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He was a colonel dripping with decorations. But things changed, as they often do in Haiti. For a Duvalieriste, life is not nearly as grand in a Florida jail cell.
By BILL DURYEA
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 1, 2002
SARASOTA -- The colonel plucks at his baggy jail-issue shirt as if he were picking up a piece of wet trash.
"This uniform is a disgrace," he says in French.
A fat scar from his heart surgery peeks up from the V-neck of his shirt, and this makes him seem vulnerable.
"I feel helpless," he says.
When he wore another uniform -- the one with the braid dripping from the shoulder, the one with the peaked hat pulled low on his brow -- he was something to see. Thick through the chest and square-jawed with a mustache that seemed to underline every order in black.
"All my life I worked to earn the respect of others."
Now it's hard to tell him from the other inmates, the car thieves and the drug dealers.
Bowing his head to be heard through the tiny holes in the partition, the colonel cannot muster the hauteur he acquired in 25 years in the Haitian military. He was more than just a career soldier. For three years when there was no president and the army ruled the country, he was an arm's length from the top.
His name is Hebert Valmond. The name probably means nothing to most people in the Tampa Bay area. In Haiti, he wielded his power just offstage, never the star, but always a player.
He was no less obscure during six years of exile.
Who knew he was living in Temple Terrace? That his life had been threatened in Haiti, and that officials there wanted to try him for war crimes? Until he was led away in handcuffs four months ago, how many people thought twice about where Haiti's dictators went to retire?
But Valmond's fall from the pinnacle of power in Port-au-Prince to this jail cell in Sarasota offers more than one man's biography. It says something about a nation struggling to build a democracy on the ruins of two centuries of dictatorship. And it explains something about the United States' conflicted relationship with the poorest country in this hemisphere.
The colonel's story is Haiti's, too.
Valmond's father, Raphael, a Pentecostal minister and a teacher, worshiped L'Eternel, but he served Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, too. That may have been the reason he joined the Tonton Macoutes, the fearsome private militia that for 29 years enforced the Duvaliers' rule with the gleaming edge of a machete.
"My father never committed a single crime in Haiti," Valmond says. He gives the impression his father's membership in the Tonton Macoutes was as benign as registering Republican. Though 16 years have passed since Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was chased into exile in France, Hebert Valmond still describes himself as a "Duvalieriste."
Membership had its privileges.
The family's political connections enabled Hebert Valmond to enroll in the first class of the national military academy when it reopened in 1971.
The roll call of the 44 cadets in the first class and those who followed reads like a Who's Who of the men who would dominate Haitian politics in the late '80s and early '90s. Raoul Cedras, who would graduate at the top of Valmond's class, would lead the coup in September 1991 that deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president.
Valmond's first posting was in the Haitian Navy. By 1988 he had risen to the rank of deputy commander in charge of the antismuggling unit, a high-profile position in a country that had become a major stopover for Colombian cocaine bound for the United States. The drug cartels were alleged to have paid Haitian military leaders $100-million annually. No reports have linked Valmond to the drug trade.
Aristide's landslide election in December 1990 was deeply threatening to the Duvalieristes. Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who appealed to the country's downtrodden poor, spoke of eradicating Duvalier supporters.
It wasn't just the nation's conservative and moneyed elite who worried over these threats. Aristide's rhetoric was stridently anti-American and Communist enough in tone that officials in Washington hesitated to embrace him. (There is evidence the CIA funded a neo-Duvalieriste paramilitary group to provide a check to Aristide.)
The transition from dictatorship to democracy was not peaceful. Pro-democracy forces had scores to settle with their former tormentors. In at least 20 documented cases, Aristide supporters killed Tonton Macoutes by setting fire to gasoline-soaked tires they jammed over their shoulders.
After the election Valmond received a curious thank-you note from Aristide. "All this was possible thanks to you. I hope we will be able to work together for the progress of the country," the handwritten card says.
But other high-ranking members of the military were convinced Aristide, who wanted to dismantle the armed forces, planned to have them killed.
Aristide had not been in office a year when Cedras, Chief of Police Michel "Sweet Mickey" Francois and army Gen. Philippe Biamby led a coup d'etat. Francois has said he wanted to kill Aristide, but Cedras prevailed, and Aristide was exiled to Venezuela.
