Guy Philippe: Haiti’s American trained military officer, illicit drug trafficker, politician and chief CIA asset during the ouster of President Bertrand Aristide “Nabbed by the DEA”.

Election poster on a wall in Haiti, Guy Phillipe is shown as a candidate in the elections.

“There are those who say my books on the illicit drug trade in the Caribbean are the products of a lunatic at best because what I purport to describe don’t exist, others say that my works are fakes, of no academic merit as all they be are scandal rags of race hate, lies, half-truths and innuendos and as a result I will be expunged from my job at UWI shortly. For the minds of the upcoming generation must be protected from this vile discourse that I preach. But to attempt to silence me does not deal with the reality on the ground so when your home is invaded, when you are car jacked, when you hear the crack of the gunshots the attempt to silence me will have changed nothing not the availability and price of an illicit gun and the ammunition that feeds the organ of death”.   Daurius Figueria paid the ultimate price when he was fired from his post at the UWI as a Professor of Criminology and lecturer.

Figueria is one of the few Caribbean writers he dared and still dares, to write about the awful, macabre truth that is the illicit drug trade and terrorism in the Caribbean, earning him pariah status in society and the eternal enmity of the elite regionally. What follows is salient proof of what he wrote being not only true but also, corroborated by several American corporate media organs, a piece here from one such outlet the Daily Beast totally shatters, the accepted narrative regionally and again exposes the US government as a protector of and nurturer of some of the most dangerous, diabolical criminals and terrorists in the Caribbean and indeed globally. 

“PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—At 3:57 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, the clatter of gunfire broke the quiet of a middle-class neighborhood in Petionville, the upscale residential niche overlooking the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Within moments, word spread that the famous, swashbuckling, elusive rebel Guy Philippe, wanted in the U.S. on drug charges, had been arrested by the BLTS, Haiti’s recently formed Drug Trafficking Surveillance Squad.

Philippe wasn’t in hiding. He was at the radio station Scoop FM being interviewed on a live talk show about his future role as senator from Haiti’s southern department of Grande Anse.

A YouTube video of the arrest inside the studio shows Philippe having jovial exchanges with the anti-drug-squad members, giving them the high-five and hugging a few. The whole scene was more like a post-New Year’s reunion”.

Philippe first went into hiding in the Dominican Republic in the early 2000s, escaping arrest for plotting a coup in Haiti and a sealed U.S. indictment for cocaine trafficking and money laundering.

In February 2004, then-President Jean Bertrand Aristide was facing increasing local and international pressure to resign, which he was refusing to accept. Phillipe sneaked back across the border, formed a rebel army in the north, and held a press conference at the Hotel Mont-Joli in Cap Haitian on Feb. 24, 2004, declaring his intent to overthrow Aristide.

Five days later, in the early hours of Sunday, Feb. 29, 2004, Aristide was forced onto an unmarked plane headed first to Jamaica, then to South Africa for a second exile. Ironically, it was Guy Philippe’s 36th birthday.

Philippe’s motley caravan of pickup trucks and SUVs, packed with heavily armed Haitian militiamen coiffed with oversized salad-bowl looking helmets, plus Rambo-styled foreign mercenaries, careened toward Port-au-Prince, but not in time to see Aristide leave.

Soon, violence between pro-Aristide supporters and Philippe’s heavily armed rebels convulsed the capital into days and weeks of violence, persecutions and assassinations. The U.S. finally had to call in the Marines and tell Philippe to get lost. Which he did, but not before staging a lavish banquet at The Montana Hotel, surrounded by Haiti’s top models.

Philippe eventually slid into the tropical foliage again, the U.S. having turned its heels on its would-be presidential candidate and resurrected the old sealed indictment to get rid of a flamboyant liability to American policy. But Philippe was out of reach.

He had settled on the Southern peninsula, and from there he appeared an imperious warlord à la Haitien as he played commander to the ragtag army of former FADH soldiers … and eventually ran a political campaign while still on Washington’s wanted list.

Last December, he successfully weathered two rounds of vote counts to earn the seat of senator for the largest department in Haiti’s south, the Grande Anse. His headquarters was his hometown Pestel, an inaccessible fishing village on the northern coast of the peninsula where locals say he commands a large rebel army, heavily armed. No one went to find him there. Clearly.

Philippe had been slated to take office for a six-year term this month, giving him legal immunity from criminal proceedings. He was also a supporter of incoming President Jovenel Moise, whom the international community has endorsed. So the sweep on Radio Scoop seemed farcical at best, as the YouTube video showed. Did the DEA just wake up after New Year’s and realize they had to scramble if they really wanted to get Philippe? (The Haitian Constitution stipulates that immunity takes effect only after an official is sworn-in.)

A photo released by the Haitian National Police showed a very exasperated Guy Philippe, a little older and heavier, inside a police station, sitting behind a well-polished mahogany table, a few armed guards standing much to the side.

He looked confident, as ever.

