2 Haiti Leaders Are Focus of Drug Inquiry
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Federal prosecutors in Miami are pursuing a cocaine-trafficking investigation focused on senior Haitian military and intelligence officials, including the country’s powerful police commander, Federal officials and lawyers familiar with the case said today. In addition, the investigators have been told by two former members of Colombian cocaine cartels that the senior Haitian military leader, Lieut. Gen. Raoul Cedras, was part of a group of Haitian officials who helped protect shipments of the cartels’ cocaine through Haiti to the United States in the 1980’s, the lawyers and officials said. General Cedras and the police commander, Lieut. Col. Joseph Michel Francois, are members of the three-man junta ruling Haiti. Officials said they did not know whether General Cedras had become a target of the investigation — that is, someone who is likely to be indicted — or was merely a subject of the investigation. In either case, the knowledge that the Haitian leader’s past has become part of a Federal cocaine investigation further complicates the Clinton Administration’s efforts to remove General Cedras from power. Prelude to Invasion? Possible involvement by the Haitian military in drug trafficking has been cited by Administration officials as a potential justification for an invasion. A drug-trafficking indictment against the Haitian leaders might be seen as a prelude to what one foreign-policy official called “a Noriega takedown” — an invasion justified in part by an indictment, as was the case when the United States invaded Panama and seized its leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega, in 1989. More : query.nytimes.com |