canada visit, he met with Youri about the incident and about his vulnerability to prosecution,” our source explains. “They determined that the best course of action was for Youri to become an elected official, which would confer upon him immunity from prosecution. That is why and how Youri’s political career began, assured by Gérard, under whom his election was assured.”

Thus, under his “uncle’s” government, Youri was elected to a six-year term as the first senator of the Artibonite Department in the Feb. 7, 2006 elections that also brought Préval to the Presidency for the second time.

This is where the U.S. Embassy cables pick up the thread.

A Drug Dealer and Kidnapper in the Palace?

When Youri Latortue worked in the Palace under Aristide and Préval, neither president was comfortable with his presence there and knew he was involved in illegal activities. But they were afraid to act against him. “Among political observers, it is an article of faith that Latortue was involved in drug trafficking under Aristide and during the first Préval administrations,” reported U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 27, 2007 cable to Washington. “Préval himself reports that Latortue ‘ran drugs’ out of his office in the Presidency during Aristide's mandate.”

Préval said the same thing to Sanderson’s successor, current Ambassador Kenneth Merten, who reported in an Oct. 6, 2009 secret cable that the Haitian president “also expressed concern over the lack of integrity of the president of the Senate Commission on Justice and Security, Senator Youri Latortue, implying ties to the drug trade. He supported his viewpoint by recalling the USG’s [U.S. government’s]alleged refusal to allow Latortue to travel to the United States” in 1995 and 2004.

The U.S. Embassy treated Latortue warily when he returned to Haiti in 2004. The first conflict they had with him was when he took it upon himself to tell “some of the ex-soldiers in Cap-Haitien” who had taken part in Guy Philippe’s “rebel” force “that they would be admitted into the HNP,” or Haitian National Police. “This raised a red-flag for us and the rest of the international community and was a subject of the Core Group meeting March 12,” reported Sanderson’s predecessor, Ambassador James Foley in a Mar. 15, 2005 cable. The U.S. and its allies went to Prime Minister Gérard Latortue who “made clear this was not the case,” pleasing them with “his public acknowledgment that the HNP was not an automatic option for the ex-FADH.”

Two months later, a prominent member of Haiti’s bourgeoisie, businessman Fritz Mevs, told the U.S. Embassy that “Colombian drug-traffickers” were working “with a small cabal of powerful and connected individuals, including Youri Latortue... to create a criminal enterprise that thrives on - and generates - instability,” Foley wrote in a May 27, 2005 cable. This cabal which included Youri was a “small nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control a network of dirty cops and gangs that [...] were responsible for committing the kidnappings and murders.”

The Embassy also worried that Youri was beginning to alienate some in the anti-Lavalas coalition that had driven Aristide from power, particularly students. They were starting to distrust the Interim Government of Haiti (IGOH), as the Latortues’ de facto regime was called, because “rumors are rife that the IGOH (and specifically Youri Latortue) is building an ‘intelligence cell’ within the student movement for political ends,” wrote interim Chargé d’Affaires Douglas M. Griffiths in a July 6, 2005 cable.

Washington was also closely watching the emergence of the Artibonite in Action (LAAA), the party Youri Latortue formed in 2005 to run for Senate. “This party may have nefarious sources of income and has already been implicated in gang-related violence in the poorer neighborhoods of Raboteau and Jubilee in Gonaives,” wrote another interim Chargé d'Affaires Erna Kerst in a Nov. 30, 2005 cable.

As Sanderson took over the Embassy in early 2006, she also echoed that Youri Latortue is “widely believed to be involved in illegal activities,” in a Jun. 16, 2006 cable.

Less than two months later, on Aug. 2, she sent another cable that reported that Edmond Mulet, the chief of the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), was concerned that “drug trafficking has become an increasingly alarming problem, which is difficult to combat, in part because of the drug ties within the Haitian Government,” Sanderson wrote. “In this connection, he mentioned Senate leader Joseph Lambert and Security Commission Chair Youri Latortue -- describing the latter as a ‘drug dealer’.”

Arms dealer Joel Deeb also called Latortue “a drug smuggling ‘Kingpin,’ with ‘close ties’ to paramilitary leader Guy Philippe,” Anthony Fenton reported in his ZNet article. “Deeb also said that ‘everybody knows’ about Youri Latortue's involvement in kidnappings,” which were plaguing Haiti at the time.

“It is also widely known that Youri Latortue and his deputy, Jean-Wener Jacquitte,... are, at the least, funneling money associated with kidnappings,” Fenton continued. “This has been confirmed by sources both in diplomatic circles, as well as sources inside and outside the de facto Haitian government.”

In a September 2006 cable, Sanderson reported that Youri was able “to hire his ‘cronies’ to run customs' operations in Gonaives” and, in a November 2006 cable, that Gonaives Judge Napela Saintil, who had presided over the landmark 2000 Raboteau Massacre trial (at which Youri Latortue “refused to testify”), considered Latortue “his ‘arch enemy’” and “accused a security agent of Latortue's, Leon Leblanc, of attempting to assassinate him in March, 2004.”

One of Sanderson’s most enlightening cables is that of Nov. 20, 2006. It is based on a Nov. 9 meeting that one of Youri’s close associates (whose name has been removed from this report and the cable posted on WikiLeaks’ site to protect him) had with Embassy political officers or “poloffs.” The colleague “shared with poloffs his concerns regarding Latortue's illegal or otherwise unsavory activities in the port city of Gonaives and other areas of the Artibonite,” Sanderson wrote. “Latortue's family connections play a part in his ability to manipulate the region, as do his close associations with armed gangs and drug traffickers.”

An Ambitious Politician

“The Latortue family is crawling all over Haitian politics,” the man told the Embassy. “Youri's sister is the former mayor of Gonaives, and the former delegate to the region was a cousin of his as well. The administration filled Haiti's local and municipal offices by presidential appointment during the IGoH. Senator Latortue had influence over these appointments through his relation with IGoH Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, and managed to place members of his party in most positions around the Artibonite. The senator used these people to consolidate his power and influence in the region until the new delegate to the Artibonite appointed new local and regional officials who were not in the back pocket of Senator Latortue.”

The colleague “likened Senator Latortue's authority in the port city of Gonaives to that of a mafia boss,” the cable continued. “He claimed that the somewhat lethargic port and the drug and other contraband trafficking taking place there are completely under the Senator's command. The port in Gonaives is largely controlled by the Cannibal Army gang, which faces persistent competition from two other gangs, Des Cahos and Jubile Blan. Senator Latortue exerts influence over all three groups and is thus able to maintain sway over dealings in the port. Senator Latortue's other businesses in Gonaives include a nightclub and movie theater, both of questionable legitimacy.”

Sanderson also noted that “an oft-disruptive popular organization in St. Marc named ‘Bale Wouze’ recently accused the senator of distributing weapons in an effort to destabilize the government.” Latortue’s colleague “phoned the Embassy on November 16 to reinforce the Bale Wouze accusations, and also to report another incident in which Senator Latortue and friends were stealing telephone poles and utility boxes from Port-au-Prince for use in Gonaives.”

The colleague described how Youri was a savvy politician. “After the large-scale flooding in the Artibonite in September, the central government allocated emergency food supplies to be distributed to the flood victims,” Sanderson wrote, but “Senator Latortue intercepted the supplies and stashed them temporarily somewhere in Gonaives, and then took the supplies to the victims and acted as if he was personally responsible for the handouts.”

To be continued...

(Please consider making a contribution to Haiti Liberté, which is in financial straits due, in part, to expenses incurred in obtaining the WikiLeaks cables. You can donate on our website www.haitiliberte.com or click on the link http://goo.gl/oY7ct .)

First of two articles

Youri Latortue is one of Haiti’s most powerful politicians.

As an outspoken Senator, he is an ally of Haitian President Michel Martelly. Both are leading advocates for reestablishing the demobilized Haitian Army. He supported Martelly’s nominee for Prime Minister, neoliberal businessman Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, who was rejected by the Parliament in a Jun. 21 vote.

But Youri Latortue is also a drug-trafficker, gang godfather, and death-squad leader, according to the testimony and reports of many colleagues, crime witnesses and government officials, both Haitian and international.

In fact, “Senator Youri Latortue may well be the most brazenly corrupt of leading Haitian politicians,” according to the U.S. Embassy. Secret U.S. State Department cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks and reviewed by Haiti Liberté paint a portrait of a relentlessly unscrupulous, ambitious strongman, who has helped bring down Haitian governments and holds Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth largest city, as his personal fiefdom.

His Rise to Power

Born in Gonaives, Youri Latortue went to law school in Port-au-Prince and then graduated from Haiti’s military academy in 1990. He became a lieutenant in the Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH), teaching briefly at the Military Academy. But after the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Latortue joined the Army’s notorious Anti-Gang Unit (previously called Criminal Research) headed by Col. Michel Francois, one of the coup’s principal leaders.

“It was widely known that he was involved in many of the political killings carried out during the 1991-94 coup, in particular the shooting of Father Jean-Marie Vincent in August 2004,” explained a once highly-placed government security source who wishes to remain anonymous. “He was one of Michel Francois’ death-squad leaders.”

In 2004, a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights wrote that “a former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerriere... claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of Catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izméry.”

In 2005, a U.S. policeman with the United Nations Police (UNPOL) videotaped an interview that he made with a young woman who feared for her life “because the 28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue murder the priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent,” she said. The video, released in October 2010 by the Haiti Information Project (HIP), is now available on YouTube [http://bit.ly/l6Rrkv].

She describes how the priest drove up to his gate that night. “That's when I saw... a double white pickup with a bunch of men in black,” she continued. “I saw Youri... I [didn’t recognize] the other ones. But the reason why I remember Youri [was] because he used to come to [name removed] house. And I saw him getting out of the [pick-up]and shooting at the car. But at that time, I didn't know [the victim] was a priest... I didn't know the person who was in that car.” It was only later that she learned who it was (see Haiti Liberté, Vol.4, No.14, 10/20/2010).

The video-taped interview was sent to HIP with the following note: “The UN has no interest in pursuing this case or revealing this evidence despite the statements of this eyewitness that Youri Latortue was the triggerman that shot and killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994.... It is a travesty of justice that the UN has been withholding this testimony from the public. They are supposed to be impartial but Latortue has powerful friends in the US Embassy who view him as an asset since his role following the ouster of Aristide in 2004.”

After Aristide returned to Haiti from exile on Oct. 15, 1994, he dissolved the FAdH in early 1995, and Latortue was transferred to the Interim Police force, made up of former FAdH soldiers. Dr. Fourel Célestin, a former FAdH colonel, was appointed as President Aristide’s security advisor, and he proposed bringing Youri Latortue into the Palace security under his aegis.

“Aristide was dead set against it, having heard the persistent rumors of Latortue’s murderous role during the coup,” the former government source said. “But Célestin convinced him, arguing that the Palace needed to have some of the Army bad guys if it was going to dismantle and neutralize the force.” Aristide relented.

In March 1995, unknown assassins shot to death well-known pro-coup spokeswoman Mireille Durocher-Bertin and another passenger in her car on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s visit to Haiti. The shooting was a tremendous embarrassment to the Aristide government and to Clinton. A team of FBI agents spent time in Haiti investigating the murder, and Youri Latortue was one of their suspects. Washington yanked Latortue’s U.S. travel visa.

Latortue worked out of Célestin’s Palace office until 1996 when President René Préval took power. Washington insisted that certain former FAdH officers deemed too close to Aristide – Célestin, Major Dany Toussaint, Major Joseph Médard – be removed from leadership of the new police and two new Palace Security details: the USP (Presidential Security Unit), similar to the U.S. Secret Service, and the USGPN (Security Unit to Guard the National Palace). When they were removed, that left a void in the Palace security’s command, a void that was filled by Latortue. He became the USGPN’s deputy chief under Frantz Jean-Francois. Two better trusted pro-Lavalas security agents – Nesly Lucien and Oriel Jean – were named to head the USP. That arrangement lasted throughout Préval’s term (despite his grave misgivings about Latortue, as we shall see) until he handed the Presidency back to Aristide in 2001.

Aristide Returns, Youri Takes Leave

“After Aristide's accession, other USGPN policemen found [Latortue] ‘hostile’ to his new President, who worried about his involvement in a ‘plot,’ according to Haiti's elite-owned radio station Signal FM on February 21, 2001,” Canadian investigative journalist Anthony Fenton wrote in a June 2005 Znet article entitled “Have the Latortues Kidnapped Democracy in Haiti?”.

At that point, Latortue was transferred out of the Palace to work under Nesly Lucien, who had been named Police Chief. But in late 2001, Latortue took a paid leave of absence from the police to pursue a master’s degree in law in Canada. He “had lived in Miami, [and] studied in Montreal for two years” he told Fenton in a June 2005 phone interview.

It was during that time that Latortue was paid a visit by Stanley Lucas, an operative for the International Republican Institute (IRI), a tentacle of the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), according to our security source. IRI was playing a central role in organizing the “civilian opposition” to Aristide, principally the so-called “Group of 184,” headed by sweatshop magnate Andy Apaid. But Lucas was also keeping touch with the “armed opposition” of former Haitian soldier and police chief Guy Philippe in the Dominican Republic. This is where Youri came in.

