The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (44 page)

“Roger, ma’am. We have passed that repeatedly to him, and we are getting nowhere.”

“Well, tell him I’m here at the gate and I’m waiting for the authorities to open it.”

“He doesn’t want to talk right now. . . . He ran away.”

“Open the gate.”

“We’re having some problem with hostile staff. We may have a situation.”

At that moment, a band of armed men, under the direction of the then little-known thirty-six-year-old paramilitary leader Toto Constant, stormed the area. The men, who had already blocked the dock where the Harlan County was supposed to tie up, surrounded Huddleston’s car, banging on the hood and yelling in English, “Kill whites! Kill whites!”

There were only about a hundred in all, many of them potbellied and armed with little more than pitchforks. But the show of force, only a few days after U. S. soldiers had been killed in Somalia, proved terrifying. Constant put on a savvy performance for the press cameras: his ragtag troops banged on sheepskin drums and shouted “Somalia” as if it were a battle cry. They drank and caroused through the night, turning their vehicles’ lights toward the open sea where the Harlan County was still waiting. Finally, President Clinton ordered the ship to leave. It was one of the most humiliating retreats in U. S. naval history, and a surprising one even to those who forced it. “My people kept wanting to run away,” Constant told reporters afterward. “But I took the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We were astonished.”

That day was the coming-out for Constant and his Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, better known as
FRAPH,
which in Creole evokes the word “frapper,” meaning “to hit.” (Constant said the name had come to him in a dream.) Organized by Constant several months earlier,
FRAPH
was described by its leader as a grass-roots political organization—“a mysterious event”—that would rise from the masses and replace the remnants of Aristide’s populist movement. The party literature, which Constant composed on an old manual typewriter and handed out to the press, explained that “
FRAPH
is a popular movement of unity, where all the social sectors are firmly intertwined to bring perfect harmony.”

But
FRAPH
was a peculiar sort of political party: although it offered free food and liquor to lure supporters, most of its thousands of followers were drawn from the armed bands that operated at the military’s behest and from former members of the now defunct Tonton Macoutes, the infamous paramilitary organization named for a child-snatching bogeyman in Haitian fairy tales. At rallies,
FRAPH
members would slam their right fist into their left palm in mass salutes. And although
FRAPH’S
literature spoke of unity, Constant declared publicly, “If Aristide were to return, he would die. Aristide and his supporters are the enemies of this country.”

Despite such warnings, Constant tried to cultivate an image as the only gentleman in a band of thugs. At the official launching of
FRAPH,
as his men flanked him with guns, he released a handful of doves. Rather than don a soft hat and sunglasses, or camouflage pants, like other paramilitaries, he often appeared in a sharp blue suit and tie and carried a bamboo cane, which he leaned on as he walked. He had been raised within Haiti’s tiny aristocracy, and had studied at Canadian universities and worked briefly in New York as a Haitian diplomat. He spoke English with only a slight accent, and translated for the press in Spanish and French. “Never forget that I am from the establishment,” he liked to say. “I am not just any Joe out there. I’m Constant.”

Still, there was something frightening about him. His eyes, set deep in his head, were glassy and jittery. U.S. officials and reporters said that he was wired on cocaine (Constant has always denied this), and he was known to stay up all night, driving wildly through the streets, his bodyguards hanging out the back of the car with their machine guns. In public, he usually appeared with a man named Jojo, a fierce former Macoute who claimed that his pregnant wife had been murdered by Aristide’s supporters and who was regarded as a merciless killer. “He is not afraid of anything,” Constant still says of Jojo respectfully.

With Jojo as his partner, Constant began to set up
FRAPH
offices in every town and village. Members received special I.D. cards and machine guns. Like the old Macoutes, they operated as part local bosses, part spies, part extortionists, part militia, and part political cadre. But at their core they were an extension of the military’s might, a brutal “force multiplier,” as one U.S. intelligence report put it, which would allow the regime the deniability that a prudent government always looks for in the use of murder. “
FRAPH’S
will is an order,” Constant declared shortly after the storming of the port. “When we ask for something, the entire country has to accept it.”

