Two Haitian Americans seek seats on Broward County Commission
BY ASHLEY MIZNAZI AUG. 18, 2022
A Haitian American could hold a seat on the Broward County Commission for the first time after Tuesday’s election. Two Haitian American candidates — Guithele Ruiz-Nicolas and Aude Sicard — are among those running for seats 8 and 9 on the redistricted commission comprising nine members.
Broward is Florida’s 7th largest county with a population of 1.94 million, including a large contingent of Haitians. The exact figures are not available, but they are among the 228,000 people of Haitian ancestry that the Migration Policy Institutereports live in South Florida.
In the County Commission race, all the candidates are Democrats. Early voting ends Sunday, Aug. 21, and Election Day is Tuesday, Aug. 23.
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How U.S. gun laws and South Florida ports help fuel Haiti’s escalating gang violence
By Jacqueline Charles and Jay Weaver |
Updated August 16, 2022 7:39 PM
When the cargo ship “Miss Lilie” left Miami one recent afternoon and pulled into port along Haiti’s northwest coast, it had all the markings of a legitimate government operation.
Men in canoes waited until nighttime to unload the freight and stash it on a nearby island. Armed anti-drug trafficking officers showed up at the wharf and claimed they were sent to take the cargo, while vehicles with official state and police plates waited to transport the load along a perilous, gang-controlled road.
But the cargo was far from legal. It contained 120,000 high-power rounds — a deadly cache outlawed under U.S. law. And that’s not all. The rounds were bound for senior political officials in Port-au-Prince, according to two police reports obtained by the Miami Herald.
Haiti does not manufacture ammunition or weapons, and its poorly equipped security forces are subject to U.S. arms restrictions in place since the late 1990s. Yet the volatile nation, which is being terrorized by kidnapping gangs and other politically connected criminals, is awash in hundreds of thousands of firearms and ammunition — with the vast majority of the illegal weapons coming from South Florida.
“Today the trafficking of guns, the trafficking of ammunition and kidnapping appear to have supplanted drug trafficking,” said Gédéon Jean, a lawyer who runs the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights in Port-au-Prince, which monitors kidnappings. “The money that used to be made in Haiti in the trafficking of cocaine is now being made in these other types of trafficking.”
Among the Haiti-bound weapons that were recently seized in South Florida: military-grade .50 caliber assault rifles that use bullets “the size of a Tabasco bottle,” according to a senior Haitian police official with knowledge of the seizure.
Still, stopping the flow is nearly impossible, say experts, who cite Haiti’s deeply rooted drug trade, smuggling networks, systemic corruption and lucrative black-market firearms profits — along with the United States’ lax gun laws.
“The United States is the biggest gun store in the Western Hemisphere — by volume, by manufacturing, by culture,” said Carlos A. Canino, a former Special Agent in Charge of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives field offices in Miami and Los Angeles.
Smuggling operations out of South Florida and seizures at regional ports have spiked — along with the caliber of weapons.
“It’s disturbing the amount [of firearms] and increase in firepower we are seeing being sent down there,” said Anthony Salisbury, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations office in Miami.
While HSI has seized weapons going to Haiti before and investigated a number of cases involving the Caribbean region along with certain countries in Latin America, Salisbury said federal agents are “seeing an uptick.”
“There’s definitely an increase in the flow of weapons in both numbers and types of the firepower” to Haiti, he said, adding that “there is an increase in activity and seizures.”
Half of all weapons-exports investigations in Caribbean
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which collaborates with other federal agencies including HSI, says that since 2020 about half of all firearms-export investigations have been concentrated in the Caribbean region — a top smuggling destination fueled by the demand of drug traffickers and huge black-market markups on U.S.-made guns. The other 50% are scattered throughout other parts of the world.
The most popular firearms for illegal exports from the U.S. are pistols: the Taurus Model G2C, the Micro Draco 5.5, which can fire rifle rounds, and 9mm Glocks. Body armor and ammunition are also popular black-market exports.
Commerce-BIS and the State Department, along with other federal agencies, are responsible for enforcing two main laws: International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Export Administration Regulations. Commerce-BIS regulates “commercial grade” firearms up to .50-caliber that are semi-automatic and other types such as lever action, bolt action or revolvers; Commerce also controls higher-caliber rifles that are for big-game hunting, but they are not typical of the smuggling trade. The State Department regulates “military grade” firearms that are fully automatic.