During 2002 and 2003, Latortue shuttled back and forth between the U.S., Canada, and the Dominican Republic, meeting with Guy Philippe, former FRAPH death-squad leader Jodel Chamblain, and others in the “rebel” force forming, training, and launching raids into Haiti. Interestingly, Youri’s U.S. travel visa, which had been suspended in 1995, was reinstated in 2002 when he started to play this role of anti-Aristide intermediary.

“We know that Youri was one of the intellectual authors, one of the key planners, behind the Dec. 17, 2001 attack on the National Palace,” when a band of Philippe’s “rebels” briefly took over the National Palace during a failed coup attempt, our well-placed source explained. “In the investigation after the attack, we learned that it was Youri’s people – his proteges – in the USGPN who, working inside the Palace, let the attackers into the Palace grounds.”

Finally Latortue, Philippe, Lucas, IRI, and the 184 were successful in their destabilization campaign after a U.S. SEAL team kidnapped Aristide from his home on Feb. 29, 2004, completing the second coup against him.

After the 2004 Coup

Youri Latortue then flew back to Haiti with his first cousin once-removed, Gérard Latortue in tow. A few weeks later, Gérard Latortue was installed as de facto Prime Minister. Youri Latortue, often called Gérard’s “nephew,” was appointed as his security and spy chief, with the title “Responsible for National Intelligence to the Primature.”

“The thing was that Gérard had been working for international organizations overseas most of his life and didn’t really know the lay of the land in Haiti,” our security source explained. “He had to rely largely on Youri for guidance. In that sense, Youri was practically the shadow Prime Minister. And during that coup, he was the main one responsible for the massacre of many militants in Belair, Cité Soleil and other pockets of resistance.”

In his post, Latortue was “nicknamed 'Mister 30 Per Cent' because of the percentage he demands in return for favors,” wrote Thierry Oberlin in the December 21, 2004 Le Figaro. “Worried, not without reason, about his own security, the prime minister pays 20,000 euros a month to this former police officer implicated in various scandals for 'organizing an intelligence service'."

But then something interesting happened. In late 2004, Gérard Latortue left Haiti to travel to a conference in Canada, passing through Miami. Youri was part of his delegation. But in Florida, U.S. agents detained Youri for his suspected involvement in drug-trafficking. (Joel Deeb, a Haitian-American arms dealer who reportedly brokered deals with Youri Latortue, “stated that Youri Latortue presently has four sealed DEA indictments pending against him, and that the DEA [has] issued an extradition letter for Youri Latortue to the interim government,” Fenton learned in several interviews with Deeb between April and June 2005. “Youri Latortue himself evaded questions about the DEA indictments, denying that he and Deeb, as Deeb claims, were in regular contact.”)

Gérard Latortue got on the phone to officials in Washington and demanded that Youri be released. Eventually, U.S. officials said they would not hold Youri, but on the condition that he take the next flight back to Haiti, which he did.

“When Gérard returned to Haiti after the Canada visit, he met with Youri about the incident and about his vulnerability to prosecution,” our source explains. “They determined that the best course of action was for Youri to become an elected official, which would confer upon him immunity from prosecution. That is why and how Youri’s political career began, assured by Gérard, under whom his election was assured.”

Thus, under his “uncle’s” government, Youri was elected to a six-year term as the first senator of the Artibonite Department in the Feb. 7, 2006 elections that also brought Préval to the Presidency for the second time.

This is where the U.S. Embassy cables pick up the thread.

A Drug Dealer and Kidnapper in the Palace?

When Youri Latortue worked in the Palace under Aristide and Préval, neither president was comfortable with his presence there and knew he was involved in illegal activities. But they were afraid to act against him. “Among political observers, it is an article of faith that Latortue was involved in drug trafficking under Aristide and during the first Préval administrations,” reported U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 27, 2007 cable to Washington. “Préval himself reports that Latortue ‘ran drugs’ out of his office in the Presidency during Aristide's mandate.”

Préval said the same thing to Sanderson’s successor, current Ambassador Kenneth Merten, who reported in an Oct. 6, 2009 secret cable that the Haitian president “also expressed concern over the lack of integrity of the president of the Senate Commission on Justice and Security, Senator Youri Latortue, implying ties to the drug trade. He supported his viewpoint by recalling the USG’s [U.S. government’s]alleged refusal to allow Latortue to travel to the United States” in 1995 and 2004.

The U.S. Embassy treated Latortue warily when he returned to Haiti in 2004. The first conflict they had with him was when he took it upon himself to tell “some of the ex-soldiers in Cap-Haitien” who had taken part in Guy Philippe’s “rebel” force “that they would be admitted into the HNP,” or Haitian National Police. “This raised a red-flag for us and the rest of the international community and was a subject of the Core Group meeting March 12,” reported Sanderson’s predecessor, Ambassador James Foley in a Mar. 15, 2005 cable. The U.S. and its allies went to Prime Minister Gérard Latortue who “made clear this was not the case,” pleasing them with “his public acknowledgment that the HNP was not an automatic option for the ex-FADH.”

Two months later, a prominent member of Haiti’s bourgeoisie, businessman Fritz Mevs, told the U.S. Embassy that “Colombian drug-traffickers” were working “with a small cabal of powerful and connected individuals, including Youri Latortue... to create a criminal enterprise that thrives on - and generates - instability,” Foley wrote in a May 27, 2005 cable. This cabal which included Youri was a “small nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control a network of dirty cops and gangs that [...] were responsible for committing the kidnappings and murders.”

The Embassy also worried that Youri was beginning to alienate some in the anti-Lavalas coalition that had driven Aristide from power, particularly students. They were starting to distrust the Interim Government of Haiti (IGOH), as the Latortues’ de facto regime was called, because “rumors are rife that the IGOH (and specifically Youri Latortue) is building an ‘intelligence cell’ within the student movement for political ends,” wrote interim Chargé d’Affaires Douglas M. Griffiths in a July 6, 2005 cable.

Washington was also closely watching the emergence of the Artibonite in Action (LAAA), the party Youri Latortue formed in 2005 to run for Senate. “This party may have nefarious sources of income and has already been implicated in gang-related violence in the poorer neighborhoods of Raboteau and Jubilee in Gonaives,” wrote another interim Chargé d'Affaires Erna Kerst in a Nov. 30, 2005 cable.

As Sanderson took over the Embassy in early 2006, she also echoed that Youri Latortue is “widely believed to be involved in illegal activities,” in a Jun. 16, 2006 cable.

Less than two months later, on Aug. 2, she sent another cable that reported that Edmond Mulet, the chief of the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), was concerned that “drug trafficking has become an increasingly alarming problem, which is difficult to combat, in part because of the drug ties within the Haitian Government,” Sanderson wrote. “In this connection, he mentioned Senate leader Joseph Lambert and Security Commission Chair Youri Latortue -- describing the latter as a ‘drug dealer’.”

Arms dealer Joel Deeb also called Latortue “a drug smuggling ‘Kingpin,’ with ‘close ties’ to paramilitary leader Guy Philippe,” Anthony Fenton reported in his ZNet article. “Deeb also said that ‘everybody knows’ about Youri Latortue's involvement in kidnappings,” which were plaguing Haiti at the time.

“It is also widely known that Youri Latortue and his deputy, Jean-Wener Jacquitte,... are, at the least, funneling money associated with kidnappings,” Fenton continued. “This has been confirmed by sources both in diplomatic circles, as well as sources inside and outside the de facto Haitian government.”

In a September 2006 cable, Sanderson reported that Youri was able “to hire his ‘cronies’ to run customs' operations in Gonaives” and, in a November 2006 cable, that Gonaives Judge Napela Saintil, who had presided over the landmark 2000 Raboteau Massacre trial (at which Youri Latortue “refused to testify”), considered Latortue “his ‘arch enemy’” and “accused a security agent of Latortue's, Leon Leblanc, of attempting to assassinate him in March, 2004.”

One of Sanderson’s most enlightening cables is that of Nov. 20, 2006. It is based on a Nov. 9 meeting that one of Youri’s close associates (whose name has been removed from this report and the cable posted on WikiLeaks’ site to protect him) had with Embassy political officers or “poloffs.” The colleague “shared with poloffs his concerns regarding Latortue's illegal or otherwise unsavory activities in the port city of Gonaives and other areas of the Artibonite,” Sanderson wrote. “Latortue's family connections play a part in his ability to manipulate the region, as do his close associations with armed gangs and drug traffickers.”

An Ambitious Politician

“The Latortue family is crawling all over Haitian politics,” the man told the Embassy. “Youri's sister is the former mayor of Gonaives, and the former delegate to the region was a cousin of his as well. The administration filled Haiti's local and municipal offices by presidential appointment during the IGoH. Senator Latortue had influence over these appointments through his relation with IGoH Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, and managed to place members of his party in most positions around the Artibonite. The senator used these people to consolidate his power and influence in the region until the new delegate to the Artibonite appointed new local and regional officials who were not in the back pocket of Senator Latortue.”

The colleague “likened Senator Latortue's authority in the port city of Gonaives to that of a mafia boss,” the cable continued. “He claimed that the somewhat lethargic port and the drug and other contraband trafficking taking place there are completely under the Senator's command. The port in Gonaives is largely controlled by the Cannibal Army gang, which faces persistent competition from two other gangs, Des Cahos and Jubile Blan. Senator Latortue exerts influence over all three groups and is thus able to maintain sway over dealings in the port. Senator Latortue's other businesses in Gonaives include a nightclub and movie theater, both of questionable legitimacy.”

Sanderson also noted that “an oft-disruptive popular organization in St. Marc named ‘Bale Wouze’ recently accused the senator of distributing weapons in an effort to destabilize the government.” Latortue’s colleague “phoned the Embassy on November 16 to reinforce the Bale Wouze accusations, and also to report another incident in which Senator Latortue and friends were stealing telephone poles and utility boxes from Port-au-Prince for use in Gonaives.”

The colleague described how Youri was a savvy politician. “After the large-scale flooding in the Artibonite in September, the central government allocated emergency food supplies to be distributed to the flood victims,” Sanderson wrote, but “Senator Latortue intercepted the supplies and stashed them temporarily somewhere in Gonaives, and then took the supplies to the victims and acted as if he was personally responsible for the handouts.”

To be continued...

(Please consider making a contribution to Haiti Liberté, which is in financial straits due, in part, to expenses incurred in obtaining the WikiLeaks cables. You can donate on our website www.haitiliberte.com or click on the link http://goo.gl/oY7ct .)

Leading members of Haiti’s bourgeoisie tried to turn the Haitian police force into their own private army, according to a secret U.S. Embassy cable provided to Haiti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks.

Then US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley warned in the cable “against private delivery of arms to the HNP” (Haitian National Police) after learning from a prominent Haitian businessman that “some business owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition from the street and distribute them to local police officials in exchange for regular patrols.”

Fritz Mevs, a member of “one of Haiti's richest families and a well-connected member of the private sector elite” with major business interests in Port-au-Prince’s downtown and port, was the principal source for Foley’s May 27, 2005 report.

Haiti’s “private sector elite” has been a key U.S. ally in promoting Washington’s agenda in the country, from free-trade and privatization of state enterprises to twice ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide followed by U.S. and UN military occupations.

Mevs told the Embassy that the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos, had “distributed arms to the police and had called on others to do so in order to provide cover to his own actions.” Boulos currently sits on the board of Bill Clinton’s Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) which controls the spending of $10 billion being donated to rebuild Haiti after the Jan. 12, 2010 quake.

The cable describes the period after the Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’état that ousted Aristide, repressed his Lavalas Family party, set up a US-backed de facto government, and ushered in a 9,000-strong UN military occupation known as MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti).

De facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue’s interim government of Haiti (IGOH) and his paramilitary allies had difficulty stabilizing their unpopular regime, despite killing, jailing, and purging from government jobs thousands of Lavalas militants and sympathizers.

The Latortue regime had particular trouble suppressing pro-Aristide strongholds like the slums of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, which mounted a fierce armed resistance to the coup and occupation. The coup government, US Embassy and Haitian elite called the resistance fighters “bandits” or “gangs,” the terminology used in the cable.

Entitled “Haitian Private Sector Panicked by Increasing Violence,” the cable relays Mevs report to the Embassy’s Political Officer that Haitian “business leaders are exasperated by the lack of security in the vital port and industrial zone areas of Port-au-Prince and are allegedly arming local police with long-guns and ammunition in an effort to ensure security for their businesses and employees.”

Foley wrote that “Mevs says that of the roughly 150 business owners in the area, probably 30 have already provided some kind of direct assistance (including arms, ammunition, or other materiel) to the police, and the rest are looking to do so soon.”

Mevs “defended the idea of the private sector arming the police in general, but he lamented the haphazard manner in which many of his colleagues seemed to be handing out weapons with little control,” the cable says. Mevs also worried “that funneling the arms secretly would only serve to reinforce rumors that the elite were creating private armies,” which was in fact happening.