Valmond says he despises Aristide but insists he did not support the coup. He had no part in its planning, he says, and had no clue about the timing.
"I stayed far from politics," he says of his military career. "I had a reputation as a moderate. I avoided contact with politicians."
Besides, he says, he couldn't have had any role in the coup because in September 1991 he wasn't stationed in Port-au-Prince. However, Valmond's opposition to the coup did not prevent him from joining up with those who had carried it out. Shortly afterward he was named the head of military intelligence, the fifth most senior member of the high command.
Cedras' publicly stated rationale for the coup was to prevent anarchy. But the killing never stopped. If anything it accelerated as the military worked quickly to suppress dissent.
If there were abuses, Valmond and his supporters say, they were isolated. "There are bad soldiers just like there are bad doctors," he says.
Valmond says he was a reformer who promoted military professionalism. Cedras agreed with him, he says. As proof he offers several cagily phrased memos from Cedras written in late 1993.
"Gunshots have been heard at nighttime," reads one memo, "troubling the quietness of heart and souls and causing human losses in lives either by shots from unknown source or by heart attack because of emotional shock."
It goes on to remind officials "Any military caught in the act of unjustified shooting will be punished."
"I told (the soldiers) to avoid violence," Valmond says. "I repeated that every day. That's why they called me 'Pasteur.' "
Maybe they weren't listening to the sermon.
Nobody knows precisely how many were killed by the armed forces in the years after the coup. The estimate most often cited is 3,000 to 5,000.
One reason for the uncertainty is that the justice system in Haiti was almost incapable of bringing a murder case to trial. The constitution of 1987 established the right of authorities to investigate human rights abuses, but the military made it clear it had the real power, not the judiciary. As a local prosecutor once said, when asked why he didn't pursue a case: "The constitution is paper. Bayonets are steel."
One of the last of the infamous massacres happened in April 1994 in Raboteau, a seaside slum about 100 miles north of the capital. Raboteau has about 6,000 residents, most fishermen and salt rakers, but it has a reputation as an opposition stronghold where political dissidents often went to hide.
International pressure had been building since the summer of 1993 for the military leaders to abide by an agreement permitting Aristide's return. In the face of a tightening U.S. embargo, Cedras made a last-ditch effort to quash support for Aristide.
On April 18, 100 soldiers and about 30 paramilitaries arrived in Raboteau for what investigators would later call a "dress rehearsal." They rousted people from their homes, demanding to know where Amiot "Cubain" Metayer, a well-known Aristide supporter, was hiding.
They beat people, inducing a pregnant woman to miscarry, and forced others to drink from open sewers. Soldiers tortured a 65-year-old blind man until he vomited blood. He died the next day.
The soldiers returned before dawn on April 22. They ransacked homes and shot people in the streets, and when the residents fled for the water, other soldiers fired at them from boats they had commandeered. Bodies washed ashore for days; some were never found. The number of victims ranges from two dozen to 30. Hundreds more fled the town, fearing further reprisals.
The outcry was sufficiently loud that the U.S. ambassador made a visit. Soon after, Cedras sent Valmond to investigate.
Valmond spent a week in Raboteau. No one would talk to him, he says.
The version of events that he settled on was the one put forward by the local army commander, Cenafils Castera: The army post had been attacked by the locals, as they were in the habit of doing, and the soldiers had no choice but to defend themselves.
Valmond says he saw no bodies when he arrived. Whatever bodies there may have been, he says, were part of a crude attempt to embarrass the military. These alleged victims, he says, were unclaimed cadavers that had been pulled from the morgue.
From the beginning, this version of events was treated with suspicion. The ambassador and the military attache who visited Raboteau two days after the massacre found no bullet holes to indicate the army barracks had been attacked.
The Raboteau incident was lost in the shuffle of events as the international community debated whether a military invasion would be necessary to force Cedras out. In September, the United States dispatched 21,000 troops to Haiti.
U.S. officials, with the images of the botched raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, still fresh in their memories, wanted to avoid bloodshed at all costs. This put Cedras in a position to demand an attractive exit package. The U.S. government agreed to rent Cedras' three mansions for a year to ease Cedras' fear the homes would be ransacked without tenants.
