The Outsourcing of Haiti: How U.S. Intervention Laid the Groundwork for the Crisis of Today

In this excerpt from Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, Jake Johnston unpacks the narco industry’s long-standing sway over Haiti and Washington's pivotal role in underwriting the chaos currently unfolding in the country

By Jake Johnston

On August 19, the US Department of the Treasury levied financial sanctions against Haiti’s former president Michel Martelly for his alleged role in drug trafficking, money laundering, and sponsoring Haiti-based gangs. In many ways, the news was a long time coming. Martelly has already come under sanctions in other nations and faced global condemnation. Still, Washington’s move against him came as a surprise to many: The former president had a long-standing relationship with the U.S. and has spent much of the past 30 years residing in south Florida.

The new sanctions serve as much as a condemnation of past U.S. policy as they do of Martelly himself. Since the 2021 assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Martelly’s successor, Haiti has descended further into political instability and violence. Armed groups, including some that Martelly allegedly supported, now control large swaths of the capital. The country has not had an election since 2016, when Martelly left office. An unelected transitional government holds power, once again with strong US and international support.

In my book Aid State, I show how the Haitian state—and its corresponding political and economic systems—have been shaped as much by foreign intervention and aid as by the Haitian people themselves. That story begins in January 2010, when Haiti suffered a massive earthquake that claimed the lives of an estimated 220,000 people, according to the Haitian government. Led by the U.S., the international community pledged some $10 billion to “build back better,” as the mantra at-the-time went. Martelly, a popular musician known as “Sweet Micky” known for performing in nothing but a diaper and other outlandish acts, finished third in a deeply flawed electoral process, eliminating him from the run-off.

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In the aftermath of disaster and with billions on the line, the international community wanted to make sure the country’s next leader wouldn’t be an obstacle to its plans. So the U.S., along with the local United Nations office, and the Organization of American States (OAS), a hemispheric body that receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. intervened, as I uncovered. Following the vote, UN officials told members of Haiti’s election council that it would not allow runner-up Jude Célestin to advance to the runoff, regardless of the results. The OAS sent a team to audit the results and, without conducting a full analysis of the votes, recommended overturning the results and placing Martelly into the run-off election.

While Martelly was a political neophyte, he had long-standing ties with Haiti’s military and right-wing forces, even admitting he’d been part of the Tonton Macourtes, the Duvalier dictatorship’s deadly militia. Despite this, Washington remained invested in Martelly, threatening to withhold its post-quake assistance if the government didn’t comply and sending then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton to Haiti to pressure its government to accept the new results.

On April 4, 2011, the electoral council declared Martelly the winner of the run-off. With billions in foreign aid flowing in after the earthquake, much of the Haitian state had been effectively outsourced to the Aid State. And Martelly, Washington knew, would keep it that way. In 2012 following a ceremony inaugurating a new industrial park, the flagship reconstruction project of the international community, Clinton called him the country’s “chief dreamer and believer.”

In this excerpt, I delve into the long-standing ties between Martelly and drug trafficking organizations, as well as the narco industry’s corrosive influence over Haitian politics. Only when Haitians have elected a political leader opposed by the U.S. have concerns over any of this ever materialized publicly. When there is a government friendly toward the U.S. and western interests, those narco connections always seem to fade into the background.

By supporting Martelly and then the violence and corruption-plagued electoral process at the end of his term, the US in many ways paved the way for the multifaceted crisis afflicting Haiti today.

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In the run-up to Haiti’s 2015 electoral process, Michel Martelly’s party set up an informal campaign office in a second-floor suite at the 1950s art deco–style El Rancho Hotel. During the country’s tourism heyday, the El Rancho had provided exclusive revelry to the world’s rich and famous. Richard Burton, Jackie Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, and Elizabeth Taylor were among the many visitors. After decades of neglect and significant damage from the 2010 earthquake, the hotel reopened in 2013 following a multimillion-dollar renovation, part of the reconstruction-era hotel bonanza. It was a fitting location for Martelly to set up shop. Like his campaign, the hotel was managed by a Spanish firm. The investors in the new renovation were led by three individuals: Reginald Boulos, Sherif Abdallah, and Marc-Antoine Acra, all of whom were financial backers of Martelly’s party.

