As a member of the corrupt and violent Haitian military junta, the official, Joseph Michel Francois, ''placed the political and military structure of Haiti under his control'' to ship the drugs from Colombia through Haiti to the United States, the Federal indictment said.
Mr. Francois was arrested in Honduras and is to be flown to Miami on Saturday, a Justice Department official said. An architect of the 1991 coup that overthrew President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Mr. Francois fled Haiti for the Dominican Republic when the junta began falling in October 1994.
A former lieutenant colonel trained by the United States Army, Mr. Francois was the chief of police in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. He controlled death squads, vigilante gangs and vicious plainclothes police called attaches during the junta's three-year rule.
Those forces killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in an effort to keep the junta in power by repressing Mr. Aristide's supporters. Mr. Francois was convicted in absentia by a Haitian court for his part in the 1993 assassination of a key aide to Mr. Aristide, Antoine Izmery.
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As police chief paid a monthly salary of $500, Mr. Francois managed to build a sumptuous villa in the capital's wealthiest neighborhood. United States officials said he took payoffs for everything of value that entered Haiti's ports, from cement to cocaine.
The indictment charged that Mr. Francois' wealth came in part from his role in plotting to ship 33 tons of cocaine and heroin into the United States, and it made the scheme seem simple.
It said that Mr. Francois' career in drugs began in 1987 when, as ''a representative of the Haitian military,'' he received a payoff of between $1 million and $4 million to protect Colombian cocaine shipments. Then, it said, Mr. Francois and his Colombian connection, Fernando Burgos-Martinez, built an airstrip on the property of a Haitian colonel, Jean Claude Paul. Planes loaded with cocaine flew there from Colombia, the indictment said.
After the 1991 coup put Mr. Francois in power, cocaine seizures in Haiti plummeted to near zero, Drug Enforcement Administration documents show.
Mr. Francois installed his friend Marc Valme as chief of security at Port-au-Prince International Airport. Nine smugglers got a wink and a nod from Mr. Valme and his officers as they boarded commercial flights for Miami, the indictment said, and they received a similar welcome from Evans Gourge, a security officer at Miami International Airport, who made sure they bypassed Customs officials.
Some of the drugs were distributed in Florida, the indictment said, and more went to New York and Chicago.
Mr. Borgos-Martinez, Mr. Valme, Mr. Gourge and the nine people accused of smuggling were indicted today along with Mr. Francois.
Mr. Francois was arrested in April by the Dominican Republic authorities and accused of plotting another coup in Haiti. Honduras offered him asylum, but the Honduran authorities helped take part in his arrest and his planned deportation to the United States, officials said.
A 1994 Justice Department memorandum named Mr. Francois as a target in the cocaine-smuggling case, along with senior members of the Service Intelligence National, a Haitian intelligence organization. The group, founded with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1986, was supposedly dedicated to anti-drug efforts. None of the C.I.A.-connected officers was indicted today. Nor was Gen. Raoul Cedras, the leader of the junta.
Two jailed members of a Colombian cartel have told Justice Department investigators that Colonel Francois and General Cedras came to a 1987 celebration at a ranch in Colombia thrown to celebrate the Haitian connection, according to Federal investigators and lawyers familiar with the investigation.
The jailed cartel members, Enrique Arroyave and Carlos Marcantoni, who have been Federal witnesses in several cocaine cases, told the investigators that the celebration marked the shipment of 66,000 pounds of cocaine into Haiti -- the same amount as in today's indictment. They said General Cedras and Colonel Francois, among other senior Haitian military officials at the party, were paid $10 million for their help with the shipments.
A convicted member of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Gabriel Taboada, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in April 1994 that the shipments were ''protected by the Haitian military'' and that ''Michel Francois protected the drugs in Haiti and then allowed the drugs to continue to the United States.''
