Youri Latortue is one of Haiti’s most powerful politicians.
As an outspoken Senator, he is an ally of Haitian President Michel Martelly. Both are leading advocates for reestablishing the demobilized Haitian Army. He supported Martelly’s nominee for Prime Minister, neoliberal businessman Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, who was rejected by the Parliament in a Jun. 21 vote.
But Youri Latortue is also a drug-trafficker, gang godfather, and death-squad leader, according to the testimony and reports of many colleagues, crime witnesses and government officials, both Haitian and international.
In fact, “
Senator Youri Latortue may well be the most brazenly corrupt of leading Haitian politicians,” according to the U.S. Embassy. Secret U.S. State Department cables obtained by the media organization WikiLeaks and reviewed by
Haïti Liberté paint a portrait of a relentlessly unscrupulous, ambitious strongman, who has helped bring down Haitian governments and holds Gonaïves, Haiti’s fourth largest city, as his personal fiefdom.
His Rise to Power
Born in Gonaïves, Youri Latortue went to law school in Port-au-Prince and then graduated from Haiti’s military academy in 1990. He became a lieutenant in the Haitian Armed Forces (FAdH), teaching briefly at the Military Academy. But after the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Latortue joined the Army’s notorious Anti-Gang Unit (previously called Criminal Research) headed by Col. Michel François, one of the coup’s principal leaders.
“
It was widely known that he was involved in many of the political killings carried out during the 1991-94 coup, in particular the shooting of Father Jean-Marie Vincent in August 2004,” explained a once highly-placed government security source who wishes to remain anonymous. “
He was one of Michel François’ death-squad leaders.”
In 2004, a delegation of the Center for the Study of Human Rights wrote that “
a former high-ranking police official from the USGPN (palace security), Edouard Guerrière… claims that Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of Catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent (as did eyewitnesses in 1995), and that he assisted in the 1993 murder of democracy activist Antoine Izméry.”
“Youri Latortue participated in the 1994 murder of Catholic priest Jean-Marie Vincent,” (pictured above) wrote the Center for the Study of Human Rights.
In 2005, a U.S. policeman with the United Nations Police (UNPOL) videotaped an interview that he made with a young woman who feared for her life “
because the 28th of August 1994, I witnessed Youri Latortue murder the priest by the name of Jean-Marie Vincent,” she said. The video, released in October 2010 by the Haiti Information Project (HIP), is now available on
YouTube.
She describes how the priest drove up to his gate that night. “
That’s when I saw… a double white pickup with a bunch of men in black,” she continued. “
I saw Youri… I [didn’t recognize] the other ones. But the reason why I remember Youri [was] because he used to come to [name removed] house. And I saw him getting out of the [pick-up]and shooting at the car. But at that time, I didn’t know [the victim] was a priest… I didn’t know the person who was in that car.” It was only later that she learned who it was (see
Haïti Liberté, Vol.4, No.14, 10/20/2010).
The video-taped interview was sent to HIP with the following note: “
The UN has no interest in pursuing this case or revealing this evidence despite the statements of this eyewitness that Youri Latortue was the triggerman that shot and killed Father Jean-Marie Vincent on August 28, 1994…. It is a travesty of justice that the UN has been withholding this testimony from the public. They are supposed to be impartial but Latortue has powerful friends in the US Embassy who view him as an asset since his role following the ouster of Aristide in 2004.”
After Aristide returned to Haiti from exile on Oct. 15, 1994, he dissolved the FAdH in early 1995, and Latortue was transferred to the Interim Police force, made up of former FAdH soldiers. Dr. Fourel Célestin, a former FAdH colonel, was appointed as President Aristide’s security advisor, and he proposed bringing Youri Latortue into the Palace security under his aegis.
“
Aristide was dead set against it, having heard the persistent rumors of Latortue’s murderous role during the coup,” the former government source said. “
But Célestin convinced him, arguing that the Palace needed to have some of the Army bad guys if it was going to dismantle and neutralize the force.” Aristide relented.
In March 1995, unknown assassins shot to death well-known pro-coup spokeswoman Mireille Durocher-Bertin and another passenger in her car on the eve of President Bill Clinton’s visit to Haiti. The shooting was a tremendous embarrassment to the Aristide government and to Clinton. A team of FBI agents spent time in Haiti investigating the murder, and Youri Latortue was one of their suspects. Washington yanked Latortue’s U.S. travel visa.
Latortue worked out of Célestin’s Palace office until 1996 when President René Préval took power. Washington insisted that certain former FAdH officers deemed too close to Aristide – Célestin, Major Dany Toussaint, Major Joseph Médard – be removed from leadership of the new police and two new Palace Security details: the USP (Presidential Security Unit), similar to the U.S. Secret Service, and the USGPN (Security Unit to Guard the National Palace). When they were removed, that left a void in the Palace security’s command, a void that was filled by Latortue. He became the USGPN’s deputy chief under Frantz Jean-François. Two better trusted pro-Lavalas security agents – Nesly Lucien and Oriel Jean – were named to head the USP. That arrangement lasted throughout Préval’s term (despite his grave misgivings about Latortue, as we shall see) until he handed the Presidency back to Aristide in 2001.