Mevs was asking the Embassy if “the U.S. would oversee [a] program” under which the elite could legally buy the HNP’s guns because “he did not trust either MINUSTAH or the HNP to properly control the issuance of weapons.”

The private army “rumor” was corroborated by “[c]ontacts of the Econ Counselor [who] report from time to time of discussions among private sector leaders to fund and arm their own private sector armies.”

Foley added that the “[American Chamber of Commerce] Board of Directors at one point discussed informally giving non-lethal assistance to police stations, such as furniture and microwave ovens for police stations, but decided against doing so for fear that anything given to the police would quickly be stolen.”

Security around the capital’s industrial, warehouse and port districts degenerated after the Mar. 30, 2005 death of Thomas Robenson, alias Labaniere, a one-time Lavalas leader in Cité Soleil’s Boston neighborhood, who defected to defense of the 2004 coup and providing armed protection to the bourgeoisie’s nearby commercial zones. Labaniere was killed by one of his bodyguards, Evens Jeune, “allegedly in a plot directed by rival pro-Lavalas gang leader Dread Wilme,” Foley wrote.

After that, the UN force had tried to secure the commercial areas but “was proving to be a poor substitute for Labaniere,” a political advisor to Cité Soleil’s mayor told the Embassy, largely because “MINUSTAH troops (who, he said, rarely set foot outside of their vehicles) were unable to identify the bandits from amongst the general populace as Labaniere had done.”

The residents of Cité Soleil did not view Emmanuel Wilmer (aka Dred or Dread Wilme) as a “bandit.” They saw him as a hero defending them from pro-coup paramilitaries (who in 1994 burned many houses in the rebellious shantytown) and UN occupation troops. Today, one of the main boulevards through Cité Soleil is named after him, and murals of his face adorn many walls.

Wilme told the Lakou New York program on Brooklyn’s Radio Pa Nou station in April 2005 that “MINUSTAH has been shooting tear gas on the people. There are children who have died from the gas and some people inside churches have been shot… The Red Cross is the only one helping us. The MINUSTAH soldiers remain hidden in their tanks and just aim their guns and shoot the people. They shoot people selling in the streets. They shoot people just walking in the streets. They shoot people sitting and selling in the marketplace.”

But for Foley and the Haitian elite, the UN military was not doing enough repression. “According to Mevs, although MINUSTAH has on occasion parked armored vehicles near the Terminal with some success, he said criminals regularly force the tanks to move (by burning tires or fecal matter nearby), and as soon as the vehicles depart, the rampage continues.”

Foley asked the “Core Group” of international donors and the UN military for a “swift, aggressive” response to the business sector’s call for action against the “criminal elements” from slums like Cité Soleil.

“Ambassador Foley warned the Core Group that MINUSTAH's stand-down in Cite Soleil put the elections at risk, and that the insecurity around the industrial zone risked undermining what is left of the Haitian economy,” said the cable.

In response, the UN mission chief Juan Gabriel Valdes “promised a more robust response from MINUSTAH,” which sat down with police leaders to develop a plan in “coordination with the private sector,” the cable explains.

“In response to embassy and private sector prodding, MINUSTAH is now formulating a plan to protect the area,” concluded the cable.

Weeks later, on July 6, 2005, at 3 a.m. in the morning, 1,440 Brazilian and Jordanian soldiers sealed off Cite Soleil with 41 Armored Personnel Carriers and attacked. Helicopters dropped grenades and UN troops fired more than 22,000 bullets, leaving untold dozens of civilian casualties, including women and children. (Cité Soleil residents told an Oct. 2005 fact-finding delegation for the International Tribunal on Haiti that UN tanks whisked away many bodies, which were never returned.) Human rights groups called the carnage a “massacre.”

“It remains unclear how aggressive MINUSTAH was, though 22,000 rounds is a large amount of ammunition to have killed only six people” (the UN’s official death toll), wrote Foley in a Jul. 26, 2005 Embassy cable obtained by Professor Keith Yearman through a FOIA request. The UN claimed it only killed “gang leader Dred Wilme and five of his associates,” the cable says, while noting that “at St. Joseph’s hospital near Cite Soleil, Doctors Without Borders reported receiving 26 gunshot victims from Cite Soleil on July 6, of whom 20 were women and at least one was a child.”

Meanwhile journalist Jean Baptiste Jean Ristil, a Cité Soleil resident, interviewed “a weeping Fredi Romélus [who] recounted how UN troops had lobbed a red smoke grenade into his house and then opened fire, killing his wife and two children,” reported the Haiti Information Project. Jean Ristil also filmed inside the house where the body of Fredi’s 22-year-old wife, Sonia Romélus, lay, “killed by the same bullet that passed through the body of her one-year-old infant son, Nelson,” the HIP reported. “She was apparently holding the child as the UN opened fire. Next to them was her four-year-old son, Stanley, who was killed by a single shot to the head.”

A U.S. Labor and Human Rights Delegation which was in Haiti at the time and visited Cité Soleil the next day reported that “this full-blown military attack on a densely-populated neighborhood... multiple sources confirm killed at least 23 people” and possibly as many as 50.

As the evidence of a massacre grew, the UN and U.S. began to admit that more Cité Soleil residents may have died. “Given the flimsy construction of homes in Cite Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets,” Foley’s FOIA-released cable reported.

By Aug. 1, Foley was praising the Brazilians in another cable (obtained by Yearman’s FOIA requests) entitled “Brazil Shows Backbone in Bel-Air.” According to Foley, “the security situation in the capital has clearly improved thanks to aggressive incursions in Bel Air and the July 6 raid against Dread Wilme in Cite Soleil… Post has congratulated MINUSTAH and the Brazilian Battalion for the remarkable success achieved in recent weeks.”

The WikiLeaked May 2005 cable also offers a glimpse of Haiti’s inter-ruling class rivalries. Mevs felt that “private sector protests against the IGOH for the lack of security were misguided,” Foley reports, because “Haiti's real enemy and the true source of insecurity [was] a small nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control a network of dirty cops and gangs that not only were responsible for committing the kidnappings and murders, but were also frustrating the efforts of well-meaning government officials and the international community to confront them.” At the center of this “cabal,” according to Mevs, was prominent attorney Gary Lissade, who has a long history as a right-wing operative. In 1993, he was the lead counsel for the military government of coup leader Gen. Raoul Cédras during negotiations at New York’s Governors Island with Aristide’s exiled constitutional government. In 2001, Aristide, in a futile attempt to mollify the Bush administration and putschist bourgeoisie, made Lissade Justice Minister until popular outcry forced his removal along with Prime Minister Jean-Marie Chérestal’s whole government. Today, Lissade sits, alongside Reginald Boulos, on the board of the Clinton co-chaired IHRC.

Others whom Mevs cites in this group allied to “Colombian drug-traffickers” include powerful senator Youri Latortue, a close ally of new Haitian president Michel Martelly, Dany Toussaint, a former Lavalas Family senator who changed camps and supported the 2004 coup against Aristide, and Michel Brunache, who was de facto President Boniface Alexandre’s chief of staff.

The Embassy took Mevs warnings about Lissade’s “cabal” with a grain of salt. Foley wrote that Mevs “is no doubt biased against those individuals he names” because “Mevs himself is a core member of what might easily be described as a rival network of influence competing for control of Haiti against the cast of characters he has described.” Presciently, Foley says that his Embassy “cannot confirm whether the alleged cabal of political insiders allied with South American narco-traffickers is controlling the gangs, we have seen indications of alliances between drug dealers, criminal gangs and political forces that could threaten to make just such a scenario possible via the election of narco-funded politicians,” which some political observers fear may be the situation in Haiti today.

Meanwhile, Dread Wilme’s legend lives on. “His funeral was a hero's farewell,” wrote Haitian blogger Erzili Danto. “His remains decked in a Vodun boat were pushed out onto the open seas next to Site Soley’s water shores, and set to flames for his spirit to soar towards the countless African Ancestors who, like Dread Wilme, had made the ultimate sacrifice for our people's freedom and dignity.”

Leading members of Haiti’s bourgeoisie tried to turn the Haitian police force into their own private army, according to a secret U.S. Embassy cable provided to Haiti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks.

Then US Ambassador to Haiti James Foley warned in the cable “against private delivery of arms to the HNP” (Haitian National Police) after learning from a prominent Haitian businessman that “some business owners have already begun to purchase weapons and ammunition from the street and distribute them to local police officials in exchange for regular patrols.”

Fritz Mevs, a member of “one of Haiti's richest families and a well-connected member of the private sector elite” with major business interests in Port-au-Prince’s downtown and port, was the principal source for Foley’s May 27, 2005 report.

Haiti’s “private sector elite” has been a key U.S. ally in promoting Washington’s agenda in the country, from free-trade and privatization of state enterprises to twice ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide followed by U.S. and UN military occupations.

Mevs told the Embassy that the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos, had “distributed arms to the police and had called on others to do so in order to provide cover to his own actions.” Boulos currently sits on the board of Bill Clinton’s Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) which controls the spending of $10 billion being donated to rebuild Haiti after the Jan. 12, 2010 quake.

The cable describes the period after the Feb. 29, 2004 coup d’état that ousted Aristide, repressed his Lavalas Family party, set up a US-backed de facto government, and ushered in a 9,000-strong UN military occupation known as MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti).

De facto Prime Minister Gérard Latortue’s interim government of Haiti (IGOH) and his paramilitary allies had difficulty stabilizing their unpopular regime, despite killing, jailing, and purging from government jobs thousands of Lavalas militants and sympathizers.

The Latortue regime had particular trouble suppressing pro-Aristide strongholds like the slums of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, which mounted a fierce armed resistance to the coup and occupation. The coup government, US Embassy and Haitian elite called the resistance fighters “bandits” or “gangs,” the terminology used in the cable.

Entitled “Haitian Private Sector Panicked by Increasing Violence,” the cable relays Mevs report to the Embassy’s Political Officer that Haitian “business leaders are exasperated by the lack of security in the vital port and industrial zone areas of Port-au-Prince and are allegedly arming local police with long-guns and ammunition in an effort to ensure security for their businesses and employees.”

Foley wrote that “Mevs says that of the roughly 150 business owners in the area, probably 30 have already provided some kind of direct assistance (including arms, ammunition, or other materiel) to the police, and the rest are looking to do so soon.”

Mevs “defended the idea of the private sector arming the police in general, but he lamented the haphazard manner in which many of his colleagues seemed to be handing out weapons with little control,” the cable says. Mevs also worried “that funneling the arms secretly would only serve to reinforce rumors that the elite were creating private armies,” which was in fact happening.

Mevs was asking the Embassy if “the U.S. would oversee [a] program” under which the elite could legally buy the HNP’s guns because “he did not trust either MINUSTAH or the HNP to properly control the issuance of weapons.”

The private army “rumor” was corroborated by “[c]ontacts of the Econ Counselor [who] report from time to time of discussions among private sector leaders to fund and arm their own private sector armies.”

Foley added that the “[American Chamber of Commerce] Board of Directors at one point discussed informally giving non-lethal assistance to police stations, such as furniture and microwave ovens for police stations, but decided against doing so for fear that anything given to the police would quickly be stolen.”

Security around the capital’s industrial, warehouse and port districts degenerated after the Mar. 30, 2005 death of Thomas Robenson, alias Labaniere, a one-time Lavalas leader in Cité Soleil’s Boston neighborhood, who defected to defense of the 2004 coup and providing armed protection to the bourgeoisie’s nearby commercial zones. Labaniere was killed by one of his bodyguards, Evens Jeune, “allegedly in a plot directed by rival pro-Lavalas gang leader Dread Wilme,” Foley wrote.

After that, the UN force had tried to secure the commercial areas but “was proving to be a poor substitute for Labaniere,” a political advisor to Cité Soleil’s mayor told the Embassy, largely because “MINUSTAH troops (who, he said, rarely set foot outside of their vehicles) were unable to identify the bandits from amongst the general populace as Labaniere had done.”

The residents of Cité Soleil did not view Emmanuel Wilmer (aka Dred or Dread Wilme) as a “bandit.” They saw him as a hero defending them from pro-coup paramilitaries (who in 1994 burned many houses in the rebellious shantytown) and UN occupation troops. Today, one of the main boulevards through Cité Soleil is named after him, and murals of his face adorn many walls.

Wilme told the Lakou New York program on Brooklyn’s Radio Pa Nou station in April 2005 that “MINUSTAH has been shooting tear gas on the people. There are children who have died from the gas and some people inside churches have been shot… The Red Cross is the only one helping us. The MINUSTAH soldiers remain hidden in their tanks and just aim their guns and shoot the people. They shoot people selling in the streets. They shoot people just walking in the streets. They shoot people sitting and selling in the marketplace.”

But for Foley and the Haitian elite, the UN military was not doing enough repression. “According to Mevs, although MINUSTAH has on occasion parked armored vehicles near the Terminal with some success, he said criminals regularly force the tanks to move (by burning tires or fecal matter nearby), and as soon as the vehicles depart, the rampage continues.”