“F
ACIAL
S
CALPING”

More and more packs of armed men began to roam at night, looking for Aristide supporters. They were believed to be
FRAPH,
the police, or the military, or a combination of the three, but they were usually careful to disguise themselves with hoods or women’s clothing (a trademark of the old Macoutes). They carried tire irons, M16s, Uzis, pistols, machetes, axes, and “voodoo powders,” which were widely believed to be lethal. They broke into homes and seized their political enemies. “I realized that I was among animals,” an Aristide supporter who was taken prisoner by one of these armed packs told human-rights monitors. “At first they played with me, taking out their guns and saying I would die. Then they took me to a little torture chamber where there was a small bed. . . . They started beating me about the buttocks with their truncheons, one after the other. At that moment, I thought I would die. I passed out. When I came to, I was in a cell with another man. There were rivers of blood on the floor. Some of it was mine.”

In 1994, after an extensive investigation, the O.A.S./U.N. International Civilian Mission reported, “The scenario is always substantially the same. Armed men, often military or
FRAPH
members, burst into the house of a political activist they [sought] to capture.” If he wasn’t there, the intruders attacked his wife or sister or daughter. “One guy took me by the hands and led me to the front porch,” a woman told Human Rights Watch. “He said lie down. He said, ‘If you don’t, I’ll split your head open.’ . . . He pulled his pants down to his knees, lifted up my nightgown, pulled down my underpants, and raped me.”

Faceless bodies began to appear in the streets. The assailants had developed a kind of art known as “facial scalping,” a bloody ritual in which a person’s face was peeled from ear to ear with a machete. It was a way to torture people even in the afterlife, because, many believed, such mutilation would prevent a proper burial—trapping the spirit eternally in purgatory.

As the bodies piled up, Constant held forth. He would often sit in a rattan chair in the courtyard of the house that had been his father’s, a sprawling Art Deco mansion with a swimming pool and fountains, and speak to the press. Unlike other paramilitary leaders, who purposely remained in the shadows, Constant craved attention. He let reporters sleep in his garden. He cut back the hedges to make more space for them and handed out T-shirts emblazoned with
FRAPH’S
name. “At one point, I was the most interviewed person in the world,” he recalls. “It was incredible.” Constant enjoyed playing the role of statesman. He warned the United States not to intervene and threatened to shut down the country in protest of the world embargo put into place after the coup. He called for the dissolution of Haiti’s parliament, echoing Jojo, who had earlier warned that, if it didn’t disband,
FRAPH
would call on the people to “tie up the deputies.” As Constant put it, “A leader has to know how to play with the army, the power, and the people.”

As he cultivated the press, Constant also courted Haiti’s houngans, or voodoo priests, a potent psychological force. He portrayed himself as an embodiment of the most ferocious spirits. He held public ceremonies in front of the markets or at temples, where his men laid out small skulls. At a typical ceremony, he would lie on the ground, surrounded by skulls and fire. Then, as he rose from the flames, the crowd would chant in Creole, “Toto for President! Without Toto, Haiti can’t have a life.” Though he still carried a .357 Magnum, he insisted that he no longer needed it. “I have the power of voodoo with me,” he said.

G
ENERAL
C
ONSTANT’S
B
OY

In Haiti, nearly every leader has a hidden history, a family closet usually filled with the bones of enemies. Constant inherited the secrets, and to some degree the power, of his father. Gerard Emmanuel Constant had been the Army chief of staff under Haiti’s dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during the nineteen-sixties. A loyal soldier, he once famously rose from his bed in the middle of the night to execute, along with other officers, more than a dozen of his friends at the dictator’s command. He remained a symbol of the old ruling order after it had collapsed.

