Haiti Faces Its Future with the Belt and Road, or with Dope, Inc.

Oct. 3, 2021 (EIRNS)—Open the latest Oct. 1, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review to p. 13, and look at the map in Figure 7. The map indicates Haiti’s location in the Schiller Institute proposed program for a Caribbean Basin Belt and Road, and the broad sweep of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and other infrastructure and science projects that China and the U.S. must jointly create within the region. Note in particular the location of Fort Liberté, the proposed deep water port on Haiti’s northern coast which, along with Ponce, Puerto Rico, and Mariel, Cuba, will be key industrial port hubs in the Caribbean, to receive and transship international Belt and Road cargo to other ports in Central and South America, as well as to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts.

The Schiller Institute will be adding to that map a new location for another major industrial port, right across the border from Fort Liberté, on the Dominican Republic’s northern coast: the port of Manzanillo. Manzanillo, the Dominican Republic’s deepest port with a depth of 30-40 feet, will also be built up in tandem with Fort Liberté into twin industrial ports for the joint development of the two countries of the island of Hispaniola—and also as key terminals on the high-speed rail line to be built linking Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This provides the reader with a summary mental image of one of two pathways facing Haiti—and by extension, the world.

The other pathway is a worsening of the misery, degradation and depopulation imposed on Haiti by the trans-Atlantic financial Establishment, and of the violence associated with street drug gangs now controlling large parts of the country, and who work for the Dope, Inc. apparatus run by those same City of London-centered banks. According to the State Department’s 2021 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INSCR), Haiti “is a transit point for cocaine from South America and marijuana from Jamaica en route to the United States.”

Can this be stopped? In the aftermath of a 2015 drug bust in the capital, Port-au-Prince, of a ship carrying 800 kg. of cocaine and 300 kg. of heroin, two whistleblowers, former DEA special agents who worked in Haiti, charged that “only a small amount of the seized drugs was secured,” and that “because DEA has been looking the other way, for over a decade Port-au-Prince has been a safe port to ship heroin and cocaine without interference through Haiti, generally destined for Florida in the United States,” according to a May 1, 2019 letter written on behalf of the anonymous whistleblowers by the Government Accountability Project, and sent to the head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a permanent independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency. That same letter reported that “the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami is actively investigating the case.”

Over two years later, on July 30, 2021, the OSC issued a finding notifying the U.S. President and Congress that DEA officials in Haiti had indeed “failed to secure a key Haitian seaport used by drug smugglers,” and urged the Department of Justice to fully investigate the charges by the whistleblowers, since the DEA is under DOJ jurisdiction.

How big a problem is the international drug trade in which Haiti today plays an important role? The 2021 INSCR documents that the total worldwide potential pure cocaine production skyrocketed from 871 metric tons in 2011 to 1,886 metric tons in 2019—a more than doubling in eight years. Total potential worldwide heroin production also almost doubled in that same period, from 590 metric tons, to over 1,000 metric tons.