Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) (in French: Front pour l'Avancement et le Progres Haitien) was a paramilitary death squad organized with US backing in Haiti in mid-1993 to terrorize the Haitian people by murder, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighborhoods, and severing limbs by machete. Its goal was to undermine the supporters of the popular Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who served less than eight months as Haiti's president before being deposed, on 29 September 1991, by a coup in which many hundreds of his supporters were massacred, and thousands more fled to the Dominican Republic or left by sea.

FRAPH was established by Emannuel "Toto" Constant, who went on the CIA payroll as an informant and spy in early 1992 (according to the Agency, this relation ended in mid-1994, but the following October the American Embassy in Haiti was openly acknowledging that Constant -- now a born-again democrat -- was on its payroll). According to Constant, shortly after Aristide’s ouster, Colonel Patrick Collins, a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), attache who was stationed in Haiti from 1989 to 1992, pressured him to organize a front that could balance the Aristide movement and do intelligence work against it (it is believed that members of FRAPH were working, and perhaps still are, for two social service agencies funded by the Agency for International Development, one of which maintains sensitive files on the movements of the Haitian poor). [1]

In an article published in The Nation in 1994, US investigative journalist Allan Nairn revealed US government's role in establishing and funding FRAPH.[2] Putting together more pieces of the story in a followup article in The Nation of January 8/15, 1996, Nairn wrote:

This information comes from interviews in Haiti and the United States with military, paramilitary and intelligence officials, including Green Beret commanders and also from internal documents from the U.S. and Haitian armies. Pieces of the story also come from Constant himself, who called me from his Maryland jail cell last September and again on December 7, shortly before he was due to be deported to Haiti. Constant, who has said that he started the group that became FRAPH at the urging of the Defense Intelligence Agency -- an account confirmed last year by a U.S. official who worked with him -- now says that even after the U.S. occupation got under way in September 1994, "other people from my organization were working with the D.I.A.," aiding in operations directed against "subversive activities."[3]

When Nairn tried to follow up (Constant insisted on a face-to-face meeting), the US Immigration and Naturalization Service denied him access, explaining that Constant had had a change of heart and no longer wanted to talk.[4]

External links

• "Who will rid me of this man? Haiti 1986-1994" (From Killing Hope, by William Blum)
• "Our Payroll, Haitian Hit" (Allan Nairn, The Nation, October 9, 1995)