Ex-Haiti rebel leader wanted in US arrested during talk show Evens Sanon, Associated Press Updated

[Judi Lynn]

Ex-Haiti rebel leader wanted in US arrested during talk show

Evens Sanon, Associated Press
Updated 7:53 pm, Thursday, January 5, 2017


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A former rebel leader who is wanted on U.S. drug charges, and was recently elected to the Haitian Senate, was arrested Thursday as he appeared on a live radio talk show.


Ex-Haiti rebel leader wanted in US arrested during talk show

Evens Sanon, Associated Press
Updated 7:53 pm, Thursday, January 5, 2017


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A former rebel leader who is wanted on U.S. drug charges, and was recently elected to the Haitian Senate, was arrested Thursday as he appeared on a live radio talk show.

Guy Philippe was being interviewed on the show with another recently elected lawmaker when the host abruptly announced that police were outside the studio in the Petionville district of the capital to arrest him. The host came back on air and said authorities had taken him away

. . .

He is wanted on drug-trafficking charges including conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. The indictment charging him is sealed and federal prosecutors have declined to discuss it. In Haiti, he is a divisive figure who was one of the leaders of a violent 2004 rebellion that led to the ouster for then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Philippe has spent most of his time in recent years in a remote, mountainous part of southern Haiti, where he had extensive family and business connections and it would have been difficult for authorities to locate and arrest him. Still, he would frequently appear in public and gave an extensive interview to the AP for an August 2016 profile.

More:
http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Witness-Ex-Haiti-rebel-leader-wanted-in-US-is-10838119.php

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Vol. 26 No. 8 · 15 April 2004
pages 28-31 | 5155

Who removed Aristide?
Paul Farmer reports from Haiti

. . .

The rebel leader Guy Philippe received training, during the last coup, at a US military facility in Ecuador. When the army was demobilised, Philippe was incorporated into the new police force, serving as police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas and in the second city, Cap-Haïtien. During his tenure, the UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of suspected gang members were summarily ex ecuted, most of them by police under the command of Philippe’s deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in drug smuggling during his police career. Crimes committed in large part by ex-military policemen, are often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these posts.

Philippe fled Haiti in October 2000, when the authorities discovered him plotting a coup with a clique of fellow police chiefs. Since then, the Haitian government has accused him of masterminding terrorist attacks in July and December 2001, as well as lethal hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti’s central plateau. (Over the last two years, four of our ambulances have been stolen, and members of our medical staff have been held hostage.) Last month, Philippe’s men bragged to the US press that they had executed Aristide supporters in Cap-Haïtien and Port-au-Prince, and many have indeed been reported missing. ‘I am the chief, the military chief. The country is in my hands,’ Philippe boasted on 2 March, which triggered the following response from Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace laureate and former president of Costa Rica: ‘Nothing could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of rebel leader Guy Philippe last week in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent the country from falling back into the hands of military men.’ Philippe told the Associated Press that he would use his new powers to arrest Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and proceeded to lead a mob in an attack on Neptune’s house. Philippe has been quoted as saying that the man he most admires is Pinochet.

More:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide

[Judi Lynn]

1. Refresher on the Bush-instigated coup:

The overthrow of Haiti’s Aristide: a coup made in the USA
By World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board
1 March 2004

The violent overthrow and forced exile of Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has ripped aside the democratic pretensions of Washington and the other major powers to expose the brutal and predatory character of resurgent imperialism. The actions taken by the US government in Haiti demonstrate the farcical character of its claims that the aim of the US invasion of Iraq was to inaugurate an era of democratization and freedom in the Middle East and around the world.

Aristide’s overthrow is the outcome of a bloody coup orchestrated by the Bush administration and aided by the Chirac government in Paris. It was executed by a band of killers drawn from the disbanded and discredited Haitian army and the CIA-backed death squads that terrorized the population under the former military dictatorship that ruled the country in the early 1990s.

Among those leading the armed bands that overran the country are Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former Haitian army officer sentenced to life at hard labor in connection with the 1993 assassination of political activist Antoine Izméry, and Jean-Pierre Baptiste, likewise sentenced to life for his role in a 1994 massacre. Both were leaders of the FRAPH, or Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress, a CIA-backed organization that carried out state terror against opponents of the military regime that ruled the country from 1991 to 1994.

Another leader of the armed bands is Guy Philippe, a former member of the Haitian military who received training from US Special Forces in Ecuador in the 1990s and was then sent back to Haiti, where he became a brutal police chief and sought to organize a coup in 2000. He is suspected of involvement in cocaine trafficking.

These heavily armed terrorists invaded Haiti from across the border with the Dominican Republic. There is convincing evidence that they were trained, financed and armed by Washington, provided with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers and other weapons out of stockpiles originally sent to the Dominican army.
Hundreds of Haitians have died as a result of this made-in-the-USA coup. In cities that fell to the gunmen—Gonaives and Cap Haitien—they have reportedly carried out a house-to-house manhunt for government supporters, executing those who failed to escape.

More:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/03/hait-m01.html