Martelly had his own history with the hotel. In the late 1980s, the El Rancho hosted a young Sweet Micky’s first performances. By then, high-ranking Haitian military officials and others from the country’s post-Duvalier elite had largely replaced the foreign A-listers. At the time, the El Rancho was also an efficient money-laundering operation for Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel. According to US law enforcement, its casino was run by Fernando Burgos-Martinez, an emissary of Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel.

In the 1970s, the emergence of the drug trade sent political ripples to all corners of the hemisphere. The demand for cocaine has always come from the north; in nearly every nation from the Andes through Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico, the cocaine trade has been inexorably linked with political developments. Equally as ubiquitous has been the response, the US-led War on Drugs.

While white Americans only now seem to be reckoning with the legacy of criminalized poverty and institutionalized racism at home, there has been a corresponding political and social effect of those long-standing practices across the region, not to mention a devastating impact on human rights. And abroad, just like at home, rarely did combating drug trafficking deter the political objectives of US leaders. Manuel Noriega had been “our man” in Panama before he was indicted on drug-trafficking charges in 1988. US troops invaded and overthrew him a year later. Perhaps most notorious is the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, in which US intelligence agencies facilitated the cocaine trade as a way to fund the Contras’ war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, as a Congressional committee later documented.

In nearly every nation the cocaine trade has been inexorably linked with political developments. Equally as ubiquitous has been the response, the US-led War on Drugs.

Interestingly, revelations about the cocaine trade’s hold on Haiti made international headlines partially as a result of the US congressional inquiry into Iran-Contra. Burgos-Martinez, Escobar’s representative in Haiti, had made fast friends with the officials in the country’s security forces. He operated openly and lived lavishly, with the El Rancho Hotel’s casino turning over an estimated $50 million a week. At the same time, the CIA was looking for information as well as allies in the military to help steer the post-Duvalier political transition.

While most official military financing was prevented by Congress over human rights concerns, the agency financed the creation of a Haitian intelligence agency—run entirely by the military. While its stated purpose was combatting drug trafficking, the New York Times later revealed that the agency was heavily involved in the drug trade, all while using its funding, equipment and training to repress political opponents.

After Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s victory in the 1990 election, the president sought to combat traffickers but was virtually powerless to do so. Upon becoming prime minister that year, Rene Préval later recounted to me his first meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Haiti. In their conversation, he asked Préval if he knew Burgos. Préval said no. “‘He is the head of the Medellín cartel in Haiti,’” Préval recalled. “‘If you arrest him, you will die, and they’ll have a replacement tomorrow.’”

Aristide’s administration certainly couldn’t count on any support from within the military or the police, for that matter. One of the Medellín cartel’s greatest assets in Haiti was Michel François, the head of police in Port-au-Prince, according to US court documents, and a friend of Martelly’s. Aristide already faced the ire of the country’s economic elite, the fantastically wealthy oligarchs who had flourished in the Duvalier years. But it may have been his efforts to replace François as much as anything else that precipitated his ouster in September 1991, known in Haiti as the “Cocaine Coup.” The junta that took power for the next three years ran the country as a de facto narco-state.

Ironically, Aristide would find himself on the receiving end of drug-trafficking allegations from the US some ten years later. Though Escobar was dead and Aristide had disbanded the Haitian military upon his return to power in 1994, the country still served as a major transshipment point for Colombian cocaine. And the US government’s stated antidrug objectives still seemed to have more to do with political objectives than anything else.

In the early 2000s, the charges against Aristide were weaponized as part of a multiyear effort to overthrow him for a second time. Nevertheless, in June 2003, Aristide turned over Jacques Kétant, Haiti’s most-wanted trafficker, to the U.S. The heir to Burgos’s Haiti operation, Kétant had been just as untouchable, living a life of open luxury. By the time of his sentencing hearing in February 2004, he was already cooperating with US prosecutors and pled guilty. At the hearing he spoke for 25 minutes, lashing out at Aristide. “The man is a drug lord,” he said. “He controlled the drug trade in Haiti. He turned the country into a narco-country.”

