by David Grann
But FRAPH was a peculiar sort of political party: although it offered free food and liquor to lure supporters, most of its 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 Constant.”
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 torture people even in the afterlife, because, many believed, such mutilation would prevent a proper burial—trapping the spirit eternally in purgatory.
As the bodies piled up, Constant held forth. He would often sit in a rattan chair in the courtyard of the house that had been his father’s, a sprawling Art Deco mansion with a swimming pool and fountains, and speak to the press. Unlike other paramilitary leaders, who purposely remained in the shadows, Constant craved attention. He let reporters sleep in his garden. He cut back the hedges to make more space for them and handed out T-shirts emblazoned with FRAPH’S name. “At one point, I was the most interviewed person in the world,” he recalls. “It was incredible.” Constant enjoyed playing the role of statesman. He warned the United States not to intervene and threatened to shut down the country in protest of the world embargo put into place after the coup. He called for the dissolution of Haiti’s parliament, echoing Jojo, who had earlier warned that, if it didn’t disband, FRAPH would call on the people to “tie up the deputies.” As Constant put it, “A leader has to know how to play with the army, the power, and the people.”
As he cultivated the press, Constant also courted Haiti’s houngans, or voodoo priests, a potent psychological force. He portrayed himself as an embodiment of the most ferocious spirits. He held public ceremonies in front of the markets or at temples, where his men laid out small skulls. At a typical ceremony, he would lie on the ground, surrounded by skulls and fire. Then, as he rose from the flames, the crowd would chant in Creole, “Toto for President! Without Toto, Haiti can’t have a life.” Though he still carried a .357 Magnum, he insisted that he no longer needed it. “I have the power of voodoo with me,” he said.
GENERAL CONSTANT’S BOY
In Haiti, nearly every leader has a hidden history, a family closet usually filled with the bones of enemies. Constant inherited the secrets, and to some degree the power, of his father. Gerard Emmanuel Constant had been the Army chief of staff under Haiti’s dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during the nineteen-sixties. A loyal soldier, he once famously rose from his bed in the middle of the night to execute, along with other officers, more than a dozen of his friends at the dictator’s command. He remained a symbol of the old ruling order after it had collapsed.
But shortly after the military coup, in September of 1991, as his disciples emerged from the barracks to restore the Duvalier system, the seventy-two-year-old general slipped into a coma and died. All the military leaders and former Duvalier supporters turned out for his funeral. “It was a real phenomenon,” Constant says. “I was inheriting all my father’s protection and power and people. It was a symbolic transference.” In his private papers, Constant went further: “My prominence, some might argue, is destiny. . . . To be the first son of General Gerard Emmanuel Constant is the call to arms for Emmanuel Gerard Constant, myself.”
It was not long before people feared the younger Constant even more than they had feared his father. By the middle of 1994, thousands of Haitians had been slaughtered or had disappeared, and although no one knew for sure how many had been killed by FRAPH itself (most human-rights observers had by then been driven out of the country), the group was universally considered the most brutal of all the right-wing paramilitary outfits. Witnesses, many of them found floating on rafts as they tried to escape to the United States, told international authorities that Constant’s men, in an effort to wipe out opposition, were annihilating the population. Even FRAPH members started to flee in disgust. “When they kill and rape people, we [new members] are forced to sit and watch,” a former recruit told U. S. authorities, according to a declassified document obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights for use in a lawsuit again
st FRAPH. Later, as part of their initiation, this same man said, the recruits were made to join the assaults.
Though Constant continued to deny the allegations, by 1994 the U.N. had concluded that Constant’s organization was “the only political movement [in Haiti] whose members have been linked to assassinations and rapes.” In the spring of 1994, a secret cable from the office of the American military attaché in Port-au-Prince warned, “All over the country, FRAPH is evolving into a sort of Mafia.” Its members were “gun-carrying crazies,” one cable stated, eager to “use violence against all who oppose it.”