Foley asked the “Core Group” of international donors and the UN military for a “swift, aggressive” response to the business sector’s call for action against the “criminal elements” from slums like Cité Soleil.

“Ambassador Foley warned the Core Group that MINUSTAH's stand-down in Cite Soleil put the elections at risk, and that the insecurity around the industrial zone risked undermining what is left of the Haitian economy,” said the cable.

In response, the UN mission chief Juan Gabriel Valdes “promised a more robust response from MINUSTAH,” which sat down with police leaders to develop a plan in “coordination with the private sector,” the cable explains.

“In response to embassy and private sector prodding, MINUSTAH is now formulating a plan to protect the area,” concluded the cable.

Weeks later, on July 6, 2005, at 3 a.m. in the morning, 1,440 Brazilian and Jordanian soldiers sealed off Cite Soleil with 41 Armored Personnel Carriers and attacked. Helicopters dropped grenades and UN troops fired more than 22,000 bullets, leaving untold dozens of civilian casualties, including women and children. (Cité Soleil residents told an Oct. 2005 fact-finding delegation for the International Tribunal on Haiti that UN tanks whisked away many bodies, which were never returned.) Human rights groups called the carnage a “massacre.”

“It remains unclear how aggressive MINUSTAH was, though 22,000 rounds is a large amount of ammunition to have killed only six people” (the UN’s official death toll), wrote Foley in a Jul. 26, 2005 Embassy cable obtained by Professor Keith Yearman through a FOIA request. The UN claimed it only killed “gang leader Dred Wilme and five of his associates,” the cable says, while noting that “at St. Joseph’s hospital near Cite Soleil, Doctors Without Borders reported receiving 26 gunshot victims from Cite Soleil on July 6, of whom 20 were women and at least one was a child.”

Meanwhile journalist Jean Baptiste Jean Ristil, a Cité Soleil resident, interviewed “a weeping Fredi Romélus [who] recounted how UN troops had lobbed a red smoke grenade into his house and then opened fire, killing his wife and two children,” reported the Haiti Information Project. Jean Ristil also filmed inside the house where the body of Fredi’s 22-year-old wife, Sonia Romélus, lay, “killed by the same bullet that passed through the body of her one-year-old infant son, Nelson,” the HIP reported. “She was apparently holding the child as the UN opened fire. Next to them was her four-year-old son, Stanley, who was killed by a single shot to the head.”

A U.S. Labor and Human Rights Delegation which was in Haiti at the time and visited Cité Soleil the next day reported that “this full-blown military attack on a densely-populated neighborhood... multiple sources confirm killed at least 23 people” and possibly as many as 50.

As the evidence of a massacre grew, the UN and U.S. began to admit that more Cité Soleil residents may have died. “Given the flimsy construction of homes in Cite Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets,” Foley’s FOIA-released cable reported.

By Aug. 1, Foley was praising the Brazilians in another cable (obtained by Yearman’s FOIA requests) entitled “Brazil Shows Backbone in Bel-Air.” According to Foley, “the security situation in the capital has clearly improved thanks to aggressive incursions in Bel Air and the July 6 raid against Dread Wilme in Cite Soleil… Post has congratulated MINUSTAH and the Brazilian Battalion for the remarkable success achieved in recent weeks.”

The WikiLeaked May 2005 cable also offers a glimpse of Haiti’s inter-ruling class rivalries. Mevs felt that “private sector protests against the IGOH for the lack of security were misguided,” Foley reports, because “Haiti's real enemy and the true source of insecurity [was] a small nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control a network of dirty cops and gangs that not only were responsible for committing the kidnappings and murders, but were also frustrating the efforts of well-meaning government officials and the international community to confront them.” At the center of this “cabal,” according to Mevs, was prominent attorney Gary Lissade, who has a long history as a right-wing operative. In 1993, he was the lead counsel for the military government of coup leader Gen. Raoul Cédras during negotiations at New York’s Governors Island with Aristide’s exiled constitutional government. In 2001, Aristide, in a futile attempt to mollify the Bush administration and putschist bourgeoisie, made Lissade Justice Minister until popular outcry forced his removal along with Prime Minister Jean-Marie Chérestal’s whole government. Today, Lissade sits, alongside Reginald Boulos, on the board of the Clinton co-chaired IHRC.

Others whom Mevs cites in this group allied to “Colombian drug-traffickers” include powerful senator Youri Latortue, a close ally of new Haitian president Michel Martelly, Dany Toussaint, a former Lavalas Family senator who changed camps and supported the 2004 coup against Aristide, and Michel Brunache, who was de facto President Boniface Alexandre’s chief of staff.

The Embassy took Mevs warnings about Lissade’s “cabal” with a grain of salt. Foley wrote that Mevs “is no doubt biased against those individuals he names” because “Mevs himself is a core member of what might easily be described as a rival network of influence competing for control of Haiti against the cast of characters he has described.” Presciently, Foley says that his Embassy “cannot confirm whether the alleged cabal of political insiders allied with South American narco-traffickers is controlling the gangs, we have seen indications of alliances between drug dealers, criminal gangs and political forces that could threaten to make just such a scenario possible via the election of narco-funded politicians,” which some political observers fear may be the situation in Haiti today.

Meanwhile, Dread Wilme’s legend lives on. “His funeral was a hero's farewell,” wrote Haitian blogger Erzili Danto. “His remains decked in a Vodun boat were pushed out onto the open seas next to Site Soley’s water shores, and set to flames for his spirit to soar towards the countless African Ancestors who, like Dread Wilme, had made the ultimate sacrifice for our people's freedom and dignity.”

Even before the Haitian government authorized it, Washington began deploying 22,000 troops to Haiti after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, despite U.S. Embassy officials saying there was no serious security problem, according to secret U.S. diplomatic cables provided to Haiti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks.

Washington’s decision to send thousands of troops in response to the 7.0 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital and surrounding areas drew sharp criticism from aid workers and government officials around the world. They criticized the militarized response to Haiti’s humanitarian crisis as inappropriate and counterproductive, claiming Haiti needed “gauze not guns.” French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet famously said that international aid efforts should be “about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also decried “Marines armed as if they were going to war,” in his weekly television address. “There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that is what the United States should send. They are occupying Haiti in an undercover manner."

The earthquake-related cables show that Washington was very sensitive to international criticism of its response, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mobilized her diplomatic corps to ferret out “irresponsible journalism” worldwide and “take action” to “get the narrative right.”

Meanwhile, the UN in Haiti claimed its 9,000 occupation troops and policemen were sufficient to ensure security. On Jan. 19, with Resolution 1908, the UN Security Council unanimously approved sending more than 3,500 reinforcements to Haiti “to support the immediate recovery, reconstruction and stability efforts,” increasing MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti, as the occupation force is called) to 12,651.

But Obama administration officials said the additional U.S. troops were necessary.

"Until we can get ample supplies of food and water to people, there is a worry that in their desperation some will turn to violence,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters six days after the quake. “And we will work with the UN in trying to ensure that the security situation remains good."

Seeking to avoid the appearance of a unilateral U.S. military action, the U.S. asked Préval to issue a joint communique with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Jan. 17.

Haiti “requests the United States to assist as needed in augmenting security,” said the communiqué, providing the rationale for what would be the third U.S. military intervention of Haiti in the last 20 years.

The revelations that US officials in Port-au-Prince did not believe there was, in fact, a security threat to justify a military intervention come in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to Haiti Liberté by WikiLeaks.

Deployment First, Authorization Later

After the quake, Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince resembled a warzone. Bodies lay strewn, collapsed buildings spilled into dust-filled streets, while Haitians frantically rushed to dig out survivors crying out from under hills of rubble. Several flattened neighborhoods looked as if they had been destroyed by bombing raids.

But the one element missing from this apocalyptic scene was an actual war or widespread violence. Instead, families sat down in the street, huddled around flickering candles with their belongings. Some wept, some sat in shell-shocked silence, while others sang prayers, wailing for Jesus Christ in Kreyol, “Jezi!”

In the quake’s chaotic aftermath, Haitian President René Préval and his prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, were out of touch with U.S. government officials for about 24 hours. When they did connect, the Haitian leaders held a 3 p.m. meeting on Jan. 14 with U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten, the Jamaican Prime Minister, the Brazilian and EU ambassadors, and UN officials.

President Préval laid out priorities: “Re-establish telephone communications; Clear the streets of debris and bodies; Provide food and water to the population; Bury cadavers; Treat the injured; Coordination” among groups amidst the catastrophic destruction, a Jan. 16, 2009 cable explains. Préval did not mention insecurity as a major concern. He did not ask for military troops.

But the same cable reports that “lead elements of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived today, with approximately 150 troops on the ground. More aircraft are expected to arrive tonight with troops and equipment.”

The U.S. government had already initiated the deployment of considerable military assets to Haiti, according to the secret State Department cables. At its peak, the U.S. military response included 22,000 soldiers -- 7,000 based on land and the remainder operating aboard 58 aircraft and 15 nearby vessels, according to the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard was also flying spotter aircraft along Haiti’s coast to intercept any refugees from the disaster.

A Jan. 14 cable from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to U.S. embassies and Pentagon commands worldwide said that the U.S. Embassy in Haiti “anticipates significant food shortages and looting in the affected areas.” But subsequent dispatches from Ambassador Merten in Haiti repeatedly describe only “sporadic” incidents of violence and looting.

In those early post-quake hours, it appears that Préval was reluctant to call in U.S. troops . A Jan. 19 cable reported that a “radio talk show host blasted President Préval on Signal FM on January 18 for hesitating to authorize the U.S. military to deploy.”

But Washington wasn’t waiting for authorization apparently. In a Jan. 15 cable, Clinton told diplomatic posts and military commands that “approximately 4,000 U.S. military personnel will be in Haiti by January 16 and 10,000 personnel by January 18.” However, not until two days later, on Jan. 17, did Clinton and Préval issue the “joint communique” in which Haiti requested the U.S. “to assist as needed in augmenting security.”

Aware that there would be international dismay about U.S. troops playing a security role, Clinton outlined a series of “talking points” for diplomats and military officers in her Jan. 22 cable. She said they should emphasize that “MINUSTAH, has the primary international responsibility for security,” but that “in keeping with President Préval's request to the United States for assistance to augment security, the U.S. is providing every possible support... and is in no way supplanting the UN's role.”

UN Says It Should Provide Security

In the Jan. 18 meeting between Préval and international officials in Santo Domingo, former Guatemalan diplomat Edmund Mulet, MINUSTAH’s new chief, said that his troops “were capable of providing security” in the country. (Mulet had flown into Haiti on a Pentagon plane to take over from MINUSTAH chief Hédi Annabi, who was killed with 101 other UN personnel when the Hotel Christopher, which acted as UN headquarters, collapsed in the quake.) Mulet “insisted that MINUSTAH be in charge of all security in Haiti, with other foreign military forces limited to humanitarian relief operations.”

In fact, many Haitians looked on in disbelief as heavily armed UN soldiers, after rushing to rescue their own personnel, resumed driving through the devastated capital and its suburbs in armored troop carriers, bristling with the guns. Many Haitians have long resented and denounced the MINUSTAH as a flagrant violation of Haiti’s 1987 Constitution and an affront to Haitian sovereignty. The UN troops brandishing guns in front of devastated earthquake victims added insult to injury.

Even before the earthquake, President Préval had called on the UN to change its mission from costly, mostly pointless, and sometimes repressive military patrols to building desperately needed infrastructure. “Turn your tanks into bulldozers” Préval pleaded in his 2006 inaugural speech. UN and U.S. officials repeatedly and dismissively rebuffed the request.

After the quake, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim and Organization of American States (OAS) Representative to Haiti Ricardo Seitenfus echoed Préval’s call. Even Mexico “sought an unproductive debate on reviewing MINUSTAH’s mandate” at the UN Security Council, a proposal which was thankfully “avoided,” a Feb. 24, 2010 cable from the U.S. Mexican Embassy reported.

Even though the UN boosted its force, US troops in and around Haiti eventually outnumbered it by almost 2-to-1, and they remained for six months. Those troops poured into Haiti as U.S. officials fretted about the Haitian police force’s ability to reorganize itself and maintain order, the cables show. (At the same time, the cables reported no marked increase in violence.)

But following her boss’ “talking points,” Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, “assured Préval... that the [U.S.] military was here for humanitarian relief and not as a security force,” explains a Jan. 19 cable.

But that’s not what journalists on the ground saw.

On Jan. 19, 2010, Democracy Now’s crew along with Haiti Liberté’s Kim Ives arrived at the General Hospital around 1 p.m., shortly after troops from the 82nd Airborne Division. There, they found the soldiers, guns in hand, standing behind the hospital’s closed main gate. The troops had orders to provide “security” by denying entrance to a crowd of hundreds, including injured earthquake victims and family members of patients bringing them food or medicine. “Watching the scene in front of the General Hospital yesterday said it all,” said Ives in a Democracy Now! interview the next day. “Here were people who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there were a bunch of... U.S. 82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it weren’t so tragic... They had no business being there.”