But the rampant sale of firearms in Florida and other states makes enforcing those federal export laws difficult, according to experts and former law enforcement officials.
In Florida, buyers of weapons at federally licensed firearms stores must go through a criminal background check and fill out a form saying they are the actual purchasers. (Background checks and other paperwork are not required at private gun shows.) But “straw” buyers with no criminal history can easily pass a background check and declare that they are the actual purchasers. While making multiple purchases, they claim on a federal form that they are buying the weapons for themselves when in fact they are amassing them for shipment or sale to someone else in the U.S. or abroad.
However, there’s a loophole in Florida law for anyone buying ammunition. Although the law prohibits anyone who can’t buy or possess a firearm from purchasing ammunition, licensed vendors aren’t required to run background checks on buyers of bullets to make sure they’re allowed to do so. In addition, the buyers don’t have to fill out a federal form declaring they’re purchasing the ammunition, so there’s no way to trace the transaction.
A black market for weapons
There are several ways in which traffickers hide and ship firearms and ammunition. Federal agents have seen instances in which traffickers have tried to hide both “in massive amounts of goods,” like consignment shipments of used clothing and donations of toys.
The weapons, which are sold for hundreds of dollars each in the U.S. market, are then resold for thousands of dollars each in the Caribbean.
“There are huge markups on the black market,” a Commerce-BIS enforcement official said.
For example, because of their name-brand popularity, 9mm Glock pistols can sell for $400 to $500 each at a federally licensed firearms store or private gun show in South Florida, but can be resold for $2,000 to $5,000 in St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and then fetch as much as $10,000 in Jamaica, Trinidad or Haiti.
In Haiti, where police have seized hundreds of weapons in recent months, automatic rifles like AK47s, the Israeli-made Galil and military-grade rifles also fetch high prices. The latter is already in the hands of some gangs, according to an individual who has knowledge of gang armaments.
Almost 200 percent spike in kidnappings
Gangs have been part of the Haitian landscape for more than 20 years. But a year after the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, gang violence has soared and the interim government led by Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon, seems unable to stem the tide or the country’s free fall.
Between January and July 1 of this year, there have been 1,207 homicides and 787 kidnappings, according to statistics provided to the United Nations by the Haiti National Police and other sources. The kidnappings represent an increase of 193.7%, while killings represent an increase of about 27.5% compared to the similar period last year.
The escalation, blamed mainly on violent gangs, has made tackling the illegal flow of weapons to the country “an urgent problem,” according to several Haiti experts.
Haiti observers and federal authorities say stopping the escalating cycle of violence in the Caribbean nation is only possible if the U.S. government steps up efforts to block the exports of illegal weapons through U.S. ports.
“If you can really squeeze this flow, it would make a huge impact on so many different issues in Haiti, on so many problems,” said William O’Neill, a security expert and international human rights lawyer who was involved in helping rebuild the country’s fledgling police force when he worked for the U.N.
READ MORE: They lack guns, bullets and body armor. How are Haiti’s cops confronting gangs?
Earlier this year, Homeland Security opened a permanent office at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Salisbury, who heads HSI’s office in Miami, said as a result of the expanded presence, there’s going to be “an increased effort to stop the flow of weapons to Haiti,” which could lead to more arrests and prosecutions in South Florida.
Despite their limitations, Haitian police have stepped up efforts to go after armed gangs using lethal force — and to crack down on the illegal trafficking of arms and ammunition.
Police have seized 250 guns as of July, with the overwhelming numbers being pistols. Last year, they seized a total of 401 firearms.
The bulk of the illegal weapons, while not always destined for gangs, do eventually find their way into their hands. Once estimated at less than 100 just a few years ago, gangs now number up to 200, with over “3,000” soldiers, according to some international observers.
They are not only carrying out attacks in mostly poor, working-class neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, but they also sow other kinds of chaos in crisis-wracked Haiti.
