Society blames cocaine trade for its downfall

 BY YVES COLON

 PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Bernard Louisdhon sits on a dirty mattress that takes up half the airless
 room. He rubs his eyes and looks at the light that filters through the open door.

 Louisdhon is waking up from the morning's crack binge. He's a thief who feeds a growing
 appetite for the drug with stolen goods. Recently, he fell from a third-story balcony with
 a stolen laptop in his hands, and casually  shows the bruises on his side. For the theft, he
 spent a month locked up.

 ``You can get as much drugs as you want here,'' Louisdhon said. ``. . . The police
 are dealing. Everybody is a dealer here.''

 While Colombian traffickers use Haiti as a trampoline to ship some of their
 cocaine to American streets, they're wreaking havoc in Haiti, too. Break-ins and
 armed robberies, rare a few years ago, are now common, and Haitians believe
 that to be a product of the drug trade. More than 100 police officers suspected of
 working for drug dealers have been kicked off the force, raising Haitians' mistrust
 of the young department.

 Many Haitians say the cocaine trade has not only worsened the crime problem,
 but has also contributed to the breakdown of Haitian society.

 They point to mansions sprouting in the mountains above this city and gas
 stations under construction as evidence of illicit gains or money laundering.

 MANY USERS

 Researchers found that users, many of them street children addicted to glue,
 paint thinner or gasoline, are getting younger. Some graduate to cocaine,
 financing their habit by washing cars or stealing. Older ones become dealers.

 ``Haitian society is in complete denial,'' said Gaetane Auguste, executive director
 of Haiti's only treatment center.

 But Haitians should not expect any help from the United States, the destination
 for most of the cocaine.

 The General Accounting Office on Sept. 19 said $70 million to build a new Haitian
 police force and $27 million to strengthen the legal system had largely been
 wasted. The police were ineffective, corrupt and politicized, the GAO said, and the
 legal system was hampered by corruption, government control, a large case
 backlog, an outdated legal code, poor facilities and by the fact that it conducted
 business in French, instead of Creole, the country's majority language.

 COASTLINE

 The cocaine to make Louisdhon's crack enters Haiti through hundreds of miles of
 unguarded coastline, mostly on the Caribbean Sea. The White House Office on
 National Drug Control Policy estimates that more than 65 metric tons of cocaine
 gets dropped here from go-fast boats or airplanes before it is repackaged and
 shipped to the United States through couriers or on freighters that dock on the
 Miami River.

 ``The fight against the criminal element in Haiti goes through the drug trade,'' said
 Camille Leblanc, Haiti's minister of justice.

 DRUG HAVEN

 For Louisdhon and his roommate, Richard Miguel, this city is a drug haven.

 One of the most active drug bazaars is around the block from their second-floor
 cinder-block room, only yards from the presidential palace and the police
 department. All they need to satisfy their craving is a little bit of money. A ``rock''
 of crack that would sell for $10 in the United States goes for $1 here.

 ``The guys downstairs is a dealer,'' said Louisdhon, eyes vacant, pointing with his
 chin to a room below the steps. ``That's why he keeps me here. He makes
 money from us.''

 Justice Minister Leblanc advocates greater U.S. cooperation, saying that Haiti
 cannot slow the flood of drugs with 25 agents. More often than they would like to
 admit, they have come across officers such as Patrick Dormevil, who tried to
 bribe an agent at the airport to let through 891 pounds of cocaine in March 1998.
 Hundreds of other officers have been investigated, fired and imprisoned.

 ``We do our share, our part in trying to identify them, kick them off the force and
 whenever possible arrest them,'' said Pierre Denize, Haiti's police chief.

 Denize said he plans to double to 50 the number of anti-drug agents.

 Leblanc holds 50 Colombian traffickers in jail, some locked up for as long as three
 years without a trial. For the first time, Haiti expelled a low-level trafficker last
 month wanted by U.S. prosecutors. Leblanc said he is setting up a special jury
 for drug cases, along with a translator from the Colombian consulate.

 ``Haiti is ready to set up the mechanism to bring to trial all drug traffickers,''
 Leblanc said, ``if the U.S. gives us help. Drug dealers used to drop money to get
 cases ruled in their favor. They can't do that anymore. I've exposed judges. We're
 too small to respond to this crisis on our own.''

 HIGH QUALITY

 The cocaine that stays in Haiti, reputed to be of high quality, is only a small part
 of the trade. Young Haitians who have lived overseas have only recently begun to
 experiment with the drugs. Marijuana and cocaine were rare in Haiti during the
 30-year Duvalier family dictatorship, when the state security apparatus eyed
 suspiciously any ``rebel'' trends.

 During that time, major traffickers such as Colombian Carlos Lehder used other
 available routes, primarily the Bahamas, as transshipment points. As Haiti
 disbanded its army and the paramilitary Tonton Macoutes, traffickers with
 mountains of cash found it easy to make new friends there.

 Estimates from the Association Against Alcohol and other Chemical
 Dependencies put the number of users at 5 percent of the eight million Haitians.

 FINDING HELP

 Joannie is typical of those who find help there. She lived in New York City for
 more than 25 years, where she tried marijuana once, and settled in Haiti about a
 decade ago to be closer to her older parents. She tried crack with a boyfriend,
 then was buying about $50 worth a day, she said. In six months, she spent her
 savings of $30,000.

 ``I blew it, just blew it,'' said Joannie, who asked that her real name not be used.

 She hasn't touched the drug in years, she said, although it would be easy to get
 it. There is a market in front of her home in the suburb of Petionville.

 ``There is a lot of use out there, a lot,'' she said, speaking of drug users. ``I see
 them.''

 CRACK PIPE

 Miguel might be the most carefree of them all. He shrugs off the stain from having
 a picture of him smoking a crack pipe published on the Internet. He works as a
 lookout for Louisdhon, spends time in jail, gets out and hustles for money.

 Getting the drug is the easy part.

 ``All I need to do is stand here and yell,'' said Miguel, whose mother lives in
 Miami. ``Someone will come up. Now you get people who find this white powder
 that falls from the sky sometimes and they know that it can change their lives.
 They kill for it.''