U.S. Department Of State
DIPLOMACY IN ACTION
BUREAU OF INTERNATIONAL NARCOTICS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT AFFAIRS
2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR)
Report
Introduction
Haiti remains a transit point for cocaine originating in South America and marijuana originating in Jamaica, traversing the country’s porous borders en route to the United States and other markets. This traffic takes advantage of Haiti’s severely under-patrolled maritime borders, particularly on the northern and southern coasts. Haiti is not a significant producer of illicit drugs for export, although there is cultivation of cannabis for local consumption. Haiti’s primarily subsistence-level economy does not provide an environment conducive to high levels of domestic drug use.
The Haitian government continued in 2015 to strengthen the Haitian National Police (HNP) and its counternarcotics unit (Bureau for the Fight Against Narcotics Trafficking, or BLTS) with additional manpower, and officials at the highest levels of government have repeatedly committed to fight drug trafficking. While drug and cash seizures were higher in 2015 than in the previous year, the government has been unable to secure borders adequately in order to cut the flow of illegal drugs. Principal land border crossings with the Dominican Republic are largely uncontrolled and the southern coastline remains virtually enforcement-free. The minimal interdiction capacity of the Haitian Coast Guard creates a low-risk environment for drug traffickers to operate. While Haiti’s domestic law enforcement interdiction capacity has improved marginally, a largely ineffective judicial system continues to impede successful prosecution of apprehended drug traffickers.
Supply Reduction
BLTS executed several successful operations in 2015 that led to significant drug and cash asset seizures, including through joint operations with the U.S. Coast Guard and DEA. Seizures included 3.3 metric tons of marijuana, 143 kilograms (kg) of cocaine, and 15 kg of heroin, as well as $562,000 and 22 assorted firearms. Enforcement actions yielded a total of 148 arrests, with five extraditions to the United States for prosecution. DEA works frequently with BLTS on major operations, and its assistance in intelligence gathering, logistics, and operational planning helped facilitate most BLTS actions ending in seizure or arrest. There is no significant availability or traffic of illegal synthetic drugs in Haiti.
Conclusion
The continued institutional development of both the HNP and the BLTS are positive trends that have helped to improve public security and have marginally increased Haiti’s ability to interdict drug trafficking. Continued strong cooperation between Haitian and U.S. law enforcement yielded major narcotics seizures and enabled the apprehension of individuals indicted in U.S. jurisdictions and their return for trial in the United States. However, the dysfunctional Haitian judicial system drastically limits domestic prosecution of drug cases and thus reduces disincentives to trafficking operations. Drug seizures still remain low, and Haiti’s minimal capacity to police its sea and land borders is a particular point of concern.
Continued engagement from the United States, particularly in support of BLTS operations and general HNP development, will help Haitian law enforcement to capitalize on marginal gains in drug interdiction capacity. However, the benefits of such gains will be limited if the judicial system fails to convict drug traffickers. Only the concurrent strengthening of the judiciary, law enforcement, and border security will enable Haiti to make real progress in fighting drug trafficking.
Court Hears Suit against U.N. on Haiti Cholera Outbreak
By RICK GLADSTONEMARCH 1, 2016
A legal battle by the Haitian victims of a cholera epidemic against the United Nations reached its highest level in an American court on Tuesday, as lawyers for the plaintiffs were permitted to argue before a federal appeals panel why they believe the United Nations is not entitled to immunity.
Based on the questions asked by the three judges hearing the arguments in a packed Manhattan federal courtroom, they appeared sympathetic to the victims.
The outcome of the case, in which United Nations peacekeepers are accused of having negligently brought cholera to Haiti after their deployment in 2010 following a disastrous earthquake, could have enormous implications for the United Nations. The global organization has asserted that a 1946 convention on privileges and immunities insulates it from such legal action — a defense that the appellate judges are now weighing
Their decision is expected in the next several months, and if they agree with the cholera victims the case could be returned to a lower court for trial. If the judges deny the appeal, lawyers for the victims said, they would seek to bring the issue before the United States Supreme Court.
“Immunity does not mean impunity,” Beatrice Lindstrom, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a legal advocacy group that is helping represent the cholera victims, told the appellate judges.
There is little dispute that the peacekeepers were at fault, as supported by medical studies including some of the United Nations’ own findings, but the organization has declined to even acknowledge it is a defendant in the lawsuit, one of at least three that has been filed in the United States.
The cholera epidemic has killed more than 9,000 people in Haiti and infected more than 800,000.
The case was dismissed by a lower-court judge in 2014 after Justice Department lawyers, acting on behalf of the United Nations because the United States is the organization’s host country, argued that under the 1946 convention, American courts had no standing to hear the grievances.
Lawyers for the victims appealed, and in what they described as a last-minute decision announced last Thursday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit scheduled a hearing for them to argue their side.
Ms. Lindstrom said the 1946 convention also required the United Nations to compensate people hurt by its activities through the establishment of a special board to evaluate and act on grievances brought by victims, which the organization has not done in Haiti. Based on that lapse, she argued, the United Nations had forfeited any claim to immunity.
“The U.N.’s position is that nothing can compel it to comply with its undeniable legal obligations,” she said.
Ellen Blain, an assistant United States attorney who argued for dismissing the case, told the appellate judges that the Haiti epidemic was an unfortunate disaster but that the immunity provision of the convention, which both the United States and Haiti signed, left no room for interpretation and must be enforced.
