There has been no accounting for the rest of the drugs that went missing from the ship, which has been seized by the Haitian government. But the whistle-blower agents say they suspect a now-former commander of the Haiti anti-drug unit, Joris Mergelus, was involved. They accuse him of taking bribes to hinder the investigation by Haitian police of the drug-laden ship. They also believe that Mergelus had given kickbacks to a DEA supervisor in the past from funds for confidential sources, equipment and other expenses. Mergelus also had previously failed two lie-detector tests given by the DEA about his relationship with drug dealers, they say.

Mergelus strongly denied any links to drug traffickers. In an interview with the Herald, he said the litany of allegations “truly surprises me” and that he believes he’s being made into the fall guy for what is really an internal conflict among DEA agents in Haiti. He challenged the claim that he had failed the polygraph tests.

“If I didn’t pass, why did they accept me as head of BLTS?” said Mergelus, who joined the narcotics unit in 1997 and became its commander in 2011. “All the big drug arrests in Haiti, I did.”

Mergelus was removed from the command post in 2017 by Haiti’s new police chief, at the insistence of the DEA’s new Haiti Country Office chief, but he remains on the police force.

Haiti police Inspector Normil Rameau, who oversaw the anti-drug unit and its investigation into the Manzanares case, did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment about the allegations involving Mergelus. Rameau was removed from the post late last month but promoted days later by outgoing Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant to Haiti’s Washington embassy, according to an Aug. 1 letter signed by Lafontant.

To the DEA whistle-blowers, the Manzanares smuggling operation is just one more symptom of an ongoing problem: a high volume of drugs coursing through Haiti’s seaports and the country’s inability to stem it. They point to Haiti’s anti-drug police, who they say should have received port security training and had no idea of how to properly search a ship. They note that the police force had an office at the nearby government port in Port-au-Prince — but not at Terminal Varreux, which the whistle-blowers believe has become a hub for drug shipments between Colombia and the United States.

“There was absolutely no understanding of the most basic concept of how to do the seaport enforcement,” said one of the whistle-blower agents. “Nobody from the BLTS had the slightest inkling on what they were doing at that seaport. ... They were just completely clueless.”

The Manzanares smuggling operation wasn’t even particularly sophisticated. There were no anti-drug police at Terminal Varreux to circumvent. Newly installed video cameras weren’t even operating at the privately owned port.

Miami attorney Joel Hirschhorn, who represents members of the Mevs family that owns Terminal Varreux, said the port’s security has not been loose. The family even paid to build a BLTS substation at the port in 2017, he said. But that was two years after the Manzanares incident.

“The allegations that the port has ‘lax security’ and that illegal substances have been freely flowing are false as proven by the port’s security records,” Hirschhorn said in a statement. “[Terminal Varreux] has one of the tightest security operations of Haitian ports.”


Porous borders
But in general, Haiti’s seaports, airports and border security efforts are weak, the State Department says.

“Drug seizures still remain low, and Haiti’s minimal capacity to police its sea and land borders is a particular point of concern,” according to a 2018 international narcotics strategy report by the department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, or INL.

Until five years ago, the major drug-smuggling threat to Haiti had been Colombian traffickers flying cocaine onto makeshift landing strips and making airdrops off the coast. Today, the greater challenge is maritime trafficking along Haiti’s vast 1,100-mile coastline, according to the report.

The Haitian Coast Guard, which has primary responsibility for the country’s territorial waters, lacks funding, management skills and fuel supplies — and only has five working vessels, the report said, adding that Coast Guard has failed to serve as “an effective deterrent force to maritime drug trafficking.”

But Haiti’s second line of defense against drugs — seaport security in Port-au-Prince and other areas — has been equally porous because of a lack of basic training of Haitian police officers. While the INL has spent $18.7 million since 2010 on supporting Haiti’s anti-drug police and coast guard operations, the agency has provided “limited funding” for more specialized training — only $500,000. Only a fraction of that money has gone to seaport security training, an INL spokesperson said.

And that’s the root of Haiti’s persistent drug-smuggling problem, according to the whistle-blower agents: the DEA’s failure to properly train anti-drug officers on vessel inspections in Port-au-Prince and other key ports. The agents complained not only about corruption among Haitian police officers but also said there was a “vacuum” in seaport enforcement during evenings and weekends.

“There was no underlying [counternarcotics] law enforcement program in Haiti for seaport smuggling,” one of the agents asserted.

Rameau, the former Haiti police inspector, did not respond to a request for comment on seaport security training for Haiti’s anti-drug police.

Last year, Haiti’s anti-drug officers seized only 48 kilos of cocaine, while the U.S. Coast Guard confiscated about twice that amount in and outside of the country’s territorial waters. Haiti also arrested 110 suspects for drug-related crimes, but only a few were actually prosecuted because of the country’s notoriously dysfunctional justice system, the 2018 INL report said.

Only one “high-value target” was turned over to U.S. authorities in 2017: Guy Philippe, an elusive former Haitian police commander who had led a rebellion against then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Philippe had been on the lam for almost 12 years before DEA agents, in collaboration with the Haiti National Police, nabbed him.

Philippe was brought to the U.S. and pleaded guilty to a drug-related money-laundering charge. He is serving nine years in federal prison. The investigation into Philippe grew out of the 2003 expulsion from Haiti of drug kingpin Beaudoin “Jacques” Ketant and the subsequent extraditions of Haitian police officers, politicians and others. All but one were convicted for allowing drugs to be transported through Haiti to the U.S.

In contrast, most other drug-trafficking cases investigated by the DEA in Haiti and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office during the past decade have been small-time operations involving low-profile Haitian dealers moving lighter loads of cocaine, Miami court records show.

A.J. Collazo, the special agent who took over the DEA’s Caribbean division in January, dismissed the idea that the agency isn’t doing its job in Haiti and questioned the relevance of the Manzanares sugar boat case to the United States. Haitian police made the seizure at the Varreux port, he said, and its judicial system took responsibility for prosecution.

“I don’t know if there was any intel that it was going to the U.S. as part of a DEA case,” Collazo said. “This sounds to me like it was something that was being prosecuted in Haiti and is going to end in Haiti.”

The Haiti case seems to be grinding to a halt. A Haitian investigative judge who oversaw the sugar boat case dismissed most of the initial suspects, including the 13-member Manzanares crew and one member of the prominent Mevs family, Jean Fritz Bernard Mevs.

In 2016, a Haitian judge charged a handful of suspects with drug trafficking: businessmen Marc Antoine Acra and Sébastien François Xavier Acra, the brothers who owned the company, NABATCO, that commissioned the sugar shipment from Colombia. The port’s foreman, Fedner “Supris” Doliscar, was also indicted along with longshoreman Grégory Georges.

Marc Antoine Acra told the Herald he’s innocent and deflected the accusations, saying that investigators aren’t going after the real traffickers. The well-known businessman, even as he was under investigation in the Manzanares case, was appointed a Haiti Goodwill Ambassador by former President Michel Martelly.

In April, a three-judge appeals court in Haiti put the Manzanares trial on hold and assigned a new judge to the case. It ordered the investigation reopened to allow questioning of the ship’s captain and 12 crew members, none of whom are in Haiti. The panel also wanted a DEA agent to testify in the case, but that has yet to happen.


Of the 16 people originally arrested, including the ship’s crew, only the lone longshoreman, Georges, remains behind bars.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article215793990.html