But shortly after the military coup, in September of 1991, as his disciples emerged from the barracks to restore the Duvalier system, the seventy-two-year-old general slipped into a coma and died. All the military leaders and former Duvalier supporters turned out for his funeral. “It was a real phenomenon,” Constant says. “I was inheriting all my father’s protection and power and people. It was a symbolic transference.” In his private papers, Constant went further: “My prominence, some might argue, is destiny. . . . To be the first son of General Gerard Emmanuel Constant is the call to arms for Emmanuel Gerard Constant, myself.”

It was not long before people feared the younger Constant even more than they had feared his father. By the middle of 1994, thousands of Haitians had been slaughtered or had disappeared, and although no one knew for sure how many had been killed by
FRAPH
itself (most human-rights observers had by then been driven out of the country), the group was universally considered the most brutal of all the right-wing paramilitary outfits. Witnesses, many of them found floating on rafts as they tried to escape to the United States, told international authorities that Constant’s men, in an effort to wipe out opposition, were annihilating the population. Even
FRAPH
members started to flee in disgust. “When they kill and rape people, we [new members] are forced to sit and watch,” a former recruit told U. S. authorities, according to a declassified document obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights for use in a lawsuit against
FRAPH.
Later, as part of their initiation, this same man said, the recruits were made to join the assaults.

Though Constant continued to deny the allegations, by 1994 the U.N. had concluded that Constant’s organization was “the only political movement [in Haiti] whose members have been linked to assassinations and rapes.” In the spring of 1994, a secret cable from the office of the American military attaché in Port-au-Prince warned, “All over the country,
FRAPH
is evolving into a sort of Mafia.” Its members were “gun-carrying crazies,” one cable stated, eager to “use violence against all who oppose it.”

According to witnesses, when a
FRAPH
member turned up dead in Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, in December of 1993, Constant’s men descended within hours. Carrying machine guns and machetes, they torched a thousand houses in revenge, killing more than a dozen people. The Human Rights Watch/Americas-N.C.H.R. described how “they entered the neighborhood, looked for specific persons and shot them on sight, doused the precarious one-room shacks with gasoline, set them alight. . . . Firefighters were turned back by armed men . . . [who] nailed doors shut, imprisoning people in their homes.”

Constant, who some witnesses claimed was at the scene, denied
FRAPH’S
involvement. “If I was going to really react, there would be no more Cité,” he later said. But by the autumn of 1994 he was no longer merely the head of
FRAPH;
he had become, in the eyes of most Haitians, the embodiment of the regime: the voodoo lord of death, Baron Samedi, himself.

A M
YSTERIOUS
E
SCAPE

In July of 1992, Brian Latell, the leading C.I.A. analyst for Latin America, visited Haiti to gather intelligence as policymakers in Washington tried to assess military rule in Haiti. Afterward, in a report later obtained by the press, he wrote, “I do not wish to minimize the role the military plays in intimidating and occasionally terrorizing real and suspected opponents, but my experiences confirm the [intelligence] community’s view that there is no systematic or frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians.”

Playing down the bloodshed (Latell called the head of the junta, Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, “a conscientious military leader”), the report conflicted with those coming from human-rights organizations, the press, and even the State Department. But, along with subsequent C.I.A. reports, it had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy and on the decision of whether to launch a military invasion to restore the exiled Aristide to power. Whereas President Bill Clinton was pushing for such a move, many in the C.I.A., along with elements in the Pentagon, feared that Aristide was a dangerous populist. In fact, Aristide was a problematic figure. (He had once suggested necklacing his enemies with burning tires.) But a crucial C.I.A. report, which was circulated on Capitol Hill just after the Harlan County incident, seemed to exaggerate his instability, claiming that he was so unbalanced psychologically that he had once had to be hospitalized. The charge later proved to be false, but at the time it fuelled American opposition to an invasion and contributed to the ongoing vacillation in Washington. “There were factions in the process who didn’t want to get involved in Haiti and could use these intelligence reports to strengthen their position,” a former Clinton Administration official says.