The journalists finally managed to get into the hospital and alerted the hospital’s interim director, Dr. Evan Lyon, about the problem. He immediately sent word down that the soldiers should stand down and open the gate. They did, but then assumed positions in the hospital’s driveway, continuing to act, among the injured hobbling into the hospital, as a completely unnecessary and unrequested “security force,” contrary to what Mills had promised Préval.

The entry point for much of the military personnel and equipment was the capital’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport. Timothy Schwartz, an anthropologist who has consulted for USAID, rushed into Port-au-Prince the day after the quake to help. “Ben and I are at the airport, on the tarmac, helping soldiers of the 82nd Airborne load thick, heavy metal plates into the back of my pickup truck,” he writes in a forthcoming book. “Then it occurs to me, ‘what the hell are these things?’”

“‘Body armor,’ Ben says.”

Schwartz reflected: “Fear must be the reason why all this military hardware and these soldiers around us are setting up base camp behind a ten foot fence. Fear must be why they are walking around in the near sweltering heat with 80 pounds of gear strapped to their bodies and machine guns swung over their shoulders.”

One doctor from Colorado who flew in with colleagues (at their own expense) on Jan. 17 to help the injured was shocked by the military deployment he saw at the airport. “We need gauze, not guns,” he told the Democracy Now crew.

The enormous influx of U.S. military personnel, weapons and equipment into the airport prompted a chorus of protest from mid-level French, Italian, and Brazilian officials, as well as the aid group Doctors Without Borders. They were outraged that planes carrying vital humanitarian supplies were prevented from landing, or delayed, sometimes for days.

“We had a whole freaking plane full of the friggin’ medicine!” Douglas Copp, an American rescue worker, exclaimed outside a UN base not long after the quake. The U.S. military, which had taken over the Port-au-Prince airport, would not give clearance for the Peruvian military plane to land. It had to divert to the Dominican capital, 150 miles away. “In Santo Domingo, we got a bus, and we came into Haiti with just the things we could fit in the bus,” he said.

Getting the Narrative “Right”

Secretary Clinton brooked no criticism, which was growing worldwide, of the U.S. military’s role in the relief effort.“I am deeply concerned by instances of inaccurate and unfavorable international media coverage of America's role and intentions in Haiti,” she wrote in a stern Jan. 20 message to embassies across the globe. “It is imperative to get the narrative right over the long term.”

She asked that Embassies report back to her, “citing specific examples of irresponsible journalism in your host countries, and what action you have taken in response.”

In countries all over the world, from Luxembourg to Chile, diplomatic officials scrutinized the media and hit back against criticism of the U.S. military’s build-up in Haiti, sending back dozens of detailed reports.

For example, a Jan. 20 cable from Doha describes an Al Jazeera English report on the relief effort’s militarization which compared the US-run airport to a “mini-Green zone.” This report resulted in a phone call “during the early morning hours of January 18" from the U.S. Embassy in Doha to Tony Burman, managing director of Al Jazeera English.

But the airport story was accurate. “They had taken over the place,” said Jeremy Dupin, 26, about the U.S. “joint coordination” of the airport. After his home had collapsed, Dupin, a Haitian journalist, had wandered the streets for a day until linking up with an Al Jazeera English crew to work as a producer.

“There were 20,000 soldiers so this was a big move,” Dupin said. “We pointed out there were serious problems, and that's why the U.S. didn't like the news, but we told the truth. And if we had to say it again, we would say it again... This wasn't something we just said, it's something we showed with images and footage. I mean, this was the truth.”

Many cables reported generally positive coverage in their countries. But any instance of negativity towards the United States, no matter how small, was flagged and dealt with. In Colombia, for example, “the only negative coverage” was from a newspaper cartoonist who drew “a colonial soldier planting a U.S. flag on the island of Haiti,” the Bogota Embassy reported on Jan. 26. “Post will meet with the cartoonist this week to discuss this cartoon with him and provide information refuting its inference, as well as engage with El Espectador's editor to express our strong concerns.”

The Buenos Aires Embassy reported on Jan. 26 that the “pro-government, left-of-center Pagina 12 protests the excessive U.S. troop deployment, noting that ALBA (Bolivarian Partnership for the Americas) voiced its ‘concern over the excessive presence of foreign troops without any reason, purpose, venues or time of permanence,’ in veiled reference to the U.S. troops.”

Factory Owners Demand “Security at All Levels”

Back in Haiti, Embassy officials worried that only 30-40% of the police were showing up for duty, while some 4,000 prisoners had escaped from the National Penitentiary. There were “numerous gang member/leaders” among the escapees, a Feb. 16 cable noted, but “many were not hardened criminals and were being held in lengthy pre-trial detention, never having been sentenced.”

“The security situation is worsening,” said a Jan. 18 cable issued just after midnight. “[E]scaped inmates have formed gangs to kidnap and perpetuate [sic] other crimes.”

Only nine hours later, however, another dispatch: “Embassy Port-au-Prince reports security is ‘pretty good,’ with ‘sporadic outbreaks’ of violence, despite news stories of a growing number of looters roaming the streets of Port-au-Prince and of gunfire and police using tear gas to disperse crowds.”

A Jan. 23 cable shows the situation unchanged: “Embassy Port-au-Prince reports the security situation on the ground remains relatively calm.”

Many news stories dishonestly described a sensational and imaginary eruption of violence in Haiti. “Gangs Rule Streets of Haiti,” CBS reported the day after the quake. On Jan. 19, CNN.com’s lead headline was “Security fears grow in Haiti’s tent cities,” and the caption below, “with 4,000 convicted criminals on the loose, nothing and no one is safe.”

But the U.S. Embassy was reporting the opposite. One Jan. 19 cable said that the “security situation in Haiti remains calm overall with no indications of mass migration towards North America.” Another Jan. 19 cable said: “Despite hardships in devastated neighborhoods, residents appear to be calm and civil, though isolated reports of roving armed gangs continue.” It continued: “Residents were residing in made-shift [sic] camps in available open areas, and they had not yet received any humanitarian supplies from relief organization. Nonetheless, the residents were civil, calm, polite, solemn and seemed to be well-organized while they were searching for belongings in the ruins of their homes. However, isolated reports continue of roving armed gangs engaged in looting and robbery.”

The U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH), giving police chief Mario Andrésol “command and control advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett, whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed” bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it, FOX News reported. The crowds never materialized. [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/05/law-enforcement-plays-critical-role-haiti-relief-efforts-1485071597/]

Before the end of the month, three separate State Department cables relayed that “Canadian Embassy contacts in Port-au-Prince report verbal orders were allegedly given by police leadership to shoot escaped prisoners on sight. UN Civilian Police officers close to prison authorities also heard unconfirmed reports of extra-judicial killings by police.”

The cables do not identify what action, if any, the PNH’s U.S. advisors took to investigate or stop the unlawful killings. Nor is there any mention of the numerous so-called “looters” in downtown Port-au-Prince’s rubble-filled commercial district who were shot on sight by the Haitian police, like 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma, who grabbed some paintings from a collapsed structure. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/20/haiti-earthquake-teenager-shot-police].

Not surprisingly, Haitian business owners were the most worried about security, especially for their factories. Five days after the quake, Ambassador Merten met with representatives of Haiti’s business sector, who said “their major concern is security at all levels, to include security of goods, at marketplaces, and for ports of entry.” Later, they asked the UN occupation troops “to provide security for reopened factories, and pledged to re-open in weeks.” Embassy officers met again with Haitian business leaders one week later.

In a Jan. 26 cable, Merten commented that “apparel manufacturers in Haiti operate on a high volume, thin margin, low capitalization basis where cash flow is extremely important for the business to survive.” He relayed a factory owner’s suggestion for a $20 million loan to the sector. Days later, he applauded the introduction of legislation in the U.S. Senate “intended to provide short-term relief to Haiti's apparel sector” by extending trade preferences.

Militarization of Humanitarian Aid

There is no doubt that the U.S. soldiers deployed to Haiti helped many earthquake victims. The 82nd Airborne Division helped set up one of the capital’s largest and best equipped IDP camps of over 35,000 with actor Sean Penn at the Pétionville Country Club, which was their operational base.

The Pentagon’s earthquake response also included one of the largest medical outreach efforts in history. Service men and women treated and evaluated thousands of Haitian patients, including more than 8,600 on the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort. Surgeons aboard the ship completed nearly 1,000 surgeries.

However, even more impressive results were obtained by Cuba’s 800 doctors in Haiti and the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade, a 1,500 member contingent of doctors from Cuba and many other nations who graduated from Cuba’s medical school. In the six months after the quake, according the Cuban Embassy in Haiti, the Brigade treated over 70,300 patients, performing over 2,500 operations, all without deploying soldiers or bringing in weapons. (Cuba’s medical missions are still in Haiti and remain a bulwark against cholera’s spread.)

In fact, there is a growing movement among aid groups worldwide, and even in the UN, against the militarization of humanitarian aid. The report entitled "Quick Impact, Quick Collapse: The Dangers of Militarized Aid in Afghanistan" by Actionaid, Oxfam International, and other NGOs could have been as easily written about Haiti, where the Pentagon’s “government in a box” strategy was being applied in late January 2010, when the study was released.

“As political pressures to ‘show results’ in troop contributing countries intensify, more and more assistance is being channeled through military actors to ‘win hearts and minds’ while efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty... are being sidelined,” the report’s introduction reads. “Development projects implemented with military money or through military-dominated structures aim to achieve fast results but are often poorly executed, inappropriate and do not have sufficient community involvement to make them sustainable. There is little evidence this approach is generating stability...”

Even before the Haitian government authorized it, Washington began deploying 22,000 troops to Haiti after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, despite U.S. Embassy officials saying there was no serious security problem, according to secret U.S. diplomatic cables provided to Haiti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks.

Washington’s decision to send thousands of troops in response to the 7.0 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital and surrounding areas drew sharp criticism from aid workers and government officials around the world. They criticized the militarized response to Haiti’s humanitarian crisis as inappropriate and counterproductive, claiming Haiti needed “gauze not guns.” French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet famously said that international aid efforts should be “about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also decried “Marines armed as if they were going to war,” in his weekly television address. “There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that is what the United States should send. They are occupying Haiti in an undercover manner."

The earthquake-related cables show that Washington was very sensitive to international criticism of its response, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mobilized her diplomatic corps to ferret out “irresponsible journalism” worldwide and “take action” to “get the narrative right.”

Meanwhile, the UN in Haiti claimed its 9,000 occupation troops and policemen were sufficient to ensure security. On Jan. 19, with Resolution 1908, the UN Security Council unanimously approved sending more than 3,500 reinforcements to Haiti “to support the immediate recovery, reconstruction and stability efforts,” increasing MINUSTAH (UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti, as the occupation force is called) to 12,651.

But Obama administration officials said the additional U.S. troops were necessary.

"Until we can get ample supplies of food and water to people, there is a worry that in their desperation some will turn to violence,” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters six days after the quake. “And we will work with the UN in trying to ensure that the security situation remains good."

Seeking to avoid the appearance of a unilateral U.S. military action, the U.S. asked Préval to issue a joint communique with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Jan. 17.

Haiti “requests the United States to assist as needed in augmenting security,” said the communiqué, providing the rationale for what would be the third U.S. military intervention of Haiti in the last 20 years.

The revelations that US officials in Port-au-Prince did not believe there was, in fact, a security threat to justify a military intervention come in a trove of 1,918 cables made available to Haiti Liberté by WikiLeaks.

Deployment First, Authorization Later

After the quake, Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince resembled a warzone. Bodies lay strewn, collapsed buildings spilled into dust-filled streets, while Haitians frantically rushed to dig out survivors crying out from under hills of rubble. Several flattened neighborhoods looked as if they had been destroyed by bombing raids.

But the one element missing from this apocalyptic scene was an actual war or widespread violence. Instead, families sat down in the street, huddled around flickering candles with their belongings. Some wept, some sat in shell-shocked silence, while others sang prayers, wailing for Jesus Christ in Kreyol, “Jezi!”

In the quake’s chaotic aftermath, Haitian President René Préval and his prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, were out of touch with U.S. government officials for about 24 hours. When they did connect, the Haitian leaders held a 3 p.m. meeting on Jan. 14 with U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten, the Jamaican Prime Minister, the Brazilian and EU ambassadors, and UN officials.

President Préval laid out priorities: “Re-establish telephone communications; Clear the streets of debris and bodies; Provide food and water to the population; Bury cadavers; Treat the injured; Coordination” among groups amidst the catastrophic destruction, a Jan. 16, 2009 cable explains. Préval did not mention insecurity as a major concern. He did not ask for military troops.

But the same cable reports that “lead elements of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived today, with approximately 150 troops on the ground. More aircraft are expected to arrive tonight with troops and equipment.”