In June, armed members of a gang known as “5 Seconds,” employing drones and heavy artillery, took over the Palace of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince, where the country’s main courthouse is located, and destroyed evidence and files on multiple massacres committed since 2018. A month later, suspected members of the 400 Mawozo gang set fire to a courthouse in the Croix-des-Bouquets region east of the capital.
The head of the National Human Rights Defense Network said gangs are responsible for at least 17 documented massacres and armed attacks over the past five years, including two this year.
The vicious cycle of gangs, trafficking, kidnapping
Previously, a few dozen armed groups were used by politicians to help get them into office or to keep them there. Now, the number of gangs has escalated as the political and economic elite turn to them to do their bidding while young people seek them out for jobs.
It’s all part of a vicious cycle, said Jean, the human rights lawyer in Port-au-Prince..
To afford firearms and ammunition, gangs need cash, he said. To acquire the cash, they kidnap, demanding tens of thousands of dollars in ransom payments that are later used to purchase guns and bullets from highly connected individuals with the ability to pay off customs officials, police officers and sometimes government authorities.
Jean, however, cautions that those behind the emerging criminal enterprise are not the gangs per se.
“They are being used,” he said, accusing Haiti’s traffickers, politicians and elite of provoking the deadly clashes so they can reap the financial benefits. “For the guns to sell, for the bullets to sell, they always have to create conflict, to make the gangs fight so that they would unload their bullets.”
Jean said two recent seizures at the ports in Port-de-Paix and in Port-au-Prince have shown that the individuals involved in the illegal gun trafficking in Haiti “are people in sectors that you would have never thought of.”
In July, the Port-de-Paix smuggling case implicating “Miss Lilie” led to the arrests of an acting state prosecutor, Michelet Virgile, and the secretary general of the Federation of Bars of Haiti, Robinson Pierre-Louis. Haiti National Police accused them of using their authority to get two weapons-smuggling suspects, the Lilie boat captain and an associate, released from jail.
Pierre-Louis, who was an adviser in the justice ministry, is accused of calling Virgile, and demanding that the prosecutor release the boat’s owner, Jonas Georges, who is from Miami, and the associate, Fritz Jean Relus, accused of transporting some of the ammunition and firearms to the home of an accused trafficker. They were released without the Haiti National Police’s approval, but their whereabouts are unknown.
Less than two weeks later in July, scandal struck again. This time, it involved shipping containers that came in the name of the Episcopal Church from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale into Port-au-Prince.
The arrival of the containers coincided with ongoing gang warfare in Cité Soleil. As police approached the port, about a mile away from the fighting, the “5 Seconds” gang traveling in a boat fired on the cops to stop the search of the illicit shipment.
Eventually, police officers made it inside the port. The containers, marked as “Donated goods,” held 22 firearms, including 19 assault rifles, 140 magazine cartridges of different calibers, nearly 15,000 rounds of ammunition and $50,000 in counterfeit dollar bills. The Episcopal Church, which has had 105 containers arrive in its name between October of last year and June, according to shipping records, has denied any wrongdoing in both a statement put out by a spokesman and its lawyer.
“The criminals are operating with impunity and with money to spend for arms,” said Canino, who retired from ATF in 2020 after 30 years. “Sit down and do the math. How many freighters are coming in? How many freighters are going out? Whether you’re talking about the Miami River, Port of Miami or Port Everglades, that’s a lot of freighters and they’re not going to be easy to stop.”
Canino said straw buyers with clean records can pass the scrutiny of criminal background checks on multiple gun purchases at federally licensed firearms stores and then resell the weapons on the black market to criminals here or overseas. Moreover, thanks to the internet, buyers can go to any private gun show in Florida and buy weapons without going through a criminal background check.
“Now you buy high-capacity semi-automatic weapons, you can buy military grade rifles — something that will take down an airplane, a helicopter and armored personnel carrier. Add the internet to it,” Canino said. “In the old days, you had to buy it from a federally licensed firearms store, but with the use of technology, you have more access to more people. You can hit all the gun shows in Florida.”
Canino also said that no matter how many federal resources and agencies are thrown at the problem, the stream of weapons will continue to flow, despite higher numbers of seizures in South Florida.
“Even if this is a priority, no matter what you do you can’t stop it all,” Canino said. “It’s impossible.”