The remaining half dozen members of Cedras' general staff found their way to the United States. Their exit packages weren't as comfy as their boss', but they did enjoy expedited visa service from none other than the military attache at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
Valmond was still in Haiti in late 1995 when Aristide's Truth and Justice Commission resurrected the Raboteau investigation. He was still in the country when the commission finished the final report in February 1996.
Valmond visited the U.S. Embassy in May 1996, looking for help from the military attache. Despite information implicating the armed forces in a massacre, Valmond received a six-month visa.
Valmond settled with his family in Tampa, where his wife had relatives. There he led a more modest and certainly less high-profile life. But he, his wife and four children did not lack for comforts.
In 1998, the Valmonds bought a spacious home with a pool in Temple Terrace, putting both their names on the deed. If Valmond was trying to conceal his military past, he could have done a more effective job than to hang a gold-framed portrait of himself in uniform in the foyer of the house.
In fact, he was not in hiding. He circulated openly in Tampa's burgeoning Haitian community, keeping up with Haitian news at the ENJ barber shop north of Busch Boulevard. Two years ago he fulfilled his longstanding hope to open his own church, L'Eglise de Dieu de la Nouvelle Alliance, in a small commercial property he bought at the corner of Nebraska and New Orleans avenues.
He was so proud he put his name on the sign out front. He even included his home phone number.
Not the stealthy move of a man on the run.
Indeed, his life was only getting more settled. It certainly lacked the daily stress of Port-au-Prince, where his family had come to feel so unsafe. No one threatened him here, he says, no one spat on his car.
"I was well-liked by the Haitians in Tampa," he says.
Though his visa had technically expired, Valmond had a permit to work. He has one even now. He worked as a security guard until his heart valve replacement surgery in 1999. His wife, Elisabeth, a nurse, has a good position at University Community Hospital. His daughters are in public school, and his son, Hebert Jr., joined the U.S. Marines.
That Valmond made no attempt to cover his past speaks volumes about his belief in his own innocence. The U.S. government had dossiers on everyone in the Haitian military, he and his supporters say, and he would never have gotten a visa if he were guilty of war crimes.
And even if he had felt some twinge of guilt, of which he gives no hint, he could have rested easy knowing that Haiti's long and sordid history of human rights abuses had been abetted by an equally long history of impunity for the dictators. What did he have to fear?
Initially, not much.
The Truth and Justice Commission had gathered 150 official complaints from residents of Raboteau. A local priest had preserved medical records. Forensics experts had been brought in to analyze bodies found in shallow graves. Their findings supported the witness statements that soldiers had summarily executed civilians.
But years went by and the Haitian justice system -- stymied for want of courtrooms with electricity and judges with impartiality -- yielded nothing.
Finally, in August 1999, 59 people were charged in connection with the massacre. Twenty-two, including Castera, the local army commander, were accused of direct participation. Valmond and the rest of the army leadership were charged under the theory of "command responsibility" -- that they had an obligation to prevent human rights violations and to punish those who committed them.
"It's the same type of case made against the Nazis and (Slobodan) Milosevic," says Brian Concannon Jr., an American lawyer who came to Port-au-Prince in 1996 to work with local prosecutors in the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux.
Valmond says he had no prior knowledge of the massacre, which he disputes even occurred.
"It's hard to believe the head of intelligence would be out of loop," Concannon says.
The indictment had an immediate impact on Valmond's life in the United States.
Elisabeth Valmond had become a citizen earlier in 1999. She had renewed the application for permanent resident status she had made on behalf of her husband and their four children. Her children were approved almost immediately. But not her husband.
"They said they could not give it to him because he is a criminal," Mrs. Valmond, 53, says.
Several months later, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials were at their door with a warrant for Valmond's arrest. He was released on bond, in part because he was still recovering from heart valve replacement surgery.
His attorney at the time, Ellen Gorman, filed a request for political asylum, saying Valmond would be persecuted if he were returned to Haiti. Ironically, this was the same argument Gorman had made on behalf of other Haitian clients who were part of the mass exodus of boat people after the coup.