The U.S. government had already initiated the deployment of considerable military assets to Haiti, according to the secret State Department cables. At its peak, the U.S. military response included 22,000 soldiers -- 7,000 based on land and the remainder operating aboard 58 aircraft and 15 nearby vessels, according to the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard was also flying spotter aircraft along Haiti’s coast to intercept any refugees from the disaster.

A Jan. 14 cable from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to U.S. embassies and Pentagon commands worldwide said that the U.S. Embassy in Haiti “anticipates significant food shortages and looting in the affected areas.” But subsequent dispatches from Ambassador Merten in Haiti repeatedly describe only “sporadic” incidents of violence and looting.

In those early post-quake hours, it appears that Préval was reluctant to call in U.S. troops . A Jan. 19 cable reported that a “radio talk show host blasted President Préval on Signal FM on January 18 for hesitating to authorize the U.S. military to deploy.”

But Washington wasn’t waiting for authorization apparently. In a Jan. 15 cable, Clinton told diplomatic posts and military commands that “approximately 4,000 U.S. military personnel will be in Haiti by January 16 and 10,000 personnel by January 18.” However, not until two days later, on Jan. 17, did Clinton and Préval issue the “joint communique” in which Haiti requested the U.S. “to assist as needed in augmenting security.”

Aware that there would be international dismay about U.S. troops playing a security role, Clinton outlined a series of “talking points” for diplomats and military officers in her Jan. 22 cable. She said they should emphasize that “MINUSTAH, has the primary international responsibility for security,” but that “in keeping with President Préval's request to the United States for assistance to augment security, the U.S. is providing every possible support... and is in no way supplanting the UN's role.”

UN Says It Should Provide Security

In the Jan. 18 meeting between Préval and international officials in Santo Domingo, former Guatemalan diplomat Edmund Mulet, MINUSTAH’s new chief, said that his troops “were capable of providing security” in the country. (Mulet had flown into Haiti on a Pentagon plane to take over from MINUSTAH chief Hédi Annabi, who was killed with 101 other UN personnel when the Hotel Christopher, which acted as UN headquarters, collapsed in the quake.) Mulet “insisted that MINUSTAH be in charge of all security in Haiti, with other foreign military forces limited to humanitarian relief operations.”

In fact, many Haitians looked on in disbelief as heavily armed UN soldiers, after rushing to rescue their own personnel, resumed driving through the devastated capital and its suburbs in armored troop carriers, bristling with the guns. Many Haitians have long resented and denounced the MINUSTAH as a flagrant violation of Haiti’s 1987 Constitution and an affront to Haitian sovereignty. The UN troops brandishing guns in front of devastated earthquake victims added insult to injury.

Even before the earthquake, President Préval had called on the UN to change its mission from costly, mostly pointless, and sometimes repressive military patrols to building desperately needed infrastructure. “Turn your tanks into bulldozers” Préval pleaded in his 2006 inaugural speech. UN and U.S. officials repeatedly and dismissively rebuffed the request.

After the quake, Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim and Organization of American States (OAS) Representative to Haiti Ricardo Seitenfus echoed Préval’s call. Even Mexico “sought an unproductive debate on reviewing MINUSTAH’s mandate” at the UN Security Council, a proposal which was thankfully “avoided,” a Feb. 24, 2010 cable from the U.S. Mexican Embassy reported.

Even though the UN boosted its force, US troops in and around Haiti eventually outnumbered it by almost 2-to-1, and they remained for six months. Those troops poured into Haiti as U.S. officials fretted about the Haitian police force’s ability to reorganize itself and maintain order, the cables show. (At the same time, the cables reported no marked increase in violence.)

But following her boss’ “talking points,” Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, “assured Préval... that the [U.S.] military was here for humanitarian relief and not as a security force,” explains a Jan. 19 cable.

But that’s not what journalists on the ground saw.

On Jan. 19, 2010, Democracy Now’s crew along with Haiti Liberté’s Kim Ives arrived at the General Hospital around 1 p.m., shortly after troops from the 82nd Airborne Division. There, they found the soldiers, guns in hand, standing behind the hospital’s closed main gate. The troops had orders to provide “security” by denying entrance to a crowd of hundreds, including injured earthquake victims and family members of patients bringing them food or medicine. “Watching the scene in front of the General Hospital yesterday said it all,” said Ives in a Democracy Now! interview the next day. “Here were people who were going in and out of the hospital bringing food to their loved ones in there or needing to go to the hospital, and there were a bunch of... U.S. 82nd Airborne soldiers in front yelling in English at this crowd. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were creating more chaos rather than diminishing it. It was a comedy, if it weren’t so tragic... They had no business being there.”

The journalists finally managed to get into the hospital and alerted the hospital’s interim director, Dr. Evan Lyon, about the problem. He immediately sent word down that the soldiers should stand down and open the gate. They did, but then assumed positions in the hospital’s driveway, continuing to act, among the injured hobbling into the hospital, as a completely unnecessary and unrequested “security force,” contrary to what Mills had promised Préval.

The entry point for much of the military personnel and equipment was the capital’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport. Timothy Schwartz, an anthropologist who has consulted for USAID, rushed into Port-au-Prince the day after the quake to help. “Ben and I are at the airport, on the tarmac, helping soldiers of the 82nd Airborne load thick, heavy metal plates into the back of my pickup truck,” he writes in a forthcoming book. “Then it occurs to me, ‘what the hell are these things?’”

“‘Body armor,’ Ben says.”

Schwartz reflected: “Fear must be the reason why all this military hardware and these soldiers around us are setting up base camp behind a ten foot fence. Fear must be why they are walking around in the near sweltering heat with 80 pounds of gear strapped to their bodies and machine guns swung over their shoulders.”

One doctor from Colorado who flew in with colleagues (at their own expense) on Jan. 17 to help the injured was shocked by the military deployment he saw at the airport. “We need gauze, not guns,” he told the Democracy Now crew.

The enormous influx of U.S. military personnel, weapons and equipment into the airport prompted a chorus of protest from mid-level French, Italian, and Brazilian officials, as well as the aid group Doctors Without Borders. They were outraged that planes carrying vital humanitarian supplies were prevented from landing, or delayed, sometimes for days.

“We had a whole freaking plane full of the friggin’ medicine!” Douglas Copp, an American rescue worker, exclaimed outside a UN base not long after the quake. The U.S. military, which had taken over the Port-au-Prince airport, would not give clearance for the Peruvian military plane to land. It had to divert to the Dominican capital, 150 miles away. “In Santo Domingo, we got a bus, and we came into Haiti with just the things we could fit in the bus,” he said.

Getting the Narrative “Right”

Secretary Clinton brooked no criticism, which was growing worldwide, of the U.S. military’s role in the relief effort.“I am deeply concerned by instances of inaccurate and unfavorable international media coverage of America's role and intentions in Haiti,” she wrote in a stern Jan. 20 message to embassies across the globe. “It is imperative to get the narrative right over the long term.”

She asked that Embassies report back to her, “citing specific examples of irresponsible journalism in your host countries, and what action you have taken in response.”

In countries all over the world, from Luxembourg to Chile, diplomatic officials scrutinized the media and hit back against criticism of the U.S. military’s build-up in Haiti, sending back dozens of detailed reports.

For example, a Jan. 20 cable from Doha describes an Al Jazeera English report on the relief effort’s militarization which compared the US-run airport to a “mini-Green zone.” This report resulted in a phone call “during the early morning hours of January 18" from the U.S. Embassy in Doha to Tony Burman, managing director of Al Jazeera English.

But the airport story was accurate. “They had taken over the place,” said Jeremy Dupin, 26, about the U.S. “joint coordination” of the airport. After his home had collapsed, Dupin, a Haitian journalist, had wandered the streets for a day until linking up with an Al Jazeera English crew to work as a producer.

“There were 20,000 soldiers so this was a big move,” Dupin said. “We pointed out there were serious problems, and that's why the U.S. didn't like the news, but we told the truth. And if we had to say it again, we would say it again... This wasn't something we just said, it's something we showed with images and footage. I mean, this was the truth.”

Many cables reported generally positive coverage in their countries. But any instance of negativity towards the United States, no matter how small, was flagged and dealt with. In Colombia, for example, “the only negative coverage” was from a newspaper cartoonist who drew “a colonial soldier planting a U.S. flag on the island of Haiti,” the Bogota Embassy reported on Jan. 26. “Post will meet with the cartoonist this week to discuss this cartoon with him and provide information refuting its inference, as well as engage with El Espectador's editor to express our strong concerns.”

The Buenos Aires Embassy reported on Jan. 26 that the “pro-government, left-of-center Pagina 12 protests the excessive U.S. troop deployment, noting that ALBA (Bolivarian Partnership for the Americas) voiced its ‘concern over the excessive presence of foreign troops without any reason, purpose, venues or time of permanence,’ in veiled reference to the U.S. troops.”

Factory Owners Demand “Security at All Levels”

Back in Haiti, Embassy officials worried that only 30-40% of the police were showing up for duty, while some 4,000 prisoners had escaped from the National Penitentiary. There were “numerous gang member/leaders” among the escapees, a Feb. 16 cable noted, but “many were not hardened criminals and were being held in lengthy pre-trial detention, never having been sentenced.”

“The security situation is worsening,” said a Jan. 18 cable issued just after midnight. “[E]scaped inmates have formed gangs to kidnap and perpetuate [sic] other crimes.”

Only nine hours later, however, another dispatch: “Embassy Port-au-Prince reports security is ‘pretty good,’ with ‘sporadic outbreaks’ of violence, despite news stories of a growing number of looters roaming the streets of Port-au-Prince and of gunfire and police using tear gas to disperse crowds.”

A Jan. 23 cable shows the situation unchanged: “Embassy Port-au-Prince reports the security situation on the ground remains relatively calm.”

Many news stories dishonestly described a sensational and imaginary eruption of violence in Haiti. “Gangs Rule Streets of Haiti,” CBS reported the day after the quake. On Jan. 19, CNN.com’s lead headline was “Security fears grow in Haiti’s tent cities,” and the caption below, “with 4,000 convicted criminals on the loose, nothing and no one is safe.”

But the U.S. Embassy was reporting the opposite. One Jan. 19 cable said that the “security situation in Haiti remains calm overall with no indications of mass migration towards North America.” Another Jan. 19 cable said: “Despite hardships in devastated neighborhoods, residents appear to be calm and civil, though isolated reports of roving armed gangs continue.” It continued: “Residents were residing in made-shift [sic] camps in available open areas, and they had not yet received any humanitarian supplies from relief organization. Nonetheless, the residents were civil, calm, polite, solemn and seemed to be well-organized while they were searching for belongings in the ruins of their homes. However, isolated reports continue of roving armed gangs engaged in looting and robbery.”

The U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH), giving police chief Mario Andrésol “command and control advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett, whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed” bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it, FOX News reported. The crowds never materialized. [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/02/05/law-enforcement-plays-critical-role-haiti-relief-efforts-1485071597/]

Before the end of the month, three separate State Department cables relayed that “Canadian Embassy contacts in Port-au-Prince report verbal orders were allegedly given by police leadership to shoot escaped prisoners on sight. UN Civilian Police officers close to prison authorities also heard unconfirmed reports of extra-judicial killings by police.”

The cables do not identify what action, if any, the PNH’s U.S. advisors took to investigate or stop the unlawful killings. Nor is there any mention of the numerous so-called “looters” in downtown Port-au-Prince’s rubble-filled commercial district who were shot on sight by the Haitian police, like 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma, who grabbed some paintings from a collapsed structure. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/20/haiti-earthquake-teenager-shot-police].

Not surprisingly, Haitian business owners were the most worried about security, especially for their factories. Five days after the quake, Ambassador Merten met with representatives of Haiti’s business sector, who said “their major concern is security at all levels, to include security of goods, at marketplaces, and for ports of entry.” Later, they asked the UN occupation troops “to provide security for reopened factories, and pledged to re-open in weeks.” Embassy officers met again with Haitian business leaders one week later.

In a Jan. 26 cable, Merten commented that “apparel manufacturers in Haiti operate on a high volume, thin margin, low capitalization basis where cash flow is extremely important for the business to survive.” He relayed a factory owner’s suggestion for a $20 million loan to the sector. Days later, he applauded the introduction of legislation in the U.S. Senate “intended to provide short-term relief to Haiti's apparel sector” by extending trade preferences.

Militarization of Humanitarian Aid

There is no doubt that the U.S. soldiers deployed to Haiti helped many earthquake victims. The 82nd Airborne Division helped set up one of the capital’s largest and best equipped IDP camps of over 35,000 with actor Sean Penn at the Pétionville Country Club, which was their operational base.

The Pentagon’s earthquake response also included one of the largest medical outreach efforts in history. Service men and women treated and evaluated thousands of Haitian patients, including more than 8,600 on the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort. Surgeons aboard the ship completed nearly 1,000 surgeries.

However, even more impressive results were obtained by Cuba’s 800 doctors in Haiti and the Henry Reeve Medical Brigade, a 1,500 member contingent of doctors from Cuba and many other nations who graduated from Cuba’s medical school. In the six months after the quake, according the Cuban Embassy in Haiti, the Brigade treated over 70,300 patients, performing over 2,500 operations, all without deploying soldiers or bringing in weapons. (Cuba’s medical missions are still in Haiti and remain a bulwark against cholera’s spread.)

