Haiti: To Have and To Have Not

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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.