Washington cozy with death-sqad leader

By G. Dunkel, Workers World, 8 August 1996

Washington’s refusal to extradite the notorious leader of the FRAPH death squad, Emmanuel Toto Constant, to Haiti typifies U.S. policy toward that country.

While backing the elected government in public, the United States/ United Nations military occupation has protected the reactionary Duvalierists and Macoutes from just punishment by popular forces. Preserving this rightist force threatens the mass organizations and keeps Haitian officials dependent on the U.S. military.

But Washington relies on flaunting the might of its own forces. On July 25, some 300 U.S. combat troops from the 82nd Airborne Division with heavy weapons landed in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and deployed through its streets, according to a story in Haiti Online. Their official mission was to carry out military exercises called Operation Fairwind. The Pentagon said this had nothing to do with the UN troop mission.

When the U.S. military returned former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office last fall, they demanded he reconcile his popular government with the backers of the coup that overthrew it. This not only denied justice to the Haitian people but also preserved much of the old regime’s power and influence.

With regard to Constant, Washington is attempting to hide the close connection between the CIA and the openly fascist group called FRAPH--a right-wing gang responsible for killing at least 5,000 Haitians during the coup.

Over a year ago, the Haitian government filed an extradition request for Constant, FRAPH’s leader. He had been living in the United States after Aristide returned to Haiti. Under a deportation order, he spent a year in a Maryland jail.

He was released last month and is now living in the New York area.

According to the July 26 Baltimore Sun, the agreement to release Constant was drawn up by the State Department, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Justice and the National Security Council. It specifically allows him to work here and to go to any country he wants--other than Haiti.

In exchange, Constant dropped a lawsuit against the State Department in which he asserted that his actions were part of a collaboration with the CIA to undermine Aristide’s return by exposing him as a political extremist. While Constant was head of FRAPH, he was a paid CIA informant.

The INS justified his release on the grounds that his former employer, the CIA, had learned of a plan to murder him in jail. It also claimed that the Haitian justice system couldn’t offer him a fair trial.

But Washington wants no trial at all. To prevent full exposure of the CIA’s ties to FRAPH and Washington’s ties to the coup leaders, the U.S. government is still holding 160,000 pages of documents, plus video and audio tapes, that its soldiers seized from FRAPH and army offices. These documents would be essential for any effective prosecution of FRAPH officials.

The growing strength of the Macoutes have increased tensions in Haiti. Haitian President Rene Preval has expressed his concern over the renewed sense of insecurity in the country. He says this will undermine his efforts to apply a new economic policy in Haiti.

But his new policy comes from the International Monetary Fund and Washington. It is just a rehash of the privatization and cutbacks that have brought so much misery to so much of the world.