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First of two articles
Youri Latortue is one of Haiti’s most
powerful politicians.
As an outspoken Senator, he is an ally of
Haitian President Michel Martelly. Both are leading advocates
for reestablishing the demobilized Haitian Army. He supported
Martelly’s nominee for Prime Minister, neoliberal businessman
Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, who was rejected by the Parliament in a
Jun. 21 vote.
But Youri Latortue is also a
drug-trafficker, gang godfather, and death-squad leader,
according to the testimony and reports of many colleagues, crime
witnesses and government officials, both Haitian and
international.
In fact, “Senator Youri Latortue may
well be the most brazenly corrupt of leading Haitian
politicians,” according to the U.S. Embassy. Secret U.S.
State Department cables obtained by the media organization
WikiLeaks and reviewed by Haïti Liberté paint a portrait
of a relentlessly unscrupulous, ambitious strongman, who has
helped bring down Haitian governments and holds Gonaïves,
Haiti’s fourth largest city, as his personal fiefdom.
His Rise to Power
Born in Gonaïves, Youri Latortue went to
law school in Port-au-Prince and then graduated from Haiti’s
military academy in 1990. He became a lieutenant in the Haitian
Armed Forces (FAdH), teaching briefly at the Military Academy.
But after the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état against President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Latortue joined the Army’s notorious
Anti-Gang Unit (previously called Criminal Research) headed by
Col. Michel François, one of the coup’s principal leaders.
“It was widely known that he was
involved in many of the political killings carried out during
the 1991-94 coup, in particular the shooting of Father
Jean-Marie Vincent in August 2004,” explained a once
highly-placed government security source who wishes to remain
anonymous. “He was one of Michel François’ death-squad
leaders.”
In 2004, a delegation of the Center for the
Study of Human Rights wrote that “a former high-ranking
police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard
Guerrière... claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994
murder of Catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did
eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder
of democracy activist Antoine Izméry.”
In 2005, a U.S. policeman with the
United Nations Police (UNPOL) videotaped an interview that he
made with a young woman who feared for her life “because the
28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue murder the
priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent,” she said. The
video, released in October 2010 by the Haiti Information Project
(HIP), is now available on YouTube.
She describes how the priest drove up to
his gate that night. “That's when I saw... a double white
pickup with a bunch of men in black,” she continued. “I
saw Youri... I [didn’t recognize] the other ones. But the reason
why I remember Youri [was] because he used to come to [name
removed] house. And I saw him getting out of the [pick-up]and
shooting at the car. But at that time, I didn't know [the
victim] was a priest... I didn't know the person who was in that
car.” It was only later that she learned who it was (see
Haïti Liberté, Vol.4, No.14, 10/20/2010).
The video-taped interview was sent to
HIP with the following note: “The UN has no interest in
pursuing this case or revealing this evidence despite the
statements of this eyewitness that Youri Latortue was the
triggerman that shot and killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent on
August 28, 1994.... It is a travesty of justice that the UN has
been withholding this testimony from the public. They are
supposed to be impartial but Latortue has powerful friends in
the US Embassy who view him as an asset since his role following
the ouster of Aristide in 2004.”
After Aristide returned to Haiti from exile
on Oct. 15, 1994, he dissolved the FAdH in early 1995, and
Latortue was transferred to the Interim Police force, made up of
former FAdH soldiers. Dr. Fourel Célestin, a former FAdH
colonel, was appointed as President Aristide’s security advisor,
and he proposed bringing Youri Latortue into the Palace security
under his aegis.
“Aristide was dead set against it,
having heard the persistent rumors of Latortue’s murderous role
during the coup,” the former government source said. “But
Célestin convinced him, arguing that the Palace needed to have
some of the Army bad guys if it was going to dismantle and
neutralize the force.” Aristide relented.
In March 1995, unknown assassins shot to
death well-known pro-coup spokeswoman Mireille Durocher-Bertin
and another passenger in her car on the eve of President Bill
Clinton’s visit to Haiti. The shooting was a tremendous
embarrassment to the Aristide government and to Clinton. A team
of FBI agents spent time in Haiti investigating the murder, and
Youri Latortue was one of their suspects. Washington yanked
Latortue’s U.S. travel visa.
Latortue worked out of Célestin’s Palace
office until 1996 when President René Préval took power.
