We signed an agreement two years ago with the Americans so that they could enter our airspace and seize boats. But the Americans are more interested in catching boat-people than in catching drugs. Even though mangoes, vegetable oils and herbs for perfume are shipped from Miragoane, vessels often set out with empty holds - a sign, according to US Customs, that a voyage involves smuggling. At a waterside cafe,where a large black pig and her litter picked over the waste, Manuel Romero-Napa, an Ecuadorian chief steward from one of the freighters sat drinking with a local crew in dark sunglasses. Sometimes you go empty, sometimes carrying a little butter or Barbancourt rum.
Some boats do the journey in two to three days.
Small planes from South America land by night on private airstrips, while speedboats make the journey from the Colombian coast in just eight hours. The traditional routes for the Cali and Medellin drug cartels used to be through Mexico, but the DEA has been relatively successful in intercepting their deliveries. The Colombians have consequently switched their routes back through the Caribbean. The trafficking through ports like Miragoane depends on Haiti's desperate poverty, which produces poorly paid officials who are easily corrupted. While the London-based pressure group Jubilee 2000 has pleaded for Haiti's debts to be cancelled to help development, Washington has considered withdrawing aid as a punishment for the country's failure to stem the drugs flow.