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Security & Strategic Review - March 2014 (ISSN 1741-4202)

HAITI: Kidnapping: success & downside

The good news is that over the past two years Haiti has achieved a drastic reduction in its epidemic-proportion rate of a kidnapping for ransom per day. The bad news is that a recent high-profile kidnapping, while foiled, has brought again under the spotlight the cosy relationship between criminal elements and Haitian officialdom — all the way to the top level.

Haiti’s success in curbing kidnapping was celebrated in early March by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in an article written by Julienne Gage for the bank’s blog Sin Miedos. Largely responsible for that success was the anti-kidnapping support provided by United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (Minustah) under the leadership of Robert Arce, a former US police officer, seconded by a Haitian-American, Brunel Bienvenu, who served with the New York Police Department (NYPD).

A key early step was the recruitment of Creole-speaking officers of Haitian origin for the anti-kidnapping unit. Next came the introduction of a strategy of cell-phone log exploitation (which required persuading telephone companies to cooperate) and community policing to encourage the public to come forward with information. Overseeing the anti-kidnapping unit is Normil Rameau, director of the Judicial Police, who spent three years training in Chile and has sent some of his leading officers to Colombia for training in tactical operations and intelligence gathering and analysis.

The fruits: in 2013 the police arrested 87 suspected kidnappers — 72 of them in the last three months of the year. Since then, Gage wrote on 5 March, only one new kidnapping was reported.

On 25 March the police announced that Sami El Aziz, a Syrian-American businessman kidnapped eight days earlier, had been freed before the US$1.2m ransom demanded by his abductors had been paid. Police identified the kidnapper as the Baz Galil gang, an outfit led by Woodly Ethéard (‘Sonson Lafamilia’) believed to have been involved in a number of other kidnappings; 18 according to The Sentinel, which adds that Lafamilia ‘provides security for the sons of President Michel Martelly, Olivier and T-Mickey’. The online news service haitipolitik cites a police source as saying that the kidnapping had been carried out in a car belonging to the interior ministry, and describes Lafamilia as ‘a notorious drug trafficker and personal friend of President Martelly’.

Lafamilia was arrested in 2009 but was promptly released, despite objection by Mario Andrésol, director of the national police at the time. He is now being sought by the police for the El Aziz kidnapping. After leaving his post Andrésol wrote an article in the newspaper Le Nouvelliste denouncing the permissiveness of the judiciary in Port-au-Prince towards people linked to the drugs trade purportedly shielded by those wielding political power.

The Sentinel says that the El Aziz affair ‘has become only another branch of unseeming relationships that the Haitian government has with organised criminals.’ It mentions two notorious cases involving friends of the President: that of Clifford Brandt, head of the presidential palace’s ‘secret security’, arrested as the suspected leader of a kidnapping ring and released from prison in November 2013, and that of Daniel Evinks, arrested in possession of drugs but soon released, last heard of in late 2013.

Gage does note in her article that there is a blemish on the anti-kidnapping record: most of the arrested kidnappers were still being held without trial.

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