In fact, there is a growing movement among aid groups worldwide, and even in the UN, against the militarization of humanitarian aid. The report entitled "Quick Impact, Quick Collapse: The Dangers of Militarized Aid in Afghanistan" by Actionaid, Oxfam International, and other NGOs could have been as easily written about Haiti, where the Pentagon’s “government in a box” strategy was being applied in late January 2010, when the study was released.

“As political pressures to ‘show results’ in troop contributing countries intensify, more and more assistance is being channeled through military actors to ‘win hearts and minds’ while efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty... are being sidelined,” the report’s introduction reads. “Development projects implemented with military money or through military-dominated structures aim to achieve fast results but are often poorly executed, inappropriate and do not have sufficient community involvement to make them sustainable. There is little evidence this approach is generating stability...”

Disaster capitalists were flocking to Haiti in a “gold rush” for contracts to rebuild the country after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, wrote the current U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten in a secret Feb. 1, 2010 cable obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Haïti Liberté.

“THE GOLD RUSH IS ON!” Merten headlined a section of his 6 p.m. situation report – or Sitrep – back to Washington. “As Haiti digs out from the earthquake, different [U.S.] companies are moving in to sell their concepts, products and services,” he wrote. “President Préval met with Gen Wesley Clark Saturday [Jan. 30] and received a sales presentation on a hurricane/earthquake resistant foam core house designed for low income residents.”

Former U.S. Presidential candidate and retired General Wesley Clark was promoting – along with professional basketball star Alonzo Mourning – InnoVida Holdings, LLC, a Miami-based company, which had pledged to donate 1,000 foam-core panel built house for Haiti’s homeless.

The Pompano Beach, Florida-based disaster recovery company “AshBritt has been talking to various institutions about a national plan for rebuilding all government buildings,” Merten continued in his dispatch. “Other companies are proposing their housing solutions or their land use planning ideas, or other construction concepts. Each is vying for the ear of President in a veritable free-for-all.”

One man who had the ear of President Préval, perhaps more than anyone else, was Lewis Lucke, Washington’s “Unified Relief and Response Coordinator,” heading up the entire U.S. earthquake relief effort in Haiti. He met with Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive two weeks after the quake, and at least one more time after that, according to the cables. Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development, had overseen multi-billion contracts for Bechtel and other companies as USAID Mission Director in post-invasion Iraq.

Lucke stepped down as Haiti relief coordinator in April 2010, after only three months, telling his hometown newspaper, The Austin-American Statesman, in an interview: “It became clear to us that if it was handled correctly, the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity... So much of the china was broken that it gives the chance to put it together hopefully in a better and different way.”

But in December 2010, Lucke sued AshBritt and its Haitian partner, GB Group (belonging to Haiti’s richest man, Gilbert Bigio) for almost $500,000. He claimed the companies “did not pay him enough for consulting services that included hooking the contractor up with powerful people and helping to navigate government bureaucracy,” according to the Associated Press. Lucke had signed a lucrative $30,000 per month agreement with AshBritt and GB Group within eight weeks of stepping down, helping them secure $20 million in construction contracts.

Before the lawsuit was settled, Lucke had already joined masonry product supplier MC Endeavors. The firm sent out another of many press releases last month advertising its ability to build homes and applauding Haiti’s newly-inaugurated President Michel Martelly’s declaration: “This is a new Haiti that is open for business now.”

AshBritt and Lucke weren’t the only gold-seekers to end up in lawsuits. Just over a year after his benevolent gesture, Innovida’s CEO Claudio Osorio was in court being sued by another NBA star, Carlos Boozer, for having “intentionally, maliciously, fraudulently” squandered a $1 million investment by the basketball player in InnoVida Holdings, reported the Chicago Sun-Times of Apr. 24, 2011. The article quotes Boozer’s attorney as saying that Osorio misrepresented his business record, lied, and “promised 1,000 percent returns from projects that benefitted disaster-stricken areas” like Haiti. “InnoVida is a defendant to at least 14 known lawsuits, including a blanket lien on the operating factory’s assets,” the suit states. InnoVida was taken over by a court-ordered receiver Mar. 3.

Ambassador Merten’s announced “gold rush” began as Haitians were still being pulled from the rubble. Since then, USAID has doled out nearly $200 million in relief and reconstruction contracts. By this April, just 2.5% of the money had gone to Haitian firms, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Lucke, for one, justifies making money off of disasters. “It’s kind of the American way,” he told Haïti Liberté. “Just because you’re trying to do business doesn’t mean you’re trying to be rapacious. There’s nothing insidious about that... It wasn’t worse than Iraq.”

Disaster capitalists were flocking to Haiti in a “gold rush” for contracts to rebuild the country after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, wrote the current U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten in a secret Feb. 1, 2010 cable obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Haïti Liberté.

“THE GOLD RUSH IS ON!” Merten headlined a section of his 6 p.m. situation report – or Sitrep – back to Washington. “As Haiti digs out from the earthquake, different [U.S.] companies are moving in to sell their concepts, products and services,” he wrote. “President Préval met with Gen Wesley Clark Saturday [Jan. 30] and received a sales presentation on a hurricane/earthquake resistant foam core house designed for low income residents.”

Former U.S. Presidential candidate and retired General Wesley Clark was promoting – along with professional basketball star Alonzo Mourning – InnoVida Holdings, LLC, a Miami-based company, which had pledged to donate 1,000 foam-core panel built house for Haiti’s homeless.

The Pompano Beach, Florida-based disaster recovery company “AshBritt has been talking to various institutions about a national plan for rebuilding all government buildings,” Merten continued in his dispatch. “Other companies are proposing their housing solutions or their land use planning ideas, or other construction concepts. Each is vying for the ear of President in a veritable free-for-all.”

One man who had the ear of President Préval, perhaps more than anyone else, was Lewis Lucke, Washington’s “Unified Relief and Response Coordinator,” heading up the entire U.S. earthquake relief effort in Haiti. He met with Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive two weeks after the quake, and at least one more time after that, according to the cables. Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development, had overseen multi-billion contracts for Bechtel and other companies as USAID Mission Director in post-invasion Iraq.

Lucke stepped down as Haiti relief coordinator in April 2010, after only three months, telling his hometown newspaper, The Austin-American Statesman, in an interview: “It became clear to us that if it was handled correctly, the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity... So much of the china was broken that it gives the chance to put it together hopefully in a better and different way.”

But in December 2010, Lucke sued AshBritt and its Haitian partner, GB Group (belonging to Haiti’s richest man, Gilbert Bigio) for almost $500,000. He claimed the companies “did not pay him enough for consulting services that included hooking the contractor up with powerful people and helping to navigate government bureaucracy,” according to the Associated Press. Lucke had signed a lucrative $30,000 per month agreement with AshBritt and GB Group within eight weeks of stepping down, helping them secure $20 million in construction contracts.

Before the lawsuit was settled, Lucke had already joined masonry product supplier MC Endeavors. The firm sent out another of many press releases last month advertising its ability to build homes and applauding Haiti’s newly-inaugurated President Michel Martelly’s declaration: “This is a new Haiti that is open for business now.”

AshBritt and Lucke weren’t the only gold-seekers to end up in lawsuits. Just over a year after his benevolent gesture, Innovida’s CEO Claudio Osorio was in court being sued by another NBA star, Carlos Boozer, for having “intentionally, maliciously, fraudulently” squandered a $1 million investment by the basketball player in InnoVida Holdings, reported the Chicago Sun-Times of Apr. 24, 2011. The article quotes Boozer’s attorney as saying that Osorio misrepresented his business record, lied, and “promised 1,000 percent returns from projects that benefitted disaster-stricken areas” like Haiti. “InnoVida is a defendant to at least 14 known lawsuits, including a blanket lien on the operating factory’s assets,” the suit states. InnoVida was taken over by a court-ordered receiver Mar. 3.

Ambassador Merten’s announced “gold rush” began as Haitians were still being pulled from the rubble. Since then, USAID has doled out nearly $200 million in relief and reconstruction contracts. By this April, just 2.5% of the money had gone to Haitian firms, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Lucke, for one, justifies making money off of disasters. “It’s kind of the American way,” he told Haïti Liberté. “Just because you’re trying to do business doesn’t mean you’re trying to be rapacious. There’s nothing insidious about that... It wasn’t worse than Iraq.”

The minimum wage struggle was central to the resignation of Prime Minister Michelle Pierre-Louis in November 2009, Haiti Liberté has learned from WikiLeaked cables.

In a confidential June 12, 2009 cable, Ambassador Janet Sanderson reported that Pierre-Louis “told me that she has ‘unequivocally’ decided to resign” although “she has set no date for submitting the resignation.”

In addition to being “increasingly frustrated and sidelined by President Préval,” Pierre-Louis was “highly suspicious of the President's motives in managing the minimum wage debate, noting that he has rejected suggestions from all sides to come to some decision and respond to the bill, by signing it or detailing his concerns,” Sanderson reported. “She strongly believes that Préval is using this issue as the proximate cause to maneuver her out, even though she has little influence on the matter.”

Sanderson wrote that Pierre-Louis “has decided that she won't stay around and ‘be a Jacques Edouard (Alexis),’” her predecessor who was dismissed by the Senate in April 2008 in the face nationwide food riots.

Pierre-Louis finally stepped down on Nov. 11, 2009, one year and two months after assuming the office on Sep. 5, 2008.

The minimum wage struggle was central to the resignation of Prime Minister Michelle Pierre-Louis in November 2009, Haiti Liberté has learned from WikiLeaked cables.

In a confidential June 12, 2009 cable, Ambassador Janet Sanderson reported that Pierre-Louis “told me that she has ‘unequivocally’ decided to resign” although “she has set no date for submitting the resignation.”

In addition to being “increasingly frustrated and sidelined by President Préval,” Pierre-Louis was “highly suspicious of the President's motives in managing the minimum wage debate, noting that he has rejected suggestions from all sides to come to some decision and respond to the bill, by signing it or detailing his concerns,” Sanderson reported. “She strongly believes that Préval is using this issue as the proximate cause to maneuver her out, even though she has little influence on the matter.”

Sanderson wrote that Pierre-Louis “has decided that she won't stay around and ‘be a Jacques Edouard (Alexis),’” her predecessor who was dismissed by the Senate in April 2008 in the face nationwide food riots.

Pierre-Louis finally stepped down on Nov. 11, 2009, one year and two months after assuming the office on Sep. 5, 2008.

The U.S. Embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory owners contracted by Levi’s, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom to aggressively block a paltry minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners refused to pay 62 cents an hour, or $5 per eight-hour day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. Behind the scenes, the factory owners had the vigorous backing of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Embassy, show secret U.S. Embassy cables provided to Haiti Liberté by the transparency-advocacy group WikiLeaks.

The minimum daily wage had been 70 gourdes or $1.75 a day.

The factory owners told the Haitian parliament that they were willing to give workers a mere 9 cents an hour pay increase to 31 cents an hour – 100 gourdes daily – to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for U.S. clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

To resolve the impasse between the factory owners and parliament, the State Department urged then Haitian President René Préval to intervene.

“A more visible and active engagement by Préval may be critical to resolving the issue of the minimum wage and its protest ‘spin-off’ -- or risk the political environment spiraling out of control,” warned U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 10, 2009 cable to Washington.

Two months later, Préval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase – one for the textile industry at $3.13 (125 gourdes) per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at $5 (200 gourdes) per day.

Still, the U.S. Embassy was not pleased. Deputy Chief of Mission David E. Lindwall said the $5 a day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haitian advocates of the minimum wage argued that it was necessary to keep pace with inflation and alleviate the rising cost of living. As it is, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. Haiti had been rocked by the so-called “clorox” food riots of April 2008, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a working class family of one working member and two dependents needed a daily wage of at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $13.75, to meet normal living expenses.

The revelation of U.S. support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables provided to Haiti Liberté by WikiLeaks.

“As a matter of policy, the Department of State does not comment on documents that purport to contain classified information and strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information,” the U.S. Embassy’s Information Officer Jon Piechowski told Haiti Liberté in response to a request for a statement. “In Haiti, approximately 80% of the population is unemployed and 78% earns less than $1/day – the U.S. government is working with the Government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry, and invest in agriculture and beyond.” (According to the UN, 78% of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day.)

For a 20 month period between early February 2008 and October 2009, U.S. Embassy officials closely monitored and reported on the minimum wage issue. The cables show that the Embassy fully understood the popularity of the measure.

The cables said that the new minimum wage even had support from a majority of the Haitian business community “based on reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

Still, the proposal engendered fierce opposition from Haiti’s tiny assembly zone elite, which Washington had long been supporting with direct financial aid and free trade deals.

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) bill, which gave Haitian assembly zone manufacturers preferential trade incentives. Two years later, Congress passed an even more generous version of the duty-free trade bill called HOPE II, and USAID provided technical assistance and training programs to factories to help them expand and take advantage of the new legislation.