Washington insisted that certain former FAdH officers deemed too
close to Aristide – Célestin, Major Dany Toussaint, Major Joseph
Médard – be removed from leadership of the new police and two
new Palace Security details: the USP (Presidential Security
Unit), similar to the U.S. Secret Service, and the USGPN
(Security Unit to Guard the National Palace). When they were
removed, that left a void in the Palace security’s command, a
void that was filled by Latortue. He became the USGPN’s deputy
chief under Frantz Jean-François. Two better trusted pro-Lavalas
security agents – Nesly Lucien and Oriel Jean – were named to
head the USP. That arrangement lasted throughout Préval’s term
(despite his grave misgivings about Latortue, as we shall see)
until he handed the Presidency back to Aristide in 2001.
Aristide Returns, Youri Takes Leave
“After Aristide's accession, other USGPN
policemen found [Latortue] ‘hostile’ to his new President, who
worried about his involvement in a ‘plot,’ according to Haiti's
elite-owned radio station Signal FM on February 21, 2001,”
Canadian investigative journalist Anthony Fenton wrote in
a June
2005 Znet article entitled “Have the Latortues
Kidnapped Democracy in Haiti?”.
At that point, Latortue was transferred out
of the Palace to work under Nesly Lucien, who had been named
Police Chief. But in late 2001, Latortue took a paid leave of
absence from the police to pursue a master’s degree in law in
Canada. He “had lived in Miami, [and] studied in Montreal for
two years” he told Fenton in a June 2005 phone interview.
It was during that time that Latortue was
paid a visit by Stanley Lucas, an operative for the
International Republican Institute (IRI), a tentacle of the U.S.
government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), according
to our security source. IRI was playing a central role in
organizing the “civilian opposition” to Aristide, principally
the so-called “Group of 184,” headed by sweatshop magnate Andy
Apaid. But Lucas was also keeping touch with the “armed
opposition” of former Haitian soldier and police chief Guy
Philippe in the Dominican Republic. This is where Youri came in.
During 2002 and 2003, Latortue shuttled
back and forth between the U.S., Canada, and the Dominican
Republic, meeting with Guy Philippe, former FRAPH death-squad
leader Jodel Chamblain, and others in the “rebel” force forming,
training, and launching raids into Haiti. Interestingly, Youri’s
U.S. travel visa, which had been suspended in 1995, was
reinstated in 2002 when he started to play this role of
anti-Aristide intermediary.
“We know that Youri was one of the
intellectual authors, one of the key planners, behind the Dec.
17, 2001 attack on the National Palace,” when a band of
Philippe’s “rebels” briefly took over the National Palace during
a failed coup attempt, our well-placed source explained. “In
the investigation after the attack, we learned that it was
Youri’s people – his proteges – in the USGPN who, working inside
the Palace, let the attackers into the Palace grounds.”
Finally Latortue, Philippe, Lucas, IRI, and
the 184 were successful in their destabilization campaign after
a U.S. SEAL team kidnapped Aristide from his home on Feb. 29,
2004, completing the second coup against him.
After the 2004 Coup
Youri Latortue then flew back to Haiti with
his first cousin once-removed, Gérard Latortue in tow. A few
weeks later, Gérard Latortue was installed as de facto
Prime Minister. Youri Latortue, often called Gérard’s “nephew,”
was appointed as his security and spy chief, with the title
“Responsible for National Intelligence to the Primature.”
“The thing was that Gérard had been
working for international organizations overseas most of his
life and didn’t really know the lay of the land in Haiti,”
our security source explained. “He had to rely largely on
Youri for guidance. In that sense, Youri was practically the
shadow Prime Minister. And during that coup, he was the main one
responsible for the massacre of many militants in Belair, Cité
Soleil and other pockets of resistance.”
In his post, Latortue was “nicknamed
'Mister 30 Per Cent' because of the percentage he demands in
return for favors,” wrote Thierry Oberlin in the December
21, 2004 Le Figaro. “Worried, not without reason, about his
own security, the prime minister pays 20,000 euros a month to
this former police officer implicated in various scandals for
'organizing an intelligence service'."
