PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti _ The Panamanian-flagged cargo ship pulled into a privately owned Haitian port in broad daylight with a secret buried under a mountain of imported sugar: 700 to 800 kilos of cocaine and 300 kilos of heroin with an estimated U.S. street value of $100 million.
When longshoremen started unloading the bags of sugar, they stumbled across the hidden stash _ and a lawless free-for-all unfolded. Bags of drugs were grabbed by a host of people, including police officers who sped up to the docks in cars with tinted windows, according to a Haiti police report obtained by the Miami Herald and confirmed by an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
By the time a squad of Haiti narcotics police officers arrived at the dock two hours later, most of the drugs were gone.
The sugar boat haul in April 2015 should have been exactly the kind of smuggling operation that DEA agents and Haiti's narcotics police were prepared to take down. But today, more than three years after the MV Manzanares docked at the Terminal Varreux port in Cite Soleil, the only person behind bars is a low-level longshoreman, facing 26 years in prison for drug smuggling. No one in authority at the port _ neither Haiti's anti-drug police nor the DEA _ has been held accountable for the missing drugs on the sugar boat.
The bungling of the investigation in Haiti didn't even come to light until two veteran DEA agents filed whistleblower complaints that have triggered a U.S. Justice Department investigation into the effectiveness of the DEA's drug-fighting efforts in the impoverished country. An initial review by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency, took two years and recently found "a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" in the DEA's Haiti Country Office. That resulted in an automatic referral to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for an investigation by the Justice Department.
There are other inquiries into the DEA office in Haiti, too.
The DEA agents' complaints, filed in 2016, have attracted the attention of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who called the allegations "substantial." Both requested a Justice Department probe. In addition, two separate criminal investigations into the Manzanares smuggling case are also under way _ one by Haitian authorities, the other by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami.
In the whistleblower complaints, the two agents lay out a list of allegations, blaming their own office along with Haiti's narcotics police for security failures at Haiti's ports that they said have allowed drugs to flow through the country long before the Manzanares incident. They say thousands of kilos of cocaine and other drugs had been passing through Haiti undetected for years, en route to the United States. They also accuse DEA supervisors in the Haiti office of corruption, misconduct and even collusion with the former head of the country's anti-drug unit, which is called the Brigade in the Fight Against Narcotics Trafficking, or BLTS.
Their scathing accusations suggest that the U.S. government has wasted U.S. taxpayers' money with little to show for it. The U.S. pays for the DEA's operations in Port-au-Prince and has invested more than $250 million in Haiti's roughly 15,000-member police force in the past eight years. About $18.7 million of that amount has gone for training and other resources for the Haitian police 300-member narcotics unit but nothing for seaport security in Port-au-Prince.
Both longtime DEA agents _ the Miami Herald is not naming them because whistleblower laws protect the identities of federal workers who disclose government wrongdoing _ said they see the Varreux port incident as a missed opportunity and part of a larger failure of the U.S. war on drugs in Haiti.
"The vessel was a demonstration of the corruption of BLTS, apathy of the U.S. government and exploitation by the drug traffickers," one of the agents told the Herald.
The DEA's recently appointed special agent in charge of the Caribbean division, A.J. Collazo, insisted in an interview last month that the eight-person office in Port-au-Prince has collaborated effectively with Haiti's anti-drug officers to slow the flow of cocaine and other narcotics into the U.S..
"We're there to fight narcotics trafficking," he said. "We're not there to allow it to happen or to sit back and not do anything about it."
He laid responsibility for the Manzanares case on Haiti alone. He said of the DEA: "I don't know if it was a case that we were looking to make."
That viewpoint isn't shared by at least one other U.S. law enforcement agency. The Herald has learned that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami is considering whether to file drug-trafficking charges in connection with the Manzanares smuggling operation based on evidence gathered by one of the whistleblower DEA agents, who believes the drugs were destined for Florida. The U.S. Attorney's Office wouldn't confirm that, or say whether there is a U.S. investigation into the Manzanares at all.
But a spokeswoman for the U.S. Coast Guard, which helped Haitian police search for the drugs, said the sugar boat case "is still an open (federal) investigation."