According to witnesses, when a FRAPH member turned up dead in Cité Soleil, a sprawling slum in Port-au-Prince, in December of 1993, Constant’s men descended within hours. Carrying machine guns and machetes, they torched a thousand houses in revenge, killing more than a dozen people. The Human Rights Watch/Americas-N.C.H.R. described how “they entered the neighborhood, looked for specific persons and shot them on sight, doused the precarious one-room shacks with gasoline, set them alight. . . . Firefighters were turned back by armed men . . . [who] nailed doors shut, imprisoning people in their homes.”
Constant, who some witnesses claimed was at the scene, denied FRAPH’S involvement. “If I was going to really react, there would be no more Cité,” he later said. But by the autumn of 1994 he was no longer merely the head of FRAPH; he had become, in the eyes of most Haitians, the embodiment of the regime: the voodoo lord of death, Baron Samedi, himself.
A MYSTERIOUS ESCAPE
In July of 1992, Brian Latell, the leading C.I.A. analyst for Latin America, visited Haiti to gather intelligence as policymakers in Washington tried to assess military rule in Haiti. Afterward, in a report later obtained by the press, he wrote, “I do not wish to minimize the role the military plays in intimidating and occasionally terrorizing real and suspected opponents, but my experiences confirm the [intelligence] community’s view that there is no systematic or frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians.”
Playing down the bloodshed (Latell called the head of the junta, Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, “a conscientious military leader”), the report conflicted with those coming from human-rights organizations, the press, and even the State Department. But, along with subsequent C.I.A. reports, it had a profound impact on U.S. foreign policy and on the decision of whether to launch a military invasion to restore the exiled Aristide to power. Whereas President Bill Clinton was pushing for such a move, many in the C.I.A., along with elements in the Pentagon, feared that Aristide was a dangerous populist. In fact, Aristide was a problematic figure. (He had once suggested necklacing his enemies with burning tires.) But a crucial C.I.A. report, which was circulated on Capitol Hill just after the Harlan County incident, seemed to exaggerate his instability, claiming that he was so unbalanced psychologically that he had once had to be hospitalized. The charge later proved to be false, but at the time it fuelled American opposition to an invasion and contributed to the ongoing vacillation in Washington. “There were factions in the process who didn’t want to get involved in Haiti and could use these intelligence reports to strengthen their position,” a former Clinton Administration official says.
The evidence of “systemic” and “frequent lethal violence aimed at civilians,” however, was overwhelming. And in September of 1994, three years after the coup and almost a year after the Harlan County’s retreat, President Clinton finally ordered a full-scale invasion to end what he called the “reign of terror.” “We now know that there have been . . . over three thousand political murders,” he said. In preparation for battle, Constant changed FRAPH’S name to the Armed Revolutionary Front of the Haitian People and, according to news accounts, stockpiled weapons and “secret” powders that, he declared, would be able to “contaminate water so that the GIs will die.” He claimed that one of these powders had been ground from the bones of AIDSvictims. Appearing in camouflage pants and a black T-shirt, a machine gun at his side, he no longer gave any hint of the diplomat. “Each FRAPH man,” Constant said, “must put down one American soldier.”
But before war broke out the junta, faced with the might of the United States, agreed to relinquish power. Thousands of U.S. soldiers easily seized the island. Surprisingly, FRAPH was allowed to remain an active force. When asked why, U.S. soldiers said they had been told by their superior officers that FRAPH was a legitimate opposition party, like Republicans and Democrats. U.S. soldiers even stood by, insisting they were not a local police force, while FRAPH members beat back civilians who had spilled onto the streets expecting liberation. It was only after random bands of FRAPH members mowed down a crowd of Haitians and shot and wounded an American photographer, and a radio conversation was intercepted in which Constant and his men threatened to “break out weapons” and “begin an all-out war against the foreigners,” that U.S. forces reversed their stance. On October 3rd, they stormed FRAPH headquarters. A jubilant crowd gathered outside, cheering them on. Inside, amid piles of nail-embedded sticks, Molotov cocktails, and trophy photos of mutilated corpses, soldiers surrounded more than two dozen FRAPH members. They bound their hands and gagged them, while the crowd shouted, “Let them die! Let them die!” As the soldiers departed with their FRAPH prisoners, the crowd rushed inside, smashing the headquarters.