Aristide Returns, Youri Takes Leave
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After Aristide’s accession, other USGPN policemen found [Latortue] ‘hostile’ to his new President, who worried about his involvement in a ‘plot,’ according to Haiti’s elite-owned radio station Signal FM on February 21, 2001,” Canadian investigative journalist Anthony Fenton wrote in
a June 2005 Znet article entitled “
Have the Latortues Kidnapped Democracy in Haiti?”.
At that point, Latortue was transferred out of the Palace to work under Nesly Lucien, who had been named Police Chief. But in late 2001, Latortue took a paid leave of absence from the police to pursue a master’s degree in law in Canada. He “
had lived in Miami, [and] studied in Montreal for two years” he told Fenton in a June 2005 phone interview.
Perennial right-wing operative Stanley Lucas worked closely with Youri Latortue during the 2004 coup d’état against Aristide.
It was during that time that Latortue was paid a visit by Stanley Lucas, an operative for the International Republican Institute (IRI), a tentacle of the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), according to our security source. IRI was playing a central role in organizing the “civilian opposition” to Aristide, principally the so-called “Group of 184,” headed by sweatshop magnate Andy Apaid. But Lucas was also keeping touch with the “armed opposition” of former Haitian soldier and police chief Guy Philippe in the Dominican Republic. This is where Youri came in.
During 2002 and 2003, Latortue shuttled back and forth between the U.S., Canada, and the Dominican Republic, meeting with Guy Philippe, former FRAPH death-squad leader Jodel Chamblain, and others in the “rebel” force forming, training, and launching raids into Haiti. Interestingly, Youri’s U.S. travel visa, which had been suspended in 1995, was reinstated in 2002 when he started to play this role of anti-Aristide intermediary.
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We know that Youri was one of the intellectual authors, one of the key planners, behind the Dec. 17, 2001 attack on the National Palace,” when a band of Philippe’s “rebels” briefly took over the National Palace during a failed coup attempt, our well-placed source explained. “
In the investigation after the attack, we learned that it was Youri’s people – his proteges – in the USGPN who, working inside the Palace, let the attackers into the Palace grounds.”
Finally Latortue, Philippe, Lucas, IRI, and the 184 were successful in their destabilization campaign after a U.S. SEAL team kidnapped Aristide from his home on Feb. 29, 2004, completing the second coup against him.
After the 2004 Coup
Youri Latortue then flew back to Haiti with his first cousin once-removed, Gérard Latortue in tow. A few weeks later, Gérard Latortue was installed as
de facto Prime Minister. Youri Latortue, often called Gérard’s “
nephew,” was appointed as his security and spy chief, with the title “Responsible for National Intelligence to the Primature.”
“
The thing was that Gérard had been working for international organizations overseas most of his life and didn’t really know the lay of the land in Haiti,” our security source explained. “
He had to rely largely on Youri for guidance. In that sense, Youri was practically the shadow Prime Minister. And during that coup, he was the main one responsible for the massacre of many militants in Belair, Cité Soleil and other pockets of resistance.”
In his post, Latortue was “
nicknamed ‘Mister 30 Per Cent’ because of the percentage he demands in return for favors,” wrote Thierry Oberlin in the December 21, 2004
Le Figaro. “Worried, not without reason, about his own security, the prime minister pays 20,000 euros a month to this former police officer implicated in various scandals for ‘organizing an intelligence service’.”
But then something interesting happened. In late 2004, Gérard Latortue left Haiti to travel to a conference in Canada, passing through Miami. Youri was part of his delegation. But in Florida, U.S. agents detained Youri for his suspected involvement in drug-trafficking. (Joel Deeb, a Haitian-American arms dealer who reportedly brokered deals with Youri Latortue, “
stated that Youri Latortue presently has four sealed DEA indictments pending against him, and that the DEA [has] issued an extradition letter for Youri Latortue to the interim government,” Fenton learned in several interviews with Deeb between April and June 2005. “
Youri Latortue himself evaded questions about the DEA indictments, denying that he and Deeb, as Deeb claims, were in regular contact.”)
Youri Latortue had four sealed DEA indictments pending against him, and the DEA had issued an extradition letter to Gérard Latortue’s government.
Gérard Latortue got on the phone to officials in Washington and demanded that Youri be released. Eventually, U.S. officials said they would not hold Youri, but on the condition that he take the next flight back to Haiti, which he did.
“
When Gérard returned to Haiti after the Canada visit, he met with Youri about the incident and about his vulnerability to prosecution,” our source explains. “
They determined that the best course of action was for Youri to become an elected official, which would confer upon him immunity from prosecution. That is why and how Youri’s political career began, assured by Gérard, under whom his election was assured.”
Thus, under his “
uncle’s” government, Youri was elected to a six-year term as the first senator of the Artibonite Department in the Feb. 7, 2006 elections that also brought Préval to the Presidency for the second time.
This is where the U.S. Embassy cables pick up the thread.
What you know about them streets of Arcachon and Mon Repos at night 
