you doing?” he said, speaking with only a slight accent.
To my surprise, he looked like an average American. We sat down in a small conference room lined with books. He paused, rocking back in his chair. Finally, he said, “It’s time for Toto to speak for Toto.”
It was the first of more than a dozen interviews. As he told me his story over the next several months, he often spoke for hours on end. He turned over his voluminous notes and private papers, his correspondence and journals. During that time, I also interviewed his alleged victims, along with human-rights workers, United Nations observers, Haitian authorities, and former and current U.S. officials within the White House, the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the intelligence community, many of whom had never before spoken publicly about Constant. I also gained access to intelligence reports, some of which had previously been classified, and State Department cables. With these and other sources, I was able to piece together not only the story of Emmanuel “Toto” Constant but also much of the story of how the U.S. government secretly aided him and later shielded him from justice.
VOODOO PARAMILITARY
In October of 1993, the U.S.S. Harlan County, loaded with military personnel, was sent steaming toward Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. President Bill Clinton had dispatched the ship and its crew as the first major contingent of an international peacekeeping mission to restore to power Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was a political priest, a wiry, passionate, bug-eyed orator who had risen to power in late 1990 on a mixture of socialism and liberation theology. The downtrodden of Haiti, which is nearly everyone, called him Titid and revered him; the military and the economic elite reviled him as an unstable radical. He was deposed in a coup less than a year after taking office and ultimately fled to the United States. Since then the military, along with roaming bands of paramilitaries, had murdered scores of people. The bloodshed had galvanized the international community, and the ship’s arrival was hailed as a turning point in the effort to reestablish some semblance of public safety and the island’s democracy.
On October 11th, as the Harlan County neared port, a group of U.N. and U.S. officials, headed by the charge d’affaires, Vicki Huddleston, and accompanied by a large press corps, came to formally welcome the ship and its troops. The assembly waited at the entrance to the port for a guard to open the gate, but nothing happened. Documentary footage shows Huddleston sitting in the back of her car with the C.I.A. station chief. Speaking to another embassy official, she says into her walkie-talkie, “Tell the captain [of the port] I am here to speak with him.”
“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
But most of FRAPH’s 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
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.”
“FACIAL SCALPING”
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