U.S. Embassy cables claimed that those efforts were imperiled by parliamentary demands for a wage hike to keep pace with soaring inflation and high food prices. “[Textile i]ndustry representatives, led by the Association of Haitian Industry (ADIH), objected to the immediate HTG 130 (USD 3.25) per day wage increase in the assembly sector, saying it would devastate the industry and negatively impact the benefits of the Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II),” said a June 17, 2009, confidential cable from Charge d'Affaires Thomas C. to Washington.

Ironically, Tighe’s confidential cable one week earlier, on June 10, noted that the ADIH study had found that “overall, the average salary for workers in the [garment assembly] sector is HTG 173 (USD 4.33),” only 67 cents a day less than the proposed minimum wage. Nonetheless the study urged opposing any rise in the minimum wage because “the current salary structure promotes productivity and serves as a competitive wage in the region.” Tighe notes, however, in his next sentence that the “minimum salary for workers in the Free Trade Zone on the Haiti-DR border is approximately USD 6.00,” a full dollar more than the 200 gourdes ($5) demanded. Still, the ADIH report concluded somehow “that a minimum daily wage of HTG 200 would result in the loss of 10,000 workers,” more than one third of Haiti’s 27,000 garment workers at that time.

Tighe said that the “ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

Bolstered by the USAID study, the factory owners lobbied heavily against the increase, meeting President Préval on multiple occasions and more than 40 members of Parliament and political parties, according to the cables.

The Haiti cables also reveal how closely the US Embassy monitored widespread pro-wage increase demonstrations and openly worried about the political impact of the minimum wage battle. UN troops were called in to quell student protests, sparking further demands for the end of the UN military occupation of Haiti.

On Aug. 10, 2009, garment workers, students and other activists demonstrated at the Industrial Park (SONAPI) near the Port-au-Prince airport. The police arrested and carted away two students, Guerchang Bastia and Patrick Joseph, on the charge of inciting the workers. Demanding their immediate release, the protestors marched to the Delmas 33 police station, where the police fired tear-gas and the throng replied with rock-throwing. In the course of the demonstration, the windshield of U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Tighe’s vehicle was smashed, and he took refuge in the police station. Later, when journalists asked him about the incident and the minimum wage controversy, Tighe wouldn’t comment but just said that “it is always a minority which creates disorder.”

Due to the fierce demonstrations of workers and students, sweatshop owners and Washington won only a partial victory in the minimum wage battle, delaying the $5/day minimum for one year and keeping the assembly sector’s minimum wage a notch below all other sectors. In October 2010, assembly workers’ minimum wage increased to 200 gourdes a day, while in all other sectors it went to 250 gourdes ($6.25).

“Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, [the assembly industry bourgeoisie in] ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising the minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs,” wrote the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives (PAPDA) in a June 2009 press release. “In every case, it was a lie.”

The U.S. Embassy in Haiti worked closely with factory owners contracted by Levi’s, Hanes, and Fruit of the Loom to aggressively block a paltry minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department cables.

The factory owners refused to pay 62 cents an hour, or $5 per eight-hour day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian parliament in June 2009 would have mandated. Behind the scenes, the factory owners had the vigorous backing of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Embassy, show secret U.S. Embassy cables provided to Haiti Liberté by the transparency-advocacy group WikiLeaks.

The minimum daily wage had been 70 gourdes or $1.75 a day.

The factory owners told the Haitian parliament that they were willing to give workers a mere 9 cents an hour pay increase to 31 cents an hour – 100 gourdes daily – to make T-shirts, bras and underwear for U.S. clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

To resolve the impasse between the factory owners and parliament, the State Department urged then Haitian President René Préval to intervene.

“A more visible and active engagement by Préval may be critical to resolving the issue of the minimum wage and its protest ‘spin-off’ -- or risk the political environment spiraling out of control,” warned U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson in a June 10, 2009 cable to Washington.

Two months later, Préval negotiated a deal with Parliament to create a two-tiered minimum wage increase – one for the textile industry at $3.13 (125 gourdes) per day and one for all other industrial and commercial sectors at $5 (200 gourdes) per day.

Still, the U.S. Embassy was not pleased. Deputy Chief of Mission David E. Lindwall said the $5 a day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

Haitian advocates of the minimum wage argued that it was necessary to keep pace with inflation and alleviate the rising cost of living. As it is, Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere and the World Food Program estimates that as many as 3.3 million people in Haiti, a third of the population, are food insecure. Haiti had been rocked by the so-called “clorox” food riots of April 2008, named after hunger so painful that it felt like bleach in your stomach.

According to a 2008 Worker Rights Consortium study, a working class family of one working member and two dependents needed a daily wage of at least 550 Haitian gourdes, or $13.75, to meet normal living expenses.

The revelation of U.S. support for low wages in Haiti’s assembly zones was in a trove of 1,918 cables provided to Haiti Liberté by WikiLeaks.

“As a matter of policy, the Department of State does not comment on documents that purport to contain classified information and strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of such information,” the U.S. Embassy’s Information Officer Jon Piechowski told Haiti Liberté in response to a request for a statement. “In Haiti, approximately 80% of the population is unemployed and 78% earns less than $1/day – the U.S. government is working with the Government of Haiti and international partners to help create jobs, support economic growth, promote foreign direct investment that meets ILO labor standards in the apparel industry, and invest in agriculture and beyond.” (According to the UN, 78% of Haitians live on less than $2, not $1, a day.)

For a 20 month period between early February 2008 and October 2009, U.S. Embassy officials closely monitored and reported on the minimum wage issue. The cables show that the Embassy fully understood the popularity of the measure.

The cables said that the new minimum wage even had support from a majority of the Haitian business community “based on reports that wages in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua (competitors in the garment industry) will increase also.”

Still, the proposal engendered fierce opposition from Haiti’s tiny assembly zone elite, which Washington had long been supporting with direct financial aid and free trade deals.

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) bill, which gave Haitian assembly zone manufacturers preferential trade incentives. Two years later, Congress passed an even more generous version of the duty-free trade bill called HOPE II, and USAID provided technical assistance and training programs to factories to help them expand and take advantage of the new legislation.

U.S. Embassy cables claimed that those efforts were imperiled by parliamentary demands for a wage hike to keep pace with soaring inflation and high food prices. “[Textile i]ndustry representatives, led by the Association of Haitian Industry (ADIH), objected to the immediate HTG 130 (USD 3.25) per day wage increase in the assembly sector, saying it would devastate the industry and negatively impact the benefits of the Haitian Hemispheric through Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II),” said a June 17, 2009, confidential cable from Charge d'Affaires Thomas C. to Washington.

Ironically, Tighe’s confidential cable one week earlier, on June 10, noted that the ADIH study had found that “overall, the average salary for workers in the [garment assembly] sector is HTG 173 (USD 4.33),” only 67 cents a day less than the proposed minimum wage. Nonetheless the study urged opposing any rise in the minimum wage because “the current salary structure promotes productivity and serves as a competitive wage in the region.” Tighe notes, however, in his next sentence that the “minimum salary for workers in the Free Trade Zone on the Haiti-DR border is approximately USD 6.00,” a full dollar more than the 200 gourdes ($5) demanded. Still, the ADIH report concluded somehow “that a minimum daily wage of HTG 200 would result in the loss of 10,000 workers,” more than one third of Haiti’s 27,000 garment workers at that time.

Tighe said that the “ADIH and USAID funded studies on the impact of near tripling of the minimum wage on the textile sector found that an HTG 200 Haitian gourde minimum wage would make the sector economically unviable and consequently force factories to shut down.”

Bolstered by the USAID study, the factory owners lobbied heavily against the increase, meeting President Préval on multiple occasions and more than 40 members of Parliament and political parties, according to the cables.

The Haiti cables also reveal how closely the US Embassy monitored widespread pro-wage increase demonstrations and openly worried about the political impact of the minimum wage battle. UN troops were called in to quell student protests, sparking further demands for the end of the UN military occupation of Haiti.

On Aug. 10, 2009, garment workers, students and other activists demonstrated at the Industrial Park (SONAPI) near the Port-au-Prince airport. The police arrested and carted away two students, Guerchang Bastia and Patrick Joseph, on the charge of inciting the workers. Demanding their immediate release, the protestors marched to the Delmas 33 police station, where the police fired tear-gas and the throng replied with rock-throwing. In the course of the demonstration, the windshield of U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Tighe’s vehicle was smashed, and he took refuge in the police station. Later, when journalists asked him about the incident and the minimum wage controversy, Tighe wouldn’t comment but just said that “it is always a minority which creates disorder.”

Due to the fierce demonstrations of workers and students, sweatshop owners and Washington won only a partial victory in the minimum wage battle, delaying the $5/day minimum for one year and keeping the assembly sector’s minimum wage a notch below all other sectors. In October 2010, assembly workers’ minimum wage increased to 200 gourdes a day, while in all other sectors it went to 250 gourdes ($6.25).

“Every time the minimum wage has been discussed, [the assembly industry bourgeoisie in] ADIH has cried wolf to scare the government against its passage: that raising the minimum wage would mean the certain and immediate closure of industry in Haiti and the cause of a sudden loss of jobs,” wrote the Haitian Platform for Development Alternatives (PAPDA) in a June 2009 press release. “In every case, it was a lie.”

The United States and other international donors decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections despite believing that the country’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), “almost certainly in conjunction with President Préval,” had unwisely and unjustly excluded the country’s largest party, the Lavalas Family, according to a secret U.S. Embassy cable dated Dec. 4, 2009 provided by WikiLeaks to Haiti Liberté.

The meeting of representatives from the European Union and United Nations with ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, Spain and the U.S., decided to knowingly move ahead with the flawed polling because “the international community has too much invested in Haiti's democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its [sic] imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative, according to U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s cable.

The Lavalas Family (FL) is the party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was kidnapped by a U.S. Navy Seal team on Feb. 29, 2004 and flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état that was supported by France, Canada, and the U.S..

This history made Canadian Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the Dec. 1, 2009 donor meeting that “support for the elections as they now stand would be interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Préval and the CEP's decision against Lavalas.” He said that the CEP had reneged on a pledge to “reconsider their exclusion of Lavalas.”

If this is the kind of partnership we have with the CEP going into the elections, what kind of transparency can we expect from them as the process unfolds?” Rivard asked.

The donors were concerned only about appearances in the case of the Lavalas exclusion, the cable makes clear. But they were mostly worried about strengthening “the opposition” (code for “right-wing”) which, for them, Préval had “emasculated.” The EU and Canada therefore proposed that donors “help level the playing field” by doing things like “purchase radio air time for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.” Otherwise, the right-wing “will cease to be much of a meaningful force in the next government.”

Such plans to brazenly meddle and play favorites in Haiti’s sovereign electoral process presaged how Washington would forcefully intervene in the elections when they finally did take place on November 28, 2010, followed by run-offs on March 20, 2011.

Those interventions – primarily by the Organization of American States (OAS) or what Cuba calls Washington’s “Ministry of Colonial Affairs” – assured the victory of pro-U.S. coup-cheerleader Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, 50, a former lewd konpa musician, despite a dramatically flawed, and often illegal, electoral process as well as an anemic voter turn-out.

Less than 23 percent of Haiti's registered voters had their vote counted in either of the two rounds, the lowest electoral participation rate in the hemisphere since 1945, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Furthermore, the second round was illegal because the eight-member CEP could never muster the five votes necessary to ratify the first round results which Washington and the OAS imposed.

The December 2009 donor meeting took place just over a month before the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake which would derail the elections originally planned for Feb. 28, 2010. When the polling was rescheduled, there was even more at stake, primarily how $10 billion of pledged earthquake aid would be spent and the future of the 11,500-strong UN military force that has occupied Haiti since the 2004 coup d’etat. The U.S. has been the most adamant in making a show election to keep a democratic face on the highly unpopular and costly military occupation, which now costs close to $1.5 billion annually.

Ambassador Merten urged a minimal donor reaction to the FL’s exclusion, saying they should just “hold a joint press conference to announce donor support for the elections and to call publicly for transparency” because ““without donor support, the electoral timetable risks slipping dangerously, threatening a timely presidential succession..”

His cable was classified “Confidential” and “NOFORN,” meaning “Not for release to foreign nationals.”

Merten had opposed FL’s exclusion because, he wrote, the party would come out looking “like a martyr and Haitians will believe (correctly) that Préval is manipulating the election.”

The banning of the FL from the election “for not turning in the proper documentation” set the stage for Martelly to go up against another neo-Duvalierist candidate, Mirlande Manigat.

The election’s low turn out has been ascribed to the futility of choosing between two unappealing candidates, a grassroots boycott campaign, and, primarily, popular dismay over the FL’s exclusion, the very issue that gave rise to the Dec. 1, 2009 meeting.

Former President Aristide, who returned to Haiti from exile on Mar. 18, two days before the second round, drove the point home when he declared on his arrival: “The problem is exclusion, the solution is inclusion.”