The odds that Valmond would gain asylum were slim. Since 1996, when Congress passed sweeping immigration reform, it had grown increasingly difficult for Haitians to qualify for asylum. Cubans breezed through the process, but Haitians were almost assured of deportation.
The bar for admission was even higher for people like Valmond.
In 1997, U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, introduced an amendment to the budget appropriations bill that prevented the State Department from using funds to issue visas to anyone "who was a member of the Haitian High Command during the period 1991 through 1994 and has been credibly alleged to have planned, ordered or participated in . . . the September 1991 coup . . . or the murders of thousands of Haitians during the period 1991 through 1994."
Valmond was out of luck.
The Raboteau trial, the largest in Haiti's history, began in September 2000 and lasted six weeks.
No direct evidence -- memos or witnesses -- linked members of the High Command to the massacre. (After the invasion, U.S. authorities seized 160,000 pages of documents from the headquarters of the army and the paramilitary. Prosecutors say these documents would provide the direct evidentiary links.)
But experts from Argentina testified Haitian military leaders were aware of the attack beforehand and did not stop it, making them responsible under Haitian and international law. The army, the experts said, was a "criminal enterprise that was organized for repressing civilians."
The jury took four hours to convict 16 of the 22 defendants already in custody. Twelve were sentenced to life in prison. The 37 defendants who had been tried in absentia were all convicted by a judge and sentenced to life in prison.
That month, Carl Dorelien, the former head of army personnel, received a letter from the INS, telling him he was covered under the DeWine amendment. He was arrested in June 2001.
Valmond told his wife they would come for him next. He was right.
This year, on April 29, 18 days after an immigration judge denied Valmond's asylum request because it had been filed too late, undercover INS agents came to his house pretending to answer an ad for a van for sale. As Mrs. Valmond stood in her doorway, explaining they had no van for sale, she saw a man pointing a camera from the window of a car.
When her husband returned from an errand, the agents handcuffed him in the driveway. Charged with overstaying his visa, he has been in jail (he was moved recently to a facility in Palmetto) for 120 days. The judge denied him bail on the grounds that he is a risk to flee.
"Why would he do that?" asks his wife.
"Returning to Haiti would be suicide," Valmond says. "They will kill me."
"I am a victim of political machinations and persecution," Valmond says.
He is right. In part.
Politics helped him escape Haiti. Now, a change in the political climate is helping to send him back. Valmond is confused by this shift.
Indeed, it is hard to explain why Emanuel "Toto" Constant, the leader of the paramilitary group that participated in the Raboteau massacre, has managed to avoid deportation for six years while Valmond seems destined for a flight home. Maybe it has to do with the fact Constant says he was on the CIA payroll.
Consistency has never been a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy with Haiti, says Richard Krieger, whose Boynton Beach organization, International Education Missions, lobbies for the deportation of war criminals.
Just as Nazi scientists were brought to the United States so they wouldn't fall into the hands of the Soviets, the Haitian military leaders were brought here "in the interest of the U.S. government," Krieger says. "Does that mean it's right? Certainly not. It is never in our vested interest to bring the perpetrators of atrocities into this country. But we have."
It is galling to Valmond and his supporters that the U.S. government is carrying water for Aristide, who they say is behaving like a dictator himself.
"We know how things are in Haiti," says Nodeler A. Dorcilien, of the National Association for the Advancement of Haitian Descendants. "We believe this is revenge against those people who ousted (Aristide). It's time we forgive and move forward."
Forgiveness is not high on the Haitian government's agenda. Concannon's group is already preparing another case against the High Command, this one accusing them of using rape as a tool of political intimidation.
"You can't wipe away the past. If you commit these sins, you have to pay for them," Krieger says.
For the time being, Valmond is not going anywhere. He has appealed his denial of bond, and he will likely appeal the asylum ruling. That could take months.
Until then he can do little but try to sway public opinion. Call these people, he urges a visitor. They know I am not a criminal.
One of the character references is Jean Robert Gabriel. A reporter places a call to him at his home in the United States. He makes it clear he does not want his name in the paper, not even for the sake of his friend.
No wonder. Gabriel was convicted in the Raboteau massacre, too.
-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this story.