Our Man in FRAPH: Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries

SOURCE:		The Nation
DATE:		24 October 1994
TITLE: 		Our Man in FRAPH: Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries
AUTHOR: 	Allan Nairn

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Emannuel Constant, the leader of Haiti’s FRAPH hit squad, is a protégé of U.S. intelligence. Interviews with Constant and with U.S. officials who have worked directly with him confirm that Constant recently worked for the C.I.A. and that U.S. intelligence helped him launch the organization that became the FRAPH. Documentary evidence obtained from other sources and confirmed in part by Constant also indicates that a group of attachés—some of them implicated in some of Haiti’s most notorious crimes—have been paid for several years by a U.S. government-funded project that maintains sensitive files on the movements of the Haitian poor.

In my October 3 Nation article ("The Eagle Is Landing") I quoted a U.S. intelligence official praising Constant as a "young pro-Western intellectual . . . no further right than a Young Republican" and saying that U.S. intelligence had "encouraged" Constant to form the group that emerged as the FRAPH. Reached at his home on the night of September 26, Constant confirmed the U.S. official's account. He said that his first U.S. handler was Col. Patrick Collins, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency attaché in Haiti, whom he described as "a very good friend of mine." (Constant spoke of dealing later with another official he called "[the United States'] best liaison," but he refused to give a name.) Constant said that Colonel Collins had first approached him while Constant was teaching a training course at the headquarters of the C.I.A.-run National Intelligence Service (SIN) and building a computer database for Haiti’s notorious rural Section Chiefs at the Bureau of Information and Coordination in the General Headquarters of the Haitian coup regime.

Giving an account,that dovetailed closely withth at of the U.S. official, Constant said that Collins began pushing him to organize a front "that could balance the Aristide movement" and do "intelligence" work against it. He said that their discussions had begun soon after Aristide fell in September 1991. They resulted in Constant forming what later evolved into the FRAPH, a group that was known initially as the Haitian Resistance League.

Constant at first refused to go beyond his usual publics tatements on the FRAPH, but opened up after I told him that I understood that he knew Colonel Collins. Our initial interview took place on the first day of the bold anti-FRAPH protests on the streets of Port-au-Prince. Constant said that he wanted to offer his men as "guides" for the occupation force, saying that "I've participated in the stabilization of this country for the past three years, and the United States knows it very well, no matter what agency you talk to."

Two days after that, as a crowd marched past FRAPH headquarters, FRAPH gunmen opened fire, killing one demonstrator. Five days later, in the wake of the embarrassing media coverage of the continued mayhem by the FRAPH and of a U.S. raid on a supposed pro-Aristide terrorism camp that turned out to be a world-famous dance school, U.S. occupation forces raided the FRAPH’s downtown Port-au-Prince headquarters, carting away two dozen street-level gunmen (and women) as live cameras and cheering crowds looked on. Some U.S. reporters proclaimed that this was the death of the terror system, and CNN’s Richard Blystone, announcing there was more crackdown to come, said that Constant was now "at large" (a claim also made by the next morning’s New York Times).

Five minutes after Blystone’s CNN broadcast, I reached Constant by telephone at his Port-au-Prince home. He said that the arrests had been only of low-level FRAPH people, and that he still intended to put his men at U.S. disposal. He said that there were no U.S. troops outside his house and worried that it might be set upon by mobs. Then he said that he had to leave for a meeting "on the street" with a U.S. Embassy staffer who was hitherto unknown to him but who he thought might be from the C.I.A.

He said that he would call back after the meeting, but he didn't, and I couldn't reach him again. But the next day Constant appeared in public guarded—for the first time—by U.S. Marines. He stated his fealty to the occupation and his support for the return of Aristide.

Much of the U.S. press played this as a stunning about-face, but Constant had been saying those things in public and to me all week. He hadt old me that the Carter/Powell/Nunn-Cedras pact was "the last chance for Haiti," and had expressed no worry about the return of Aristide, saying that the new Parliament, to be chosen in December, would be constituted in a way that would hem him in.

Colonel Collins is now back in Haiti (his last tour ended in 1992). The Clinton Administration has brought him back for the occupation, and he has refused to comment on the record. But a well-informed intelligence official (speaking before the FRAPH furor broke) confirmed that Collins had worked with Constant and had, as Constant says, guided him and urged him on. Collins has, in recent weeks, spoken quite highly of Constant and has said that Constant’s mission from the United States was to counter the "extreme" of Aristide. Collins has also said that, when he first approached him, Constant “was not in position to do anything . . . [but] things evolved and eventually he did come up, [and] what had been sort of an idea and technically open for business-all of a sudden, boom, it takes on national significance.”

When the relationship started, Constant was working for the C.I.A., teaching a course at the agency-run SIN on "The Theology of Liberation" and "Animation and Mobilization." At that time, the SIN was engaged in terrorist attacks on Aristide supporters, as were Constant's pupils, army S-2 field intelligence officers. The targets included, among others, popular church catechists. Constant says that the message of the SIN course was that though communism is dead, "the extreme left," through ti legliz, the grass-roots Haitian "little church," was attempting "to convince the people that in the name of God everything is possible" and that, therefore, it was right for the people to kill soldiers and the rich. Constant says he taught that "Aristide is not the only one: There are tens of Aristides."