But then something interesting happened. In
late 2004, Gérard Latortue left Haiti to travel to a conference
in Canada, passing through Miami. Youri was part of his
delegation. But in Florida, U.S. agents detained Youri for his
suspected involvement in drug-trafficking. (Joel Deeb, a
Haitian-American arms dealer who reportedly brokered deals with
Youri Latortue, “stated that Youri Latortue presently has
four sealed DEA indictments pending against him, and that the
DEA [has] issued an extradition letter for Youri Latortue to the
interim government,”
Fenton learned in several interviews
with Deeb between April and June 2005. “Youri Latortue
himself evaded questions about the DEA indictments, denying that
he and Deeb, as Deeb claims, were in regular contact.”)
Gérard Latortue got on the phone to
officials in Washington and demanded that Youri be released.
Eventually, U.S. officials said they would not hold Youri, but
on the condition that he take the next flight back to Haiti,
which he did.
“When Gérard returned to Haiti after
the Canada visit, he met with Youri about the incident and about
his vulnerability to prosecution,” our source explains. “They
determined that the best course of action was for Youri to
become an elected official, which would confer upon him immunity
from prosecution. That is why and how Youri’s political career
began, assured by Gérard, under whom his election was assured.”
Thus, under his “uncle’s”
government, Youri was elected to a six-year term as the first
senator of the Artibonite Department in the Feb. 7, 2006
elections that also brought Préval to the Presidency for the
second time.
This is where the U.S. Embassy cables pick
up the thread.
A Drug Dealer and Kidnapper in the
Palace?
When Youri Latortue worked in the Palace
under Aristide and Préval, neither president was comfortable
with his presence there and knew he was involved in illegal
activities. But they were afraid to act against him. “Among
political observers, it is an article of faith that Latortue was
involved in drug trafficking under Aristide and during the first
Préval administrations,” reported U.S. Ambassador Janet
Sanderson in a June 27, 2007 cable to Washington. “Préval
himself reports that Latortue ‘ran drugs’ out of his office in
the Presidency during Aristide's mandate.”
Préval said the same thing to Sanderson’s
successor, current Ambassador Kenneth Merten, who reported in an
Oct. 6, 2009 secret cable that the Haitian president “also
expressed concern over the lack of integrity of the president of
the Senate Commission on Justice and Security, Senator Youri
Latortue, implying ties to the drug trade. He supported his
viewpoint by recalling the USG’s [U.S. government’s]alleged
refusal to allow Latortue to travel to the United States” in
1995 and 2004.
The U.S. Embassy treated Latortue warily
when he returned to Haiti in 2004. The first conflict they had
with him was when he took it upon himself to tell “some of
the ex-soldiers in Cap-Haïtien” who had taken part in Guy
Philippe’s “rebel” force “that they would be admitted into
the HNP,” or Haitian National Police. “This raised a
red-flag for us and the rest of the international community and
was a subject of the Core Group meeting March 12,” reported
Sanderson’s predecessor, Ambassador James Foley in a
Mar. 15,
2005 cable. The U.S. and its allies went to Prime Minister
Gérard Latortue who “made clear this was not the case,”
pleasing them with “his public acknowledgment that the HNP
was not an automatic option for the ex-FADH.”
Two months later, a prominent member of
Haiti’s bourgeoisie, businessman Fritz Mevs, told the U.S.
Embassy that “Colombian drug-traffickers” were working “with
a small cabal of powerful and connected individuals, including
Youri Latortue... to create a criminal enterprise that thrives
on - and generates - instability,” Foley wrote in a
May 27,
2005 cable. This cabal which included Youri was a “small
nexus of drug-dealers and political insiders that control a
network of dirty cops and gangs that [...] were responsible for
committing the kidnappings and murders.”
The Embassy also worried that Youri was
beginning to alienate some in the anti-Lavalas coalition that
had driven Aristide from power, particularly students. They were
starting to distrust the Interim Government of Haiti (IGOH), as
the Latortues’ de facto regime was called, because “rumors
are rife that the IGOH (and specifically Youri Latortue) is
building an ‘intelligence cell’ within the student movement for
political ends,” wrote interim Chargé d’Affaires Douglas M.
Griffiths in a
July 6, 2005 cable.
Washington was also closely watching the
emergence of the Artibonite in Action (LAAA), the party Youri
Latortue formed in 2005 to run for Senate. “This party may
have nefarious sources of income and has already been implicated
in gang-related violence in the poorer neighborhoods of Raboteau
and Jubilee in Gonaïves,” wrote another interim Chargé
d'Affaires Erna Kerst in a
Nov. 30, 2005 cable.
