Yes, but for the most part these “gangs” are simply private armies – militias – working for Haitian oligarchs.[1]
Illustrating this, in May 2005 multi-millionaire Haitian businessman Reginald Boulos demanded that the U.S.-installed government allow each businessman to form his own private “security firm.” Arming with automatic weapons was planned for such employees. Boulos’s demand was granted.
WARLORDS
Warriors-for-hire were easy to find for the oligarchs.[2] They were veterans of a Haitian national army disbanded[3] in 2004 by newly re-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
These security groups also serve as house armies in case a largely non-moneyed population should rise up and seek to take a share of wealth from oligarchs’ homes. As described by Haiti State University professor Jacques Jean-Vernet,
“Those who invest in this economy at one level or another know they must be ready to have their own armed groups to protect themselves.”[4]
The UN notes these private oligarch troops sometimes attack political organizers in poor neighborhoods.
American Military University professor Hyppolite Pierre writes,
“The violence (by oligarch armed groups) had the consistent purpose of weakening the popular movement in its aspirations.”[5]
In the wake of the UN report, Canada sanctioned several Haitian oligarchs for funding militias that fueled instability in Haiti.[6] One, Andre Apaid, however, has escaped any sanctioning by the US.
Andre Apaid
Apaid has a Port-au-Prince factory that makes radar transmitters bought by major US defense-department contractors (Sperry/ Unisys, IBM, Remington, and Honeywell). Apaid has a clothing factory near Port-au-Prince, too, which makes fully 40 percent of the T-shirts sold in the USA.[7]
Apaid’s Internet ad reads, “Vintage Gildan tshirt Usa Heavy cotton large print made in Haiti $22.95”
Apaid’s cotton-fabric raw material is made in the southern US.
“I am a committed Haitian-American citizen,”Apaid says obliquely.
Apaid’s raw-material fabric arrives in Haiti via seaports near Port-au-Prince likely owned by one or another of Apaid’s fellow oligarchs. One of these is reputed billionaire Gilbert Bigio.
Gilbert Bigio
Bigio owns Haiti’s Lafito seaport. He is a US citizen born near Miami, still living there while running the Haitian operations of his GB Group. As with Apaid, Canada sanctioned Bigio in 2023 for destabilizing Haiti by enabling armed warfare, and US officials avoided sanctioning Bigio. Bigio is Donald Trump’s neighbor in the Indian Creek enclave in Miami Beach. In 2020, Bigio bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Mercedes Maybach, for $132,000, easing Epstein’s financial trouble.[8]
Bigio’s privately owned Port Lafito is managed by SSA Marine, a US defense-department contractor, whose assets are controlled by the USA’s trillion-dollar Blackstone Group LP. This port serves a large portion of Haiti’s import-export industry.
Gregory Mevs
Not far from Bigio’s port Lafito, oligarch Gregory Mevs controls much of the rest of Haiti’s import-export industry — through his privately owned Port Varreux.[9] This seaport received US financial aid to repair damage from the 2010 earthquake.
In addition, with US investment largely by billionaire George Soros’s fund, after the earthquake Mevs built adjacent to Port Varreux a large industrial park, called West Indies Free Zone.[10] The US press wrote,
“The investment from the Soros Economic Development Fund is a symbolic step by the international community to commit capital to Haiti….”[11]
Flying to Haiti around this event were Bill Clinton, Canadian ambassador Gilles Rivard, and executives from Citibank, from Scotiabank, from Gap, and from Levi Strauss.[12]
This Free Zone has been referred to as “unpoliced.”
IMPORTING COCAINE FROM COLOMBIA
Within the import-export industry that they control, it is commonplace for Haiti’s elite to invest in cocaine shipments.[13] Such investments increased many-fold beginning in 1995.[14] Most cocaine imports arrive to Haiti by sea.[15] Unpoliced industrial free zones lie next to both Mevs’s port and Bigio’s port.
As such, it is easy to imagine a loaded cargo dolly motoring a short way from a container ship, entering unimpeded to an adjacent free zone, climbing the rear delivery ramp of a maquiladoras unscrutinized, and dropping a cargo that may or may not include some of the 67 tons annually of cocaine imported to Haiti for export to the US.[16]
The “Sugar Ship” Manzanares:
In 2015, cocaine arrived in bulk at the Varreux port, tucked in the hold alongside a sugar cargo paid for by Haitian oligarch Marc Antoine Acra,[17] aboard a ship called Manzanares. Armed men arrived and seized much of the imported cocaine.[18] It was suggested that Acra and Mevs controlled these armed men.[19]
EXPORTING TO FLORIDA OF COLOMBIAN COCAINE
In the late 1990s, authorities managed to close a cocaine route to the US from Colombia that ran through Mexico. Colombian smugglers forged a new route, through Haiti. At the beginning of 2000, Colombian cocaine was arriving to Florida from Haiti at the rate of 1,000 pounds per month.[20] In February 2000 alone, some 3,000 pounds of Haiti-sourced coke was found on boats docked in the Miami River. Also in 2000, a Miami police officer was fired after he was found to receive and distribute Haiti-sourced Colombian cocaine.
At the time, US Customs agent Frank Figueroa said that around four freighters per week arrived from Haiti to southern Florida – to pick up US-grown rice and palm oil, and occasionally bicycles. He said he didn’t see how they could make a profit if that’s all they carried.[21]
Coke shipments Haiti-to-Florida increased in size. In June 2015, a full ton was found headed for Port of Miami.
“When they do come in on the Miami River, [the shipments] are typically big,” a Customs spokesman said.[22]
IMPORTING GUNS FROM FLORIDA
The Haitian National Police in 2015 reported they had 38,000 authorized weapons,[23] but a recent UN report found that as of 2020, Haiti had around one-half million illegal weapons.[24]
Most illegal guns imported to Haiti enter through seaports.[25]
In April 2019 at Gilbert Bigio’s Lafito seaport, criminals bought, from port employees, numerous customs-exemption slips. With falsified slips, three container ships escaped customs inspection at the port for three weeks.[26] By that time, the ships were suspected to have carried guns, but at that late date inspectors boarding found no guns.
“It’s some of our citizens in the US who are sending weapons to Haiti and are thus fueling the insecurity,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network.
The Moise operation
As it happens, this south Florida network became useful in a coup operation against Jovenel Moise.
[1] United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 2653, of Oct 21, 2022, said oligarchs “enabled illegal activities of armed criminal gangs” and thus destabilized Haiti. This oligarchy controls Haiti’s chief industry – import-export. and oligarchs use gunmen against hijack attempts on their imported cargoes – sometimes by other oligarch armed squads. This is particularly true regarding imports by oligarchs of cocaine, which occur frequently.
[2] Haiti Libre, September 22, 2023. Each of these men and other Haitian magnates were sanctioned eventually— either by Canada or by the US or by both countries – for destabilizing Haiti by sponsoring armed militias (media reports destabilization by “gangs” but not sponsorship of most of the gunmen by business tycoons).
[3] Disbanded to prevent the army’s practice of thuggery, in poor communities, against leftists).
[5] Hyppolite Pierre, adjunct faculty in political science, American Military University; author, Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes: Haiti the Phoenix
[6] Press Conversion Web site, citing a UK National Labour Committee Report, 1993, cited in Ronald Cox, “Private Interests and U.S. Foreign Policy in Haiti and the Caribbean Basin,” Contested Social Orders and International Politics, David Skidmore ed., 1997
[8] Through cronies in Mossad and CIA, Epstein for years had managed to conceal wrongdoing. Cf. “America Under Blackmail,” Whitney Webb, Trine Day Press, 2022
[9] A section, for container ships, of the main Port-au-Prince seaport.
[10] Haiti’s Free Zone Law categorizes free trade zones as “geographical areas guaranteed low taxes where foreign (and domestic) investors can provide services, import, store, produce, export, and re-export.
[12] CounterVortex Web site, October 13, 2009. An Associated Press investigation found that of every $100 of Haiti earthquake-reconstruction contracts awarded by the American government, $98.40 returned to American companies.
[13] D. Barnes, “Drug Trafficking in Haiti,” Naval Postgraduate School, June 2002
[15] Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 14, 2023
[16] UNODC, “Haiti’s Criminal Markets,” February 17, 2023
[17] Multiple witnesses have accused family member Bernard Mevs of working to bring drugs into Haiti with members of the Acra family, according to a current senior American official who worked on the sugar boat case; in the case, Jean Fritz Bernard Mevs was suspected initially but dismissed.
[18] Le Monde du Sud/Elsie News, August 9, 2016. Tout Haiti invites you to read this Nouvelliste report for further details. “Manzanares: Marc Antoine Acra, indicted for drug trafficking.”
[19] Reporters unearthed that US drug agents for years had been assigned to watch Port Varreux, trying to interdict cocaine shipments; debate continues over whether it was simple failure or bribes that explains their failure to interdict. Presidential Guard member Dimitri Hérard was a suspect in the Manzanares case, accused of deploying members of the presidential guard to ferry the drugs off the ship. Later, he was on the presidential guard crew that was guarding prime minister Jovenel Moise the night Moise was murdered.