Traffickers have “more power than the government,” Préval told me. “They have more money, and they don’t want good people to be in power.”

Of course, the drug trade had been established in Haiti long before Aristide took office. Still, Kétant’s charges made for effective propaganda. Within a week, Aristide was gone. “You have to look at the declarations of Kétant to understand a lot of things, to explain a lot of things,” a European diplomat said at the time. “It was a way to help the negotiation [along].” Though the allegations continued to hang over him, Aristide has never been charged with drug trafficking.

At the same time as Ketant’s testimony, a group of paramilitaries—led by former Haitian police and military officials and receiving covert support from the US—had entered Haiti from their base of operations in the Dominican Republic and started spreading terror across the country as part of the coordinated campaign to oust Aristide. The group’s leader was Guy Philippe, a former police chief later indicted on charges of drug-trafficking and money laundering. Though public focus on Haiti’s drug trade dwindled after the 2004 coup and supply chains shifted, there is no doubt that it remained a significant force in Haitian politics.

Traffickers have “more power than the government,” Préval told me, some 25 years after he first learned of the existence of Burgos-Martinez. “They have more money, and they don’t want good people to be in power.”

For international officials and their allies in the Haitian elite, the 2015 electoral process was a necessary step in consolidating the Aid State—or, at the very least, in preventing its collapse. But Haiti’s outsourced elections had long stopped representing any notion of legitimate democracy. They did, however, offer a path to protection for the country’s most corrupt, who were best placed to compete in a low-turnout vote. And when it came to drug trafficking, the U.S. once again appeared perfectly content to look the other way in order to achieve its political objectives.

Amid the influx of billions in post-quake reconstruction funds, the lingering influence of the drug trade drew little focus. But some people were paying attention. After Martelly took office, a number of former police officers who had been removed for their ties to traffickers were reincorporated into the force. There were also questions about his close associates, including his brother-in-law, Charles “Kiko” Saint-Rémy, and longtime bandmate RoRo Nelson, and their own alleged ties to the drug trade.

In 2012, a DEA sting operation on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince resulted in the seizure of some 270 kilos of Colombian cocaine and the arrest of at least two Colombians and a high-ranking Haitian police officer. The next year, Rodolphe Jaar, a wealthy Haitian businessman who co-owned a company in Florida with a relative of Martelly, was arrested in the Dominican Republic. Later, it emerged in court that Jaar had been working as a DEA informant and had stolen five kilos from the 2012 bust to fuel his own illicit activity.

The same year as Jaar’s arrest, the owner of a popular beachfront hotel frequented by the president was arrested after he reported finding more than 23 pounds of marijuana floating off the coast. Kiko, the president’s brother-in-law, intervened. The government prosecutor who had ordered the arrest was charged with abuse of authority and later fled the country fearing for his life. For good reason, it turned out: Months later Evinx Daniel, the hotelier, disappeared. According to a longtime informant for the DEA, the disappearance took place right after Daniel had flown to Miami to meet with agency officials. His body was never found.

“Kiko is a known, documented drug trafficker,” Keith McNichols, a DEA agent who spent years in Haiti, told me. But it likely wasn’t just the president who was protecting his brother-in-law. During Martelly’s time in office, Kiko had free rein and met frequently with the DEA’s Haiti section chief, prompting many, including McNichols, to assume that he was an informant, or being shielded from scrutiny for some other reason. McNichols, who would eventually blow the whistle on his colleagues, alleged corruption and blamed the local station chief and other DEA officials for thwarting an investigation into what was one of Haiti’s largest drug busts ever.