But the latest word on Friday night was that he’d been quickly, quietly, definitively extradited to the United States.

Has Haiti seen the last of Guy Philippe? Could be. But few in Port-au-Prince would count on that. From the daily Beast 01.07.17.

On Haiti Figueira said the following: “The civil war in Haiti that was used to remove President Aristide was among other things a war for drug turf funded by drug money. The militias that engaged with Aristide’s Aristides militia’s for hegemony were led by drug traffickers displaced by Aristides’s elite wielding state power who took over the trafficking enterprises in joint ventures with agents of the Colombian cartels resident in Haiti. The best kept secret of the Haitian illicit drug trade is the involvement of the non-African elite, especially the Syrian Arabs in the illicit drug trade in Haiti and the wider Caribbean. Figueira further noted that in the case of Trinidad: “Successive governments had within their cabinet’s minions and vassals of the illicit drug trade.

The NAR government of 1986 to 1991 would be the first government in the history of Trinbago in which members of the government would not only be involved in illicit drug running, providing services to the drug lords but would utilise the state to intervene in the war between the Syrian/Lebanese cartel and it’s perceived enemies, firstly the Jamaat al Muslimeen and then the Zimmern Beharry/Dole Chadee gang. This action would not only pave the way for the attempted coup d’etat of July 27th 1990, but would also precipitate a war between cartels in the 1990’s that would be the catalyst in the formation of an economy of crime predicated on gun violence, murder and kidnappings. 

Figueira further drew linkage, between the global trade in illicit narcotics and how it impacts western states and in particular the Caribbean. He also elucidated the clear and present threat of al-Qaeda to western interest’s, using the geographic area of the Caribbean, as a means of aiding the organisation in its bid to launch terrorist attacks on western soil:

“Possibly one weapon in the arsenal of the war with the west is cheap, abundant, high purity Opium base to be processed into Heroine for consumption in the West, particularly Europe. The single potent reality for the West is that the desire of the West for illicit drugs and the complicity of the powered elites of the West with the illicit drug trade has afforded the al-Qaeda network access to the finances, material and the means to penetrate the borders of the West, in order to execute their military engagement with the West. The Madrid bombings of 2004 bear salient, potent testimony to this reality. Since the events of 9/11 the complicity of the illicit drug trade in Colombia, Venezuela and Trinbago with al-Qaeda is now being granted voice in the western media. Over the years proponents of the discourse of the greater kufr have won adherents in the Indo-Muslim communities in Trinidad and Guyana. Males sent to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for schooling return as bearers of the discourse for its propagation. In addition Pakistani males have migrated to Trinidad marrying Trinidadian Muslim wives and are residents of Trinidad.

Al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers in Trinidad and Guyana are involved in the illicit drug trade and the trafficking of guns, ammunition, explosives and detonators from Venezuela. Multi product shipments now regularly cross the Gulf of Paria, the Columbus Channel and the Atlantic Ocean to Trinidad. Al-Qaeda operatives have well developed links to Colombian illicit drug suppliers. The al-Qaeda attack in Madrid Spain was facillitated by Spain’s central importance to drug trafficking across the Caribbean to Europe.Riding these trafficking networks are al-Qaeda operatives who profit from the trade, source material from the illicit trade, and utilise operational bases of the illegal trade. The al-Qaeda sleeping assets in Trinidad with their coven of sympathisers are in Trinidad only to amass wealth and material via the illicit drug trade.

But as the largest single supplier of LNG to the US is Atlantic LNG at point Fortin, Trinidad how can Trinbagonian political elites and state agencies in complicity with the drug trade protect US interest’s in Trinidad? A military strike at Atlantic LNG is the most potent strike against US interests in the western hemisphere outside of the USA. The untrammelled trade in precursor chemicals between Trinidad, Venezuela and Colombia is but another indication of the porosity of the borders of Trinidad and the high propensity of an attack on US interests in Trinidad. Equally disturbing is the announced intention of a Syrian owned Caribbean conglomerate to manufacture urea ammonium nitrate in Trinidad for the export market. Ammonium nitrate is the poor man’s weapon of mass destruction used in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA. To manufacture urea ammonium nitrate in Trinidad ammonium nitrate has to be manufactured and then combined with urea. Given the trade in precursor chemicals what assurances are there that ammonium nitrate manufactured at Union Estate La Brea would not be diverted to the illicit drug trade for use as weapons of mass destruction on an LNG tanker or LNG train at Point Fortin?  A suicide bomber breaking security at Atlantic LNG with a panel van loaded with plastic explosives, ammonium nitrate in solution and the necessary detonators. 

The plastique and detonators remote controlled or otherwise are widely available in the product mix of the illegal drug trade at present. What about an attack on a loaded LNG tanker in the stream or a tanker being loaded at the pier a la the attack on the USS Cole in South Yemen? 

The worst case scenario posited by Figueira is an imminent threat that will, eventually become reality, it might not happen in exactly the way he describes it but its inevitability is carved in stone.