How the DEA let one of Haiti's biggest drug busts slip through its fingers

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- 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 Administration.

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 Cité Soleil, the only person behind bars is a low-level longshoreman, awaiting trial on drug smuggling charges. 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.

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