In early April 2015, a Panamanian-flagged cargo vessel docked at the Varreaux terminal, a private port on the outskirts of Cité Soleil owned by the Mevs family, one of the wealthiest in Haiti. The ship, carrying 650 tons of sugar from Colombia that belonged to Acra Industries, a conglomerate owned by another of Haiti’s wealthiest families and the same one that had a stake in the El Rancho Hotel, had been delayed when crossing the Panama Canal and then spent another three days in the bay of Port-au-Prince before docking.

When longshoremen began offloading the cargo, however, they stumbled upon several packages of cocaine, according to McNichols. The workers started scrambling, jostling with one another to get ahold of the drugs. Before law enforcement could be summoned, a series of vehicles sped into the port. One was a white Toyota Land Cruiser, which witnesses later said was driven by Dimitri Hérard, a Haitian police officer assigned to the National Palace and one of Martelly’s top security officers. Another package allegedly wound up in the trunk of a car belonging to a local judge from Cité Soleil, testimony collected by the DEA.

By the time the DEA and Haitian antidrug agents arrived at the scene, drugs were nowhere to be found. However, a 28-day search by the US Coast Guard did eventually turn up 107.6 kilos of cocaine and 12.8 kilos of heroin among the tons of sugar. The DEA estimated that the full load was likely closer to 800 kilos of cocaine and 300 kilos of heroin, with a street value of more than $100 million. Most of the drugs had been siphoned off before any police arrived. It was a stark reminder of the role that drug trafficking plays in the country’s politics and its economy. “Two-thirds of the richest families in Haiti are drug traffickers,” McNichols said. “You don’t get rich selling rice and sugar.”

Yet, when an oligarchic dynasty has a monopoly on imports of basic goods, maybe it does. The Acras and the Mevses both supported the 1991 military coup, which landed them on US sanction lists. Despite the international embargo imposed on the military junta, Haiti’s elite soaked up profits as prices for basic goods skyrocketed. They did indeed get rich on rice and sugar. But while McNichol may have been exaggerating, there was little question that many among Haiti’s elite were awash in drug money. “Everyone knows,” the former agent said. They retain legitimate businesses as fronts, “but they’re known traffickers,” he added. The elite, however, can rely on their closeness to political power to avoid any repercussions.

After the bust in the spring of 2015, the Acra and Mevs families categorically denied any involvement in the drug seizure. A local judge did issue an indictment against members of both families that was quickly dropped. In an interview with the DEA, the judge later acknowledged that he had received multiple “favors” from the Mevs family.

In the end, only one individual, a longshoreman, was arrested. Marc-Antoine Acra, who had taken over the family business along with his brother, traveled to Florida—where he and his family own millions of dollars’ worth of real estate—and hired two high-profile lawyers who began reaching out to the US embassy in an attempt to clear his family’s name. It would take years for more details to emerge about what really happened on that sugar boat and the network of corruption that helped cover it up. But, on the eve of elections, it served as a stark reminder about what was at stake in the coming vote.

Guy Philippe, still on the list of the DEA’s most-wanted fugitives, emerged from hiding and announced his intention to run for the senate. So too did two others allegedly tied to the drug trade: Hervé Fourcand, a former military man from Martelly’s hometown, and Ralph Féthière, himself a onetime military official and police commissioner. All of them ran as members of Martelly’s party, or for parties closely aligned with the Martelly administration. One of those parties was Bouclier—French for “shield.” The party was rumored to be led by Kiko.

“The legal bandits take to the streets. Can’t wait. The entire team is going to prepare itself. Yes, they’re legalizing,” Sweet Micky had sung in his 2008 track. The bandi legal were ready for the elections. The international community was ready for the elections. But was Haiti?

History shows that when Haitians have faith in their electoral process, they will turn out. As the outsourcing of elections deepened, however, participation rates have plummeted. Part of this has been due to conscious efforts to break the grassroots movements that had brought Aristide and then Préval to the presidency, but it also reflects a growing disappointment with electoral politics among Haitians. The 2010 election made it abundantly clear who the real powers behind Haiti’s democracy were. In 2008, an already low 36.6 percent of Haitians reported having trust in elections. By 2015, that figure had fallen below 20 percent—the lowest for any country in the region.