Collins has recently acknowledged that the FRAPH has indeed carried out many killings, but he has said that they have not been as numerous as the press and human rights groups claim. He has said, in reference to Haiti’s political problems, "The only way you're going to solve this is . . . [that] it'll all end in some big bloodbath and there'll be somebody who emerges from it who will establish a society of sorts and a judicial system and he's going to say: 'O.K., you own the land, you don't—that's it,' whether it's fair or not."

Though most U.S. officials would never speak that way, it’s universally acknowledged that the FRAPH is an arm of the brutal Haitian security system, which the United States has built and supervised and whose leaders it has trained, and often paid. When I asked Constant, for example, about the anti-Aristide coup, he said that as it was happening Colonel Collins and Donald Terry (the C.I.A. station chief who also ran the SIN) "were inside the [General] Headquarters." But he insisted that this was "normal": The C.I.A. and D.I.A. were always there.

A foreign diplomat who knows the system well says that it is from those very headquarters that Haiti's army, with the police and the FRAPH, has run a web of clandestine torture houses (one of them in a private home at No. 43 Fontamara), some of which are said to still be working as this article is written on the occupation’s seventeenth day. Accordingt o the diplomat—who quoted internal documents as he spoke—the walkie-talkies of house personnel are routinely monitored by the U.S. Embassy, which, he said, also listened in on conversations of the U.N. Civilian Mission. Somien interrogators wear shirts emblazoned "Camp d’Application" (an army base). The diplomat also detailed a command structure of seven chief attachés who have arranged killings and brought victims to the torture houses.

Four of those senior attachés (as well as other, lower-ranking ones), according to documents and interviews, appear to have worked out of the Centers for Development and Health (C.D.S.), a large multiservice clinic funded mainly by the U.S. Agency for International Development. One of them, Gros Sergo (who was killed in September 1993), listed C.D.S. on his résumé, writing that he worked in its archives and was a "Trainer of Associates" there. Another, Fritz Joseph—who, Constant says, is the key FRAPH recruiter in Cité Soleil and who, according to official records, has been a chief attaché since the coup—is acknowledged by the C.D.S. director to have worked at C.D.S. for many years. The two others, Marc Arthur and Gros Fanfan (implicated by the U.N. in the September 1993 murder of prominent pro-Aristide businessman Antoine Izmery), have been named in sworn statements as having regularly received cash payments from C.D.S. Constant confirms that FRAPH leaders and attachés are working inside C.D.S. (and specifically that Marc Arthur has worked there) and says he speaks often on the phone with the clinic's director, Dr. Reginald Boulos. Boulos denies that he speaks to Constant. He says that Sergo's résumé is wrong, that he does not knowingly employ attachés, and that he did not know until recently that Fritz Joseph was a FRAPH Ieader and that fired him when critics pointed out that he was. Boulos said that C.D.S. files track "every family in Cité Soleil" but insisted that, as far as he knows, attachés don’t have access to the archives. Boulos said he hadn't seen Sergo in years, and when told of an entry from Sergo’s calendar that appeared to contradict that, he said it was mistaken. He also downplayed the fact that Sergo had listed him as a personal reference, along with coup leader Raoul Cedras. (Another A.I.D.-funded unit in Haiti, Planning Assistance, has also said that it employs FRAPH personnel.)

Sergo's papers indicate that he reported to the now-exiled Police Chief, Lieut. Col. Michel François (he had a pass, written on the back of François's card, authorizing him and Marc Arthur "to see the Chief of Police at all hours of the day and night"), that he and his hit squad organized anti-Aristide demonstrations, that, just before his work for C.D.S., he was in the Interior Ministry’s “intelligence police," and that he had appointments to meet with the C.I.A.’s SIN chief, Col. Silvain Diderot, and with the Mevs, one of Haiti’s ruling families.

Though some Haitian officials claim that François was on the C.I.A. payroll, this is denied by Lawrence Pezzullo, the former U.S. special envoyto Haiti. But Pezzullo did reveal that the C.I.A. paid François's brother, Evans, now a diplomat in the Dominican Republic. (Pezzullo joked, regarding the colonel himself, "You couldn’t pay him enough to buy him.")

The FRAPH emerged as a nationaiforce in the latter months of 1993, when it staged a series of murders, public beatings and arson raids on poor neighborhoods. In one such attack, Mrs. Alerte Belance had her right hand severed by a machete.

Later, when it was convenient for him, President Clinton used photos of these macabre assaults to (accurately) brand Haiti’s rulers as "armed thugs [who] have conducted a reign of terror." But, in the moment when that terror was actually at its height, Clinton used the FRAPH killings to pressure Aristide harshly to "broaden" his already broad Cabinet in a "power-sharing" deal. Pezzullo, in part echoing Collins's original vision for Constant (though he denies any knowledge of the arrangement), says that the FRAPH was "a political offset to Lavalas" and that as the "bodies were starting to appear" "we said [to Aristide]: The only people seen operating politically now are the FRAPHistas," and that he and the United States had to "fill that gap with another force with the private sector—otherwise these FRAPH people will be the only game in town."

It is often pointed out that the FRAPH embarrassed the United States by chasing off the transport ship Harlan County last year, but in that case U.S. officials could not agree about whether the ship should even be there. Constant says he got no US. guidance, but he had openly announced his dockside rally the day before and apparently did not get any U.S. warning to call it off.

On the fundamentals, though, U.S. officials have been united in pressing Aristide from the right. Constant said in our first interview (well before his Marine press conference) that he might now be "too high profile" for the United States. But even if he is, U.S. intelligence is a system, not dependent on any single individual. And—as Constant once taught about Aristide—there are others in the wings.