Back at his father’s mansion, Constant listened to a police scanner, waiting for the soldiers to seize him. His wife and four children had already fled. At one point, he yelled at a journalist, “Everybody who is reporting the situation bad . . . by the grace of God, they will wind up in the ground!” But though other FRAPH members were taken into custody Constant remained free. The U.S. Embassy spokesman, Stanley Schrager, whose assassination Constant had called for only two days before, even arranged a press conference for him outside the Presidential Palace. News footage shows Constant standing under the glaring sun, sweating in a jacket and tie. “The only solution for Haiti now is the reality of the return of Aristide,” he said. “Put down your stones, put down your tires, no more violence.” As he spoke, hundreds of angry Haitians pushed against a barricade of U.S. soldiers, shouting, “Assassin!” “Dog!” “Murderer!”
“If I find myself in disagreement with President Aristide,” Constant pressed on, his voice now cracking, “I pledge to work as a member of loyal opposition within the framework of a legal democracy.”
“Handcuff him!” people yelled from the crowd. “Tie him up! Cut his balls off!”
As the barricade of troops gave way, U.S. soldiers rushed Constant into a car, while hundreds of jeering Haitians chased after it, spitting and beating on the windows. At the time, U. S. authorities insisted to reporters that the speech was meant to foster “reconciliation,” but a senior official told me later that it had been a disaster: “Here we were protecting him from the Haitians when we were supposed to be protecting the Haitians from him.”
Throughout the occupation, ensconced in his house, where, he says, U.S. soldiers routinely came by to check on his safety, Constant tried to reinvent his past. “We’re the ones who kept this country secure for a year,” he told reporters, adding, “Aristide needs an opposition, and . . . I am the only organization right now that . . . can allow us to say there is a democracy.” But the incoming government took a different view—and within a few months Constant was ordered to appear before a magistrate investigating charges of torture and attempted murder against him. On the day of the hearing, people saying they were victims waited for Constant outside the courtroom. He never appeared. Later, he told me that on Christmas Eve of 1994, with a small suitcase and what money he could stuff into his pockets, he had crossed the border on foot into the Dominican Republic, made his way to the airport, and then, using a valid visitor’s visa that he had obtained before the coup, caught a plane to Puerto Rico. From there, he flew to the mainland United States without incident, ending up days later on the streets of New York City.
He managed to transmit a radio broadcast to his followers back home. “As for you FRAPH me
mbers,” he said, “close ranks, remain mobilized.” He went on, “FRAPH people, where are you? FRAPH is you. FRAPH is me.” The Haitian government demanded that the United States do something. Finally, in March, 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, saying, “Nothing short of Mr. Constant’s removal from the United States can protect our foreign policy interests in Haiti.”
Two months later, saying that Constant had been allowed to enter the country owing to a “bureaucratic error,” I.N.S. officials surrounded him in Queens as he went to buy a pack of cigarettes. They forced him to the ground and frisked him. He was taken to Wicomico County Detention Center, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; in September, a judge ordered his deportation to Haiti. As he waited for the outcome of his appeal, he wrote letters to world leaders, including Nelson Mandela. (“I could not hope to fill one of your footprints, yet here am I writing to one of the few men in all the world that could understand my situation, being in a white man’s jail.”) He grew a beard, and read Malcolm X and Che Guevara. “I am . . . a political prisoner,” he wrote in a letter to Warren Christopher. At one point, he was placed on a suicide watch.
Then, in December of 1995, as the I.N.S. inched closer to deporting him, Constant decided to play the only card he had left. He threatened to divulge details of U.S. covert operations in Haiti, which he said he had learned about while secretly working for the Central Intelligence Agency.
THE PERFECT RECRUIT
The story Constant tells begins around Christmastime, 1991. It was shortly after the coup, and he was working at Haiti’s military headquarters when Colonel Pat Collins, the U.S. military attaché at the Embassy, phoned and asked him to lunch. “Let’s meet at the Holiday Inn,” Collins said.