As Sanderson took over the Embassy in early
2006, she also echoed that Youri Latortue is “widely believed
to be involved in illegal activities,” in a
Jun. 16, 2006
cable.
Less than two months later, on Aug. 2, she
sent
another cable
that reported that Edmond Mulet, the chief of
the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH), was concerned
that “drug trafficking has become an increasingly
alarming problem, which is difficult to combat, in part because
of the drug ties within the Haitian Government,” Sanderson
wrote. “In this connection, he mentioned Senate leader Joseph
Lambert and Security Commission Chair Youri Latortue --
describing the latter as a ‘drug dealer’.”
Arms dealer Joel Deeb also called Latortue
“a drug smuggling ‘Kingpin,’ with ‘close ties’ to
paramilitary leader Guy Philippe,” Anthony Fenton reported
in his ZNet article. “Deeb also said that ‘everybody knows’
about Youri Latortue's involvement in kidnappings,” which
were plaguing Haiti at the time.
“It is also widely known that Youri
Latortue and his deputy, Jean-Wener Jacquitte,... are, at the
least, funneling money associated with kidnappings,” Fenton
continued. “This has been confirmed by sources both in
diplomatic circles, as well as sources inside and outside the de
facto Haitian government.”
In a
September 2006 cable, Sanderson
reported that Youri was able “to hire his ‘cronies’ to run
customs' operations in Gonaïves” and, in
a November 2006
cable, that Gonaïves Judge Napela Saintil, who had presided over
the landmark 2000 Raboteau Massacre trial (at which Youri
Latortue “refused to testify”), considered Latortue “his
‘arch enemy’” and “accused a security agent of Latortue's,
Leon Leblanc, of attempting to assassinate him in March, 2004.”
One of Sanderson’s most enlightening cables
is
that of Nov. 20, 2006. It is based on a Nov. 9 meeting that
one of Youri’s close associates (whose name has been removed
from this report and the cable posted on WikiLeaks’ site to
protect him) had with Embassy political officers or “poloffs.”
The colleague “shared with poloffs his concerns regarding
Latortue's illegal or otherwise unsavory activities in the port
city of Gonaïves and other areas of the Artibonite,”
Sanderson wrote. “Latortue's family connections play a part
in his ability to manipulate the region, as do his close
associations with armed gangs and drug traffickers.”
An Ambitious Politician
“The Latortue family is crawling all
over Haitian politics,” the man told the Embassy. “Youri's
sister is the former mayor of Gonaïves, and the former delegate
to the region was a cousin of his as well. The administration
filled Haiti's local and municipal offices by presidential
appointment during the IGoH. Senator Latortue had influence
over these appointments through his relation with IGoH Prime
Minister Gerard Latortue, and managed to place members of his
party in most positions around the Artibonite. The senator used
these people to consolidate his power and influence in the
region until the new delegate to the Artibonite appointed new
local and regional officials who were not in the back pocket of
Senator Latortue.”
The colleague “likened Senator
Latortue's authority in the port city of Gonaïves to that of a
mafia boss,” the cable continued. “He claimed that the
somewhat lethargic port and the drug and other contraband
trafficking taking place there are completely under the
Senator's command. The port in Gonaïves is largely controlled
by the Cannibal Army gang, which faces persistent competition
from two other gangs, Des Cahos and Jubile Blan. Senator
Latortue exerts influence over all three groups and is thus able
to maintain sway over dealings in the port. Senator Latortue's
other businesses in Gonaïves include a nightclub and movie
theater, both of questionable legitimacy.”
Sanderson also noted that “an
oft-disruptive popular organization in St. Marc named ‘Bale
Wouze’ recently accused the senator of distributing weapons in
an effort to destabilize the government.” Latortue’s
colleague “phoned the Embassy on November 16 to reinforce the
Bale Wouze accusations, and also to report another incident in
which Senator Latortue and friends were stealing telephone poles
and utility boxes from Port-au-Prince for use in Gonaïves.”
The colleague described how Youri was a savvy politician. “After
the large-scale flooding in the Artibonite in September, the
central government allocated emergency food supplies to be
distributed to the flood victims,” Sanderson wrote, but “Senator
Latortue intercepted the supplies and stashed them temporarily
somewhere in Gonaïves, and then took the supplies to the victims
and acted as if he was personally responsible for the handouts.” |