Lawyers for the United Nations did not attend the hearing, in keeping with the organization’s position that it is not answerable to the court’s activities. Farhan Haq, a spokesman for the United Nations, said in an emailed statement that “as is the normal course, representatives of the Host State appeared and asserted the absolute immunity of the United Nations.”
The judges asked what other possible recourse the Haitians could pursue, indicating they may see some legal justification for siding with victims caught in a situation in which nobody has been held accountable.
“We are very heartened by today’s proceeding,” Brian Concannon, the executive director of Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, told reporters after the hearing concluded. “I’m not going to predict the proceeding but it was heartening to see the judges asking very good questions.”
Mario Joseph, a Haitian lawyer who is the lead counsel for the cholera victims, said after the hearing that he believed “the United Nations is walking toward the end of this absolute immunity.”
The Relentless Rise of Two Caribbean Lakes Baffles Scientists
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
In Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the lakes are flooding farmland, swallowing communities and leading to deforestation.
By Jacob Kushner
LETANT, Haiti—On a recent calm day, the surface of Lake Azuéi has no waves, not even any ripples. Pillars of pastel-colored concrete break the still surface, the tops of what once were houses. They are all that’s visible of the community that once thrived here.
Alberto Pierre, a skinny, wide-eyed 25-year-old, said the submerged village where he grew up wasn’t even near the lake. “The water used to be many kilometers from here.”
Lake Azuéi, the largest lake in Haiti, lies about 18 miles east of Port-au-Prince, the capital, nestled along the border with the Dominican Republic. Also known as Étang Saumâtre, the lake rose so much between 2004 and 2009 that it engulfed dozens of square miles.
“At first we put rocks so it wouldn’t come into our houses,” Pierre says. “But then the water just overran the rocks.” Families in the village of Letant began abandoning their houses, building huts on higher ground using wood, tarps, whatever they could find. By 2012, all 83 houses had been vacated.
“We don’t know why the water is rising,” he says.
In fact, nobody does. There seems to be no logic to the lake’s rise. Experts from the United Nations, a French engineering firm, a Dominican Republic university, a New York City college and many others have looked for clues to explain the rise of Lake Azuéi and neighboring Lake Enriquillo, just across the border in the Dominican Republic. But few of the theories seem to hold water. Some now hypothesize the phenomenon is related to climate change, but the evidence is counterintuitive: Unlike ocean levels, which rise with climate change, lakes tend to shrink.
For the estimated 400,000 people living in the watershed of the two lakes, the fallout has been severe. Lake Enriquillo rose an incredible 37 feet in less than 10 years, doubling in size and swallowing at least 40,000 acres of farmland.
Most of those who lost their land are poor farmers.
Displaced from their farmland, some are turning to a nefarious occupation: charcoal. Illegal loggers are cutting down trees in the Dominican Republic to produce 50,000 tons of charcoal annually, which they sell in Haiti. The U.N. estimates it’s a $15 million a year business. They transport it under the cover of darkness on small boats across Lake Azuéi, which has risen high enough to straddle the border.
Meanwhile, the water is destroying a fragile ecosystem. Cao Cao birds (Hispaniolan Palm Crow, or Corvus palmarum) and other bird species lost their habitat as trees where they once nested died, their roots drowned by the water. Endangered Hispaniola ground iguanas (Cyclura ricordi) and rhinoceros iguanas (Cyclura cornuta) were forced to flee the protected island in the center of Lake Enriquillo for higher ground above the shoreline where they compete with humans and other wildlife.
Searching for an Explanation
Lake Enriquillo and Lake Azuéi have always been anomalies. For starters, their water is not fresh, but saline, even though they have no known connection to the ocean. Lake Enriquillo is the largest lake in the Caribbean, and it is also region’s lowest point: in 2013 its surface was 112 feet below sea level.
“The topography is unfortunate,” explains Michael Piasecki, professor for water resources engineering at the City College of New York who has done research in both countries on the island. “Both lakes are flanked on the north and the southern side by steep mountains. It’s like a bathtub.”
Complicating matters is the possibility that the two lakes are connected by an underground waterway. If true, Lake Azuéi, with its higher elevation, may be slowly draining into Lake Enriquillo. “But we can only speculate about this because we don’t know what the water table actually looks like,” says Piasecki. Absent funding that would allow scientists to drill the 40 to 50 boreholes he says would be necessary to find out if it’s true, the subterranean river mystery will remain just that.
Hoping for a Solution
If the water’s rise could somehow be reversed, the sunken land could probably be restored to its original state.
Dalbes Garcia Borques, a landowner in Duvergé, says that about four of his acres have resurfaced in the last two years as the lake receded slightly. He paid some workers to dig small irrigation trenches from nearby canals to “wash” away the salt residue left by the lake. One year later, he’s harvesting potatoes.
“It’s an expensive and arduous process,” says Borques.
And yet, it could be cause for optimism: If scientists and the island’s governments could work together to reverse the lakes’ rise, the land, barren and destroyed as it may look, could once again resemble the land that has not yet succumbed to the water’s grasp—lush with palm trees and tall grasses upon which fat cows graze.
For now, farmers seem hesitant to invest in the labor it would take to wash the re-emerged land and replant. With no solution in sight, most expect the water will continue to rise—flooding even more of the limited land on this small island.
The reporting for this article was made possible by support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.