Child-trafficking probe key to Americans’ fate in Haiti

UPDATED:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haitian and U.S. officials are considering a trial in the United States for 10 Americans who were arrested while trying to bus children out of Haiti without documents or permission.

The aborted Baptist “rescue mission” has become a major distraction for a crippled government trying to provide basic life support to millions of earthquake survivors. Haiti’s courts and Justice Ministry were destroyed in the disaster, which also killed many judicial officials.

But the government insisted Monday that the Americans, however well-intentioned, must be prosecuted to send a strong message against child trafficking.

“There can be no question of taking our children off the streets and out of the country,” Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelin Lassegue said. “They will be judged… . That’s what is important.”

Since their arrest Friday near the border, the church group has been held inside two small concrete rooms in the same judicial police headquarters building where ministers have makeshift offices and give disaster response briefings. They have not yet been charged.

One of their lawyers said they were being treated poorly: “There is no air conditioning, no electricity. It is very disturbing,” lawyer Jorge Puello told the AP by phone from the Dominican Republic, where the Baptists hoped to shelter the children in a rented beach hotel.

One of the Americans, Charisa Coulter of Boise, Idaho, was being treated Monday at the University of Miami’s field hospital near the capital’s international airport. Looking pale and speaking with difficulty from a green Army cot, the 24-year-old Miss Coulter said she had either severe dehydration or the flu. A diabetic, she initially thought her insulin had gone bad in the heat.

Two Haitian police officers stood beside the cot, guarding her.

“They’re treating me pretty good,” she said, adding that Haitian police didn’t bring her group any food or water but that U.S. officials have delivered water and MREs to eat. “I’m not concerned. I’m pretty confident that it will all work out,” she said.

While the U.S. Baptists said they were only trying to rescue abandoned children from the disaster zone, investigators were trying to determine how the Americans got the children and whether any of the traffickers that have plagued the impoverished country were involved.

Their detained spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, conceded that she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents but told the AP from detention that the group was “just trying to do the right thing” amid the chaos.

The 33 children, ranging in age from 2 months to 12 years and with their names written in tape on their shirts, were being sheltered in a temporary children’s home, where some told aid workers that they have surviving parents. Ms. Lassegue said the Social Affairs Ministry was trying to find them.

“One (9-year-old) girl was crying and saying: ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that,” said George Willeit, a spokesman for the SOS Children’s Village.

Foreigners adopting children from the developing world have grabbed headlines recently: Madonna tried to adopt a girl from Malawi amid criticism from locals, while Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a burgeoning multicultural brood.

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