This story was originally published August 16, 2022 5:44 PM.
The Assumption of Hope- From Fr. Rick
sam. 20 août 2022)
To: Archbishop Thomas Wenski <Cette adresse e-mail est protégée contre les robots spammeurs. Vous devez activer le JavaScript pour la visualiser.;
Subject: The Assumption of Hope- From Fr. Rick
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"The poor will have hope, and the evil one will be made to shut his mouth."
(Job 5:16)
Dear family and friends,
I know that news of Haiti is rare.
It is probably just as well, or you would be even more saturated by bad news than you already are.
In recent years, many people live with a heaviness from pandemics, public shootings, global warming, wars, nuclear arms proliferation, hostile nationalism, fragile world economies, and other threats to existence.
It is not easy to imagine a hopeful future.
This also generates anxiety about what the future holds for our children and grandchildren. They deserve a better world than the one we are giving them.
The situation in Haiti unravels at a cruel and unrelenting pace.
In just the last few weeks we witnessed widespread gang wars, a massacre in Cite Soliel, the burning of the Cathedral, the burning of the Judicial Court, the closing of a major bank, the kidnapping of four of our staff, thousands more internal refugees.
Civilization and it's symbols- community, cohesion, transcendence, justice, economy-
are being wiped out.
As priest and physician, our work puts me daily into direct encounter with the physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds of those torn to shreds by tragedy.
I am often asked if my faith in God has suffered from witnessing so much suffering.
I used to answer that I have more trouble believing in people than in God.
People are without any doubt the cause of most of the horrors we have seen.
But I hesitate to say that now, even with things much worse.
God's belief in the human family has been sorely tested from the time of Adam,
but God's belief in us stands firm.
We believe in God. God believes in us.
It is still the magnificent equation.
In the Scriptures and tradition, there is the persistent idea that a handful of good people can save the world.
There is also the persistent idea that you won't know who they are.
They are humble, reverent, hardworking, good and anonymous.
In Jewish mysticism the number is thirty six.
Maybe you remember hat Abraham, trying to save Sodom and Gomorrah, bartered it down to five.
When I make in my focus to look around for those five people, I noticed that every time I am ready to condemn the human race, someone else wonderful shows up.
Many of them are total strangers, most of them are without titles or diplomas or roles. They are just phenomenal people who show up at the just right time, with just the right word, to generously help in any way they can.
Tom Powers comes to mind right away.
You can't possibly know of him.
He was one of the millions of decent and hard working people
who have graced our planet, with an ordinary and steady way of living out a quiet heroism.
He was a mailman, and with his hands and feet he delivered news, bad or good, which he did not author.
In so doing, he marched his gruff goodness through many a neighborhood and over many a year, delivering envelopes and packages. He also delivered, with a quick Irish wit and to anyone who would listen, a word of encouragement or piece of advice which he did author.
When he was advancing in years, and was "under the knife" too many times to remove a newest cancer, he said to his well studied priest son,
"Did you know you can go to heaven in pieces?"
This is great theology.
Deeper than the his cancer, deeper even than his physical body, he achieved the sureness about love and its Author, that enabled him to laugh at the downside of ascending to God.
Tom was not victorious over cancer, but like Job, he did shut its mouth.
Cancer could not speak to him of emptiness, cynicism, or despair.
Within the last fortnight, and for a second time, our orphanage for special needs children was raided by armed bandits, and four young female staff were kidnapped.
Kenson, the director, said to me the night we released the four kidnapped staff,
"I don't know for how much longer I can take this.
Every time this happens I die a little."
Tom's testimony is about the soul becoming radiant as the body fades.
Kenson's is about the very fading of the soul.
Tom's comment shows soul vibrancy,
Kenson's comment shows the soul becoming sick.
How can we not get sick, if we open our hearts to a wounded and sick world?
To fierce dynamics that lay heavy burdens, destroy and tear down?
Hope is the best guarantee for the health of soul.
Hope takes the hit in soul sickness.
Yet there are some dynamics that work against the healing of hope.
One is, we can get used to bad news, addicted to bad news, and eventually prefer bad news.
