[Marxism] The first anti-Aristide coup crew

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[note the $US, + CIA connexions.]

'More from the Exile Files'
The life of ex-despots isn't all jail and frozen assets.

By Jen Sullivan, Mother Jones, September 1997
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1997/09/sullivan.html

About:
Gen. Raoul Cedras, anti-Aristide coup leader, Dictator of Haiti
(1991-1994); Gen. Philippe Biamby, co-conspirator, Haitian army chief of
staff; Col. Michel-Joseph Francois, chief of the police & secret police
under Cedras; Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, leader of the death-squad Front
for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH).

The notoriously slippery Col. Michel-Joseph Francois helped topple
Haiti's elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, then
terrorized his country as chief of the police and secret police under
dictator Gen. Raoul Cedras; some 4,000 Haitians were killed. Francois
fled in 1994 to the Dominican Republic, where he lived off a half
interest in his brother's car-wash, yet somehow bought a $400,000 house
and sent his kids to an exclusive private school. Though convicted in
Haiti of assassinating an Aristide supporter, he was never extradited.
When the Dominican Republic deported him last year for plotting another
coup in Haiti, the wily Francois landed in San Pedro Sula, Honduras,
where he runs a modest furniture store and rents a home in another ritzy
neighborhood.

That's where U.S. prosecutors nabbed him last March and charged him with
smuggling 33 tons of cocaine and heroin into the U.S. from his private
airstrip in Haiti, while taking millions in bribes from Colombian drug
lords. Francois denied it all and stewed in a Honduran prison until
July, when the Honduran Supreme Court nixed U.S. extradition efforts for
lack of evidence and sent the killer back to his shop to sell tacky
living room sets. If "Sweet Mickey" ever did take the stand, the CIA
might blush -- he was associated with two CIA-created and -funded
groups, Haiti's national intelligence service (SIN) and the death-squad
Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH). He also
received U.S. military training at the Army's notorious School of the
Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., and is widely reputed to have been on the
U.S. intelligence payroll. "All that I did," said Francois of the drug
charges, "I did according to the norms of my country, not according to
the norms of the United States." Don't give us too much credit, Mickey.

Club Panama
Advice to Francois and other CIA-tainted despots: Head for a certain
Central American haven, aka "Club Panama." Thanks to its liberal asylum
policy and banking secrecy laws, the tiny isthmus nation is now home to
a stunning rogue's gallery of exiled strongmen like Gen. Raoul Cedras,
who now rules supreme over a computer graphics shop in downtown Panama
City -- just upstairs from the Dairy Queen.

Cedras, who seized power in Haiti in 1991, helped execute the usual
atrocities -- you know, murder, torture, assassination -- until ousted
by the U.S. in 1994. Now he's kickin' it in P-Town, living in an
exclusive neighborhood with wife, kids, nanny, and his old bud Gen.
Philippe Biamby, who helped him into power and served as the Haitian
army's chief of staff. The two are living large on the $79 million that
the U.S. government kindly unfroze for them when they left power in
1994; many Haitians believe they stole the money from state coffers. The
U.S. also flew Cedras and Biamby to Panama, gave Cedras a rent-free
beach villa in Panama, and agreed to lease three homes he left behind in
Haiti for $5,000 to $12,000 a month.

Killer in Queens
Another CIA darling, Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, leader of the death-squad
Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), is now
desperately trying to secure political asylum -- in the United States.
In 1994 he fled Haiti for Queens, New York, where he lives with his
auntie, sells phone cards, goes nightclubbing, and collects McDonalds
Happy Meal toys. Though Bill Clinton condemned the "brutal atrocities"
that Constant and the Cedras junta committed under "the most violent
regime in our hemisphere," the U.S. has steadfastly refused Haiti's
requests to extradite Constant, claiming that he would not get a fair
trial in Haiti.

In May 1995, the State Department declared that Constant's expired
tourist visa wasn't cutting it, and threw him in a Maryland jail to be
deported, but Toto claimed political asylum, sued the U.S. for $50
million for "illegal detention," and walked out of jail last year with a
sweetheart deal. The details remain secret, but the upshot is this:
There's a standing order to deport him, but enforcement will be delayed
indefinitely. Why the kid gloves? Constant says the CIA signed his
paychecks for the three bloody years of the Cedras junta, and Washington
plainly prefers those files remain closed: U.S. officials still won't
release the FRAPH documents they seized in the 1994 invasion.

["Se bon ki ra",
  Good is rare
  - Haitian Proverb]



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