To Have and To Have Not

By Kevin Fedarko

For months, U.S. Ambassador William Swing had been hearing reports of how smugglers operating across Lake Saumatre from the Dominican Republic were flouting the United Nations fuel embargo against Haiti. Last Wednesday morning, Swing finally saw for himself. About an hour's drive from his elegant residence above Port-au-Prince, he stepped out of his armored car and trained his binoculars on a flotilla of wooden boats laden with large blue drums of petroleum. "It looks like a staging area for some of the contraband coming across," said the ambassador, an observation that has long been obvious to Haitians.

As any of the country's 7 million residents could have explained, the mathematics of the embargo are devastatingly simple. Gas that sells for $2 per gal. on the Dominican side of the border commands $7 on the Haitian side. Those numbers have fueled flourishing cross-border smuggling ever since the trade ban was placed on Haiti last October in hopes of forcing the defiant military to allow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to return. Last week President Clinton's new envoy to Haiti, William Gray III, won a promise from the Dominican Republic's aging President Joaquin Balaguer to seal the border. But with millions of gallons in reserve, Haiti's army Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Philippe Biamby, told friends confidently that the military could "hang on without much trouble."

The U.N.'s new, stronger embargo, which bars trade in goods except medicine and basic foods, is having an effect opposite to what its framers intended. By shutting down the most impoverished economy in the western hemisphere, the U.S. and the U.N. have managed to provide a lucrative opportunity for the enrichment of those it was meant to hurt. And that has left the great mass of Haiti's poor bitter, hungry and disillusioned.

The blockade has proved anything but airtight. An estimated 10,000 Haitians cross the Dominican border each day to buy fuel, which they lug back in plastic jugs or pulley across ravines. At the Malpasse border crossing east of the capital, wooden fishing boats openly ply barrels of illegal gasoline and diesel from an open-air depot on the Dominican side of the island.

The 7,000 uniformed soldiers and thousands of plainclothes thugs who serve as the Haitian military's henchmen are only too pleased by the publicity surrounding this jerry-can stampede. The attention provides an effective smoke screen for those who are really keeping the military alive: the larger vessels that audaciously evade U.N. picket boats. The U.S., Canada and Argentina have stationed warships offshore, but are unable to maneuver in shallow waters. That leaves the jagged shoreline to "coast huggers," wildcat fuel runners who use the cover of darkness to spirit drums of gas and diesel into Haiti's biggest harbors.

Together with small tankers operating out of Venezuela and Panama, which do not observe the embargo, the armada of smugglers have managed to deliver so much contraband fuel that hucksters have set up a bustling business along "gasoline alley" in Port-au-Prince. Out-of-work vendors vie frantically for customers among the wealthy in Land Rovers. Businessmen can even get gas delivered to their door.

The handful of wealthy families who directly or indirectly support the junta maintain their near monopolies on items exempted from the blockade, such as cooking oil, rice and sugar -- and are profiting handsomely. The Brandts control the market in flour, which shot up from $43 to $50 a sack, and have a corner on the country's chicken industry. The Mevs family continues to add on to a fuel depot capable of holding 50 million gal. Their cement business is booming as black-market millionaires build new homes. The Madsens are doing big business in humanitarian food at their shipping terminal, and they own the country's main beer factory. To exploit lucrative foreign-exchange deals, two of the capital's leading families -- the Acras, who come from Syria, and the Bigios, who are of Jewish descent -- have joined forces to buy the local branch of the National Bank of Paris. "Six months from now, when all the small businessmen are dead," says an angry downtown entrepreneur, "they will be the ones controlling Haiti."

Many of those small business owners put their lives on the line by denouncing the military-installed puppet government of President Emile Jonassaint. Now they watch as their companies spiral toward ruin. The day before the embargo took effect, Georges Barau Sassine stood above his factory floor as 430 employees sewed the last shipment of Disney children's wear for export to the U.S. "We're all closed," he declared as he popped tablets for an upset stomach. "They're destroying those of us who give jobs. It's so absurd."

A few blocks from the Port-au-Prince harbor, a grocery wholesaler complained about an embargo that seemed to benefit only the oligarchs. "If there's no leak in the embargo, then I'll be happy," she says. Last week black marketeers slapped an $11 charge on every case of supplies. Canned milk, a substitute for nonexistent fresh milk, has doubled in price. "The poor people can't afford it," she says. "Everything is for the rich first."

Not all the elite are after money: some just want power. A candidate angling to fill the seat of the deposed Aristide is Emmanuel Constant, leader of the paramilitary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti. He presides from a wicker chair in his backyard over a ragtag group that has been accused of committing many of the 133 political executions and 55 disappearances documented over the past four months. Constant protests his group's innocence. "If anybody from F.R.A.P.H. kills somebody," he says, casually tossing his cigarette butt into a barren flower bed, "it is personal, not political. If I had the power to arm all 400,000 members, I would be in the palace having juice and giving interviews."

Anger at economic as well as political oppression is growing in slums like the capital's Cite Soleil and in the countryside. Fuel is too expensive, so peasants can no longer afford to transport crops into the city. In some areas, people are reduced to eating boiled green mangoes and seeds. "The military got us into this mess, and they will have to pay for it," says Pierre, a father of five. Relief agencies already feed some 900,000 people, but they claim that red tape from the U.N. and the U.S. is holding up supplies. "They keep talking about humanitarian aid, but people are still starving and black marketeers are making a killing," says a relief worker in Port-au-Prince.

In fact, the military is counting on headlines about rising malnutrition and disease to weaken the international community's resolve. Some of the most poignant scenes of misery take place at the capital's General Hospital, which has been reduced to a nightmarish warren of broken beds and piles of medical rubbish. For months it operated on six hours of electricity a day, and even now water pressure is so low that some clinics cannot be cleaned. "They say there's no embargo on medicine, but why do we have to buy what we need on the black market?" demands the hospital's new Harvard-trained administrator, Dr. Georges Dubuche. "It's a tragedy when health care becomes part of the political game."

Short of an invasion by the U.S., the only alternative open to the average Haitian is the vision that greeted several wealthy young men lounging in front of a television one recent evening at a picturesque French restaurant in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Halfway through the Knicks and Bulls game, which the group was watching live by satellite, a Budweiser beer ad aired. Touting upcoming World Cup soccer matches, the commercial offered a message of unusual aptness for Haiti's suffering populace: "For millions of people, getting to America is the ultimate goal." The embargo sadly ensures that that dream stays alive.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Port-au-Prince and Bernard Diederich/Santo Domingo