Sounds strange, but the same giddy feeling that can make a deadly blizzard become the joy of snow day,
or can make a movie about a horrendous murder become satisfying entertainment,
can suddenly flip us into having a continual preference for a world that is always full of imminent danger.
Snow days and horror movies do have their place in life.
They help us face the fear of chaotic forces, which we cannot control, from a safe distance.
They are evolutionary "try-outs" for when real tragedy hits.
But we can dangerously become addicted to bad headlines, become internet ambulance chasers, filling ourselves with more and more of what is terrible, for a strange satisfaction that gives us- at the expense of hope.
Heightened fear of what is dangerous and terrifying releases actual chemicals in our body, causing the energy rush of adrenaline and the satisfying high of "morphine like" endorphins, by which our bodies prepare us for injury from a grave danger. These drugs can become addictive.
Media outlets understand the chemical power of the shocking news grab.
Another danger to the healing of hope is when there is an absence of hope in the spirit of the times. At this moment in our history, hope is not "in the air," lifting us upwards in wholesome optimism.
By contrast, there are times when a whole family, a whole country, a whole world, is so high on hope you would have to be totally dour not be swept up by it.
I remember the time of folk music proliferation and "hootenannies" when airways and parks were filled with sung poetry, lyrical determinations to create peace and end war.
I remember "We are the World", a world wide chant against hunger in Africa and Ethiopia, and against apathy to human suffering anywhere in the world.
We are not in such a time, and so we need to create our own hope, and to seek out other hopeful people.
Rather that getting swept up, we need to be the protagonists of hope.
This is why it is very valuable, when thinking about the human race, to start noticing how many humble, genuinely good people there are in every direction, holding the world together.
When hope is not in the air, you find it underground, deeply rooted.
Like a treasure.
You don't just grab it in the air.
You need to dig.
You need to work for it.
In the same way that vast networks of roots enable trees in a forest to communicate with each other, warn each other, to nourish each other, we need to meet each other through the treasures of our rootedness.
When walking though the burned Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption after the fire, with the charred sacred artifacts crunching under my boots, I wondered how would we ever celebrate the feast day on August 15.
Yet, the hundreds of people still coming for daily mass in the shadow of the burned cathedral, and under the heavy fire of war size weapons, show how deeply they are rooted in hope.
The priests of the Cathedral, who will not abandon their people, show how deeply they are rooted in hope.
Their witness makes it so very evident that while bandits and fires can destroy a building, the cannot destroy faith, or meaning, or worship. They cannot destroy hope.
The Cathedral feast can and will be celebrated, even without a Cathedral, because of the depth of its roots.
The feast of the Assumption of Mary proclaims the high dignity of the human body, equally destined for heaven with the soul, in the fullness of time.
On the streets just blocks away, those killed by bandits are set on fire and burned.
This burning speaks of total loathing and disdain of the human being.
A total contrast to the resounding proclamation of the meaning of Assumption.
To come back to Kenson, who dies a little with every attack on our children and staff, you have to also know that he enters the arena of engagement even with his wounds, into the jaws of the lions even if diminished, to liberate our four friends from human bondage.
His fading hope gets revitalized by his heroic sacrifice.
This is a final element of hope we must understand.
An instruction from the Book of Wisdom reveals to us that night of the Passover was made known before hand to give the courage and strength needed to survive that violent night.
We are also told that the "children of the good" were paving the way of the coming deliverance, by their quiet good works and sacrifices.
The teaching is that from the deepest roots of our hope, in spite of our wounds, when we keep doing what is right and just without counting the cost, hope flourishes within and paves the way for goodness.
When we do this, the evil which threatens our very hope, and would lead us to cynical mindsets and self destructive behavior, must shut its mouth.
It is totally within our power, at every moment, to think the good thought, to say the good word, to do the good deed.
This is how to keep our soul healthy, our hope rooted, and how to pave the way for the next "passover deliverance", which will come at the proper time.
We stand on this promise.
The deplorable violence can't make any of us stop our work.
It can only make us do it a different way.
At least for now.
"Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams." (Pope John XXIII)
Thank you as always for your support for our work in Haiti, which enables hope to take action.
May God bless you and your families,
May God bless us all.
Fr Richard Frechette CP DO
Port au